Page 34 of Broken Mafia Bride

Let them sit here and dress this up like politics. Let them pretend this is about solutions. All I see is a pile of corpses and a girl with hazel eyes I can’t stop chasing through nightmares.

I rise to my feet, face blank. “How cute, Enrico and Edoardo finally agree on something.” Snorting, I take another swig of mydrink. “If you fuckers want this family joined so bad, you’d better put your heads together and figure out where Giulia is.”

“Raffaele! Raff!” Isabella calls, but I ignore the lot of them. Bottle tucked under my arm, I march out of the room, blood thrumming with the desire to toss a grenade over my shoulder and watch it all go boom.

11

GIULIA

2years later

Most days, the worst thing I worry about is over-whipping the cream. Today shouldn’t be any different.

“Have we run out of scones?” Alex calls from outside the kitchen.

“I’m making a new batch,” I reply, squeezing the icing onto the cupcake, tongue sticking out the corner of my mouth.

“You know, you don’t have to bother yourself making every single one of them perfect,” Olive, the owner of the bakery, says. “Nobody’s going to care that each flower on the cupcake is perfectly centered.”

Heat rises in my cheeks at her words. Baking is one of the things I picked up after Mama died, to try and get Papa to pay me some attention again. I eventually quit when I realized I was wasting my time.

The few times since then that I’ve bothered with a cup of flour and sugar have been solely for the sake of decompressing. I forgot how fun and invigorating it felt until Mrs. Amato casually brought it up after tasting the cake I made for Noemi’s fourth birthday.

Olive used to be the grumpy cashier on the night shift at a store we worked at two years ago. Even though we had our moments, we became good friends.

When she got married over a year ago, she told me she was quitting and using her inheritance to start her own business. Back then, I used to bring my pastries to work, and she loved them. She had always wanted to buy the pastry shop her aunt owned after she passed away from cancer. It had been shut down since, and she hoped it wouldn’t be sold before she got her inheritance. Luckily for her, it wasn’t.

Of course, she offered me a job. The pay was better, and it was something I was good at, so I took it. I’ve been here ever since.

“Leave her alone.” Alex pokes his head in and winks at me. “We’ve been selling out since she started working here. Allow her to do whatever magic she’s been doing. In fact, she deserves a raise!”

“Thank you,” I mouth at him over the boss’s shoulder, and he winks again.

“But please, get those scones ready,” he sighs. “Our customers are about to come to blows over the last batch.”

“Got ya.” I salute him.

“I’ll handle the icing,” Olive says. “I feel kinda bad I can’t get them as perfect as you. We’ll just hide mine at the back.”

“Yours are perfect too.” I grin at her before hurrying over to the sink to wash my hands and grab the bag of flour.

Almost an hour later, I step out with the heavy cooling tray of scones.

“Smokin’ hot, just like the baker,” someone wolf-whistles behind me.

Laughing, I spin around and face Sienna. She’s usually in colorful clothes, but today her hair is tied up with a blackbandana, and she’s wearing denim overalls over a black T-shirt. Paint stains her hands, and there’s even some under her chin.

“What have you been up to?” I ask curiously. “Did you decide being a doctor is no longer your thing?”

“Not yet,” she teases. “I somehow found myself volunteering under pressure to join the other moms to paint the daycare. I thought they’d forget all about it until I got the call this morning.” She lets out a sigh.

About two years ago, at one of the now-regular family dinners, Sienna announced she was pregnant with twins and getting married out of the blue. It came as a shock, and her news was welcomed with a lot of protests. It all died down when we met her quiet and stoic builder fiancé.

Reed is the opposite of her in every way, but from the moment we met him, we all knew it was a perfect match.

I grin at how dramatic she’s being. “I’m sure it wasn’t that bad.”

“While I trust myself with a scary ass needle and a delicate network of veins, the same can’t be said for anything artsy,” she points out. “I knew it was bad when the owner of the daycare walked up to me and suggested I should just talk to the other moms instead.”