by Bethany-Kris
Haven looked to Andino.
He was already staring at her with a smile.
One that was knowing.
Because, of course, he knew.
He always did.
One baby.
One single, tiny growing baby.
Their boy.
Those were the only thoughts racing through Haven’s mind as Andino helped her down the three steps leading away from the clinic to where a waiting town car sat running on the curb. The driver in the front seat—not their usual man, Nate, but someone else she recognized—didn’t even bother to get out because Andino stepped up to the back and opened the rear door.
He kept a hand on the door while Haven climbed into the back of the car. She was about to move over to let her husband inside the vehicle as well when she realized he hadn’t actually moved at all.
“Aren’t you coming?” she asked.
Andino gave her a rueful smile. “I’ll follow behind later.”
What?
“What are you—”
“Business,” he replied simply. “I’ve been waiting for word on something. It came in while we were waiting inside for our results, but I didn’t want to bring it up. Today was important, babe.”
“Still is, Andi.”
He nodded. “Yeah, but so is keeping you, the girls, and my little guy safe, hmm?”
The stress left her with a hard exhale. For a long while, the two of them stared at one another. Her, inside the car. Him, standing outside on the curb in his suit.
He always looked like he owned the city.
She supposed in a way, he did.
“Is it …” Haven let her words trail off, considering how she wanted to pose the question. “Is it about what happened a while back at the park?”
It wasn’t like she had forgotten about that. Quite the opposite, really. The more time passed, well, it was never too far from her mind, really. Thing was, even if it pissed her off, she knew Andino would handle it.
It’s just what he did.
“It’s just business, babe.”
His mouth said one thing. His eyes said another.
Haven chose not to press for more. They all had to make those choices.
“Be safe. And come home.”
Andino shrugged one shoulder. “It’s the only place I want to go when the day is over, Haven.”
Yeah.
Her, too.
THIRTEEN
Andino watched the minute hand on his watch tick past the twelve as he fixed the gold cufflink at his wrist just because. He wasn’t exactly the type to fidget because he thought it was beneath him, honestly, but there were times when it just could not be helped. Now was one of those times.
His worst enemy was not actually his attitude or asshole nature despite what others liked to say. In fact, it was his boredom. He jokingly blamed that on his parents and their insane need to feed into whatever he’d wanted as a child—now that he was an adult, he expected everyone around him to still do the same they had. The worse the boredom became, the quicker he was to simply leave a situation. Most times, that wasn’t a problem being who he was and all.
Not tonight, however.
At the moment, he had no choice but to wait in the dilapidated restaurant. Although after all these years, it no longer resembled what it once was. They certainly couldn’t pass it off as a business under renovations when all someone needed to do was look at the crumbling walls to know better. Nonetheless, the business worked just fine for certain aspects of Andino’s job, and since he was stuck with it—seeing as how it had been in the family longer than he had—it was as good as anywhere to murder someone.
Right?
A throat clearing across the room had Andino finally looking away from the watch on his wrist. He let go of the cufflink as well, resuming his previous position with his hands folded in his lap while he sat on the edge of what used to be a table. Or hell, maybe it had been a stationary counter. He couldn’t be sure—there were no chairs to say either way and even the floor was just a mess of busted tiles that were no longer recognizable.
Across the space, one of two of his enforcers that he’d decided should stay inside the building with him glanced his way. Standing next to what used to be a window, but was now just a hole covered by slats of plywood, Nate nodded Andino’s way.
Ah, good.
The show was just about ready to start.
He’d been waiting for his.
For too long, perhaps.
Well, if he were an honest man, he’d just say he’d been waiting for it since the man who had come all the way from New Zealand—only known and spoke about as Mr. Moshka—sent someone to deliver a message to Andino’s wife. It was only made worse by the fact that his children had also been there that day.
Of course, nothing was ever easy.
Or simple.
Andino was also not a dumb man. He didn’t rush into teaching someone a lesson without considering all possible avenues and what might or could come of it after it was all said and done. He needed plans after it was all over, too.
So, he waited.
Did his job.
And let others do theirs.
Now, it was finally coming together.
The quiet stillness of the rundown restaurant and the area outside allowed Andino the chance to hear his incoming guests be stopped by the men he had waiting at the doors that were also covered in plywood.
“Yes,” one of his enforcers said, “you’ll go in alone.”
“That was not what I agreed—”
“Your boss either wants this meeting to happen, or he doesn’t.”
Seconds ticked down.
Andino continued to wait.
Nothing more was said outside, however. In the next minute, the door was opened and a man dressed rather smartly in a three-piece, black on black suit stepped beyond the doorway. Andino recognized him on sight—before the man even spotted Andino across the room or his enforcers standing on either side of the door with guns already drawn and pointed at his temples—as the man who took Mr. Moshka’s place at what should have been their first meeting months ago.
The one that Andino called off.
He wasn’t surprised.
Mr. Moshka, human trafficker extraordinaire, had intended to use New York as his personal collection field for trafficking victims seeing as how the state was both a melting pot of different people and a sanctuary city. It was easy to overlook those who went missing when those people were either undocumented in the first place, or came from an already overlooked minority group.
He was not the first human trafficker to think he would be able to do business with Andino over the years, and he doubted the man would be the last. He was, however, one of the most irritating because he hadn’t seemed to understand Andino wasn’t interested.
Some people would sell their souls in that way.
He wasn’t one of them.
It wasn’t as though Andino was a saint—he didn’t play the part, either. The entire Marcello empire had been built on the backs of people that would absolutely be considered victims. They made a great portion of their money in bribery, blackmail, illegal substance sales, a bit of smuggling between the States and Canada, and just a touch of arms dealing. They were criminals, absolutely.
They didn’t touch skin.
He would not sell humans.
They never had.
Everybody had a line—this one was the Marcellos.
Andino hadn’t intended to do business with Mr. Moshka—but he’d been willing to entertain the man’s first meeting just so that he could tell him to stay the fuck out of the Marcello territory while doing his work.
But here they were.
And none of that happened.
It still wouldn’t.
“Daniel Delwalsh, yes?” Andino asked from his perch.
The man’s gaze finally focused through the darkness of the space and landed on Andino at the same time the guns pointed at either side of his hea
d were racked and ready to fire. Outside the space, two muted pops echoed through the thin, crumbling walls. The following thumps were just morbid enough to tell Mr. Moshka’s closest man—who also apparently handled most of his dealings with others, so he didn’t have to be there firsthand—that the men who accompanied him were now dead on the ground.
“You’ll soon follow,” Andino said, voicing what he was sure were the man’s inner thoughts and fears. Good. He wanted him afraid. “It’ll be a well-earned message for your boss, who I am sure won’t miss you all that much. He’ll have you replaced before the week is out, won’t he? Nonetheless, my message will be received as I intend for it to when I return you and your men outside to his doorstep—it took a while for me to find his address, you see.”
“You’re making a grave—”
Andino stepped down from the counter, his first move silencing the man instantly. “I don’t make mistakes, actually. I have too much to lose in that case. Your unfortunate end won’t be seen as an act of aggression against your boss considering the amount of times I’ve made it clear we wouldn’t be doing business—this will simply settle it once and for all. I always do my research on the people who I see as threats, you understand? I know exactly who I am dealing with between you and your boss, and neither of you frighten me.”
Each word he spoke brought him one step closer to the man caught between two enforcers and their guns. Not that they, or their weapons, would be needed.
Not when Andino had his own.
A foot away from Daniel, Andino pulled his own gun—his favorite, an Eagle—from beneath his suit jacket. He pulled back the safety, racked the weapon, and pulled the trigger as soon as it met the man’s forehead. The spray of blood and matter was … unfortunate.
It stained his jacket.
That was fine.
“I have another blazer in the car, boss,” Nate said quietly.
Andino stared at the dead man on the floor. “Good, appreciate that.”
Nate nodded, but said nothing more.
“Make sure Mr. Moshka gets a call to his personal line to let him know what will soon be arriving to his doorstep—we wouldn’t want it to be a surprise. Also let him know this concludes any possible business between the two of us, and should he try to come into my state again, he won’t make it twenty-four hours before he meets the same fate.”
“You got it, boss.”
Andino sighed and tucked his warm gun away. “I’m ready to go home. I have a question to answer for my wife.”
“Car’s warm and ready whenever you are,” Nate said.
“I’m ready, Nate.”
He’d been ready for a while now.
FOURTEEN
Haven’s life wasn’t the same as it had once been in her early twenties—she could no longer afford to stay up until the wee hours of the morning and get up shortly after to start an entirely new day. She had kids, a job, and a whole house to take care of. She tried to be in bed and asleep by twelve, at the latest, unless it was a special occasion.
As the digital clock on the bedside table ticked beyond two A.M., with Haven still wide awake against her mound of pillows with the thought of sleep far from her mind. In fact, she thought about literally everything else but sleep even though that’s what she needed to be doing the most.
So was the life of a mob boss’s wife. She often wondered if Andino even realized how often his wife stayed awake at night worrying over things she had neither a say, nor any control over at the end of the day. Because she did it far more often than she wanted to admit.
With the house quiet and dark, Haven settled herself on staying awake until she heard that familiar rumble of an engine pulling into their garage. That was how she knew whatever business her husband had needed to handle that evening must have ended in some kind of bloodshed. He only used the garage when he didn’t want a witness to see him enter the house. That way, there was always plausible deniability about who had come home late at night, and what they looked like when they exited the vehicle.
Or that’s what he explained when she thought to ask once.
Sometimes, Haven wished she didn’t ask.
It was easier.
It took a good ten minutes before her husband even darkened the doorway of their bedroom. She couldn’t help but notice how the blazer he wore was a dark navy and not the flat black he’d worn with her earlier. She didn’t mention it.
Nor did she say a thing about the spots of dried red something on the backs of his hands when he lifted one to wave her way. She pressed her lips together, but at the same time, couldn’t stop the relieved smile that fettered over her lips at the sight of him.
“How’d things go?” she asked.
Yeah.
That was a safe way to ask.
Andino shrugged as he headed for the attached master bathroom. “It went well. I don’t think there’ll be anymore problems from that side of things, anyway.”
A breath escaped her.
Then, another.
He had already disappeared into the bathroom, and she could hear the shuffle of clothing dropping to the floor. Without needing to be told, she knew those clothes would not be there come morning, and she wouldn’t find them in his bag for dry cleaning, either. She wasn’t sure if he burned them or simply threw the items away, but he never asked her to handle them.
She was grateful.
“Andino?”
“Hmm?”
Haven dragged in another lungful of air, feeling all that pressure in her chest that had been building up over the evening finally start to release. She hated that the very most. The weight that came with it, and the sensation it left behind even after it was already gone.
Those were things she couldn’t forget.
She wished she could.
“What, babe?” he called from the bathroom.
The words wouldn’t come out though she tried to make them. Everything stayed stuck in her mind and lungs like tar. She only wanted to tell him that she loved him—would always love him even when he did things she couldn’t approve of or when their life scared her to fucking death. None of it mattered because at the end of the day, just like at the end of this one, she would still love him.
That was the choice she made.
Haven was fine with it.
Instead of trying to keep pretending like everything was fine—it mostly was, now—and trying to force the words out, Haven decided to try something different. Kicking the blankets from her legs, she slipped out of the bed, and headed for the bathroom.
She found Andino bent over the sink with bubbles of soap thick in his hands before he scrubbed them down his face with a few strokes of his palms. He quickly washed it away with the water spilling from the taps before turning it off and reaching for a towel he had waiting on the edge of the counter.
Haven didn’t speak.
She didn’t need to.
Andino glanced her way as though he knew she’d come to stand in the bathroom with him—maybe he’d heard her approach over the running water. Or maybe it was just because this man was entirely hers … heart and soul. Whether he was perfect or not didn’t make a difference because he was perfect for her. He knew where she was. He felt her when she was nearby.
The way she did for him, too.
He turned away from the sink at the same time she moved toward him. His arms caught her easier, wrapping tightly around her back and shoulders while hers tightened at his middle. She inhaled his scent, listened to the steady beat of his heart, and waited as they synced in stillness and breaths.
All was good again.
Right again.
“Do you remember,” he asked with his lips pressed against the top of her head, “when you asked me how I do this—be that man, and this one, too? You asked me why, how … I didn’t have an answer. I wanted to think about it.”
“Of course,” she whispered.
Andino’s arms tightened in just the right way around her. “I’ll never be anybody else—th
is is me until the day I die. And somehow, despite being who I am, I managed to find a woman that loves me, who has given me three children—with my next on the way—a home, and a life. I intend to keep these things, they’re mine, and that means protecting it by whatever means necessary. So, I am that man because being him lets me do what I need to.”
Haven said nothing.
She couldn’t.
Andino didn’t seem to mind when he pressed a kiss to the crown of her head and murmured, “You do the same thing—just in different ways. I know sometimes you think you’re misplaced beside me, but no one is a better fit to stand there. I promise.”
Forever his queen.
Or so he liked to say.
“I’ll do this forever,” he told her.
Haven tipped her head back to look up and meet his gaze. “Me, too.”
He smiled.
So did she.
It’s why she wasn’t at all surprised when his next kiss that came down upon her lips quickly went from sensual and sweet to something far more wicked and hot. If they were going to hell for everything they had done and what they were, then they might as well go together.
It only seemed fair.
Andino reminded Haven of every reason why and how he loved her when he lifted her to the bathroom counter, pulled the satiny sleep shorts down her legs to discard them on the floor, and fucked her against the large mirror of their vanity.
He was rough.
His words, dark.
Selfish.
He took so much from her.
Every single time.
She loved to give it to him, though.
Here they were, close to a decade into their marriage, and he still fucked her the same way he always had. Wildly. Like his soul was fighting to become one with hers. With an undercurrent of his ownership stamped in every kiss, touch, and stroke of his cock that filled her.
Only he could do that to her.
Surrounded by their privilege, with his hands pinning her under his weight and love, she found that place where only Andino could take her to. Where the world didn’t feel like the outside looking in, and nothing could ever touch them.
