Chapter 29: Kira - Marrying the Mafia Daddy

The private hospital room is too bright and too quiet. Clean sheets, yellow walls, the distant hum of a ventilation system trying too hard.

I’m clean—showered, hair damp, wearing the yoga pants and sweater Donna brought from the penthouse. Domenico lies beside me on the narrow hospital bed, one hand resting on my thigh, his thumb tracing slow circles through the soft fabric.

After the CT scan, they told me I have a concussion, but it’s nothing major or worrisome. There’s no intracranial bleeding, just a nasty cut that’s been cleaned and sealed with butterfly strips.

And to say I felt so much relief at hearing that is an understatement equivalent to calling a tsunami a drizzle.

When they gave me strict instructions to rest, avoid screens, and basically take it easy for a few days, Domenico had us moved into this room. It’s nicer, if that can be said about any place in a hospital.

“You were told to rest,” Domenico grumbles.

As if rest is what my body wants right now. My hands won’t stop moving. They find his forearm first, fingers tracing the black-gray pattern of his sleeve tattoo from wrist to elbow as if I’m memorizing every line.

His skin is warm beneath my fingertips, the muscle firm under my touch, and when I reach his elbow, I slide my palm higher just to feel the solid reality of him. Domenico watches me with those intense blue eyes I want to get lost in.

His massive body is half-propped against the raised headboard, one leg stretched out, the other bent at the knee. I curl toward him, my cheek against his shoulder, and my hand slides beneath his open collar to feel the heat of his skin, the steady beat of his heart under my palm.

“You’re shaking,” he murmurs.

I am. Full-body tremors that started the second the adrenaline burned off and haven’t stopped. Not from cold—the room is overheated, if anything. No, this is something deeper. It’s the kind of shaking that happens when your body finally understands how close it came to something terrible.

“I know,” I say. My voice sounds thin, worn at the edges. “I can’t make it stop.”

He shifts, turning toward me, and his arm slides around my waist. Pulls me against him until there’s no space between us, until my forehead rests against his collarbone and his breath stirs the damp strands of hair.

“Don’t try to stop it,” he says. “Just let it happen.”

So I do that too. I let myself shake against his chest while his hand moves in slow, firm strokes up and down my spine. The longer I’m pressed against him, the less I shake. My body realizes that the danger is over.

That he—my husband—found me. That I’m back with him.

The strangest part is how happy I feel. Not relieved, exactly. Happy. A bright, almost giddy sensation blooming behind my ribs that makes no sense given the day I’ve had.

First we buried Mom, then Dad was going to sell me, again. I watched my husband shoot him dead…

And yet, here, in this hospital room with its fluorescent lights and yellow walls, with Domenico’s heartbeat under my hand and his breath against my hair, I am stupidly, irrationally happy to be alive.

I tilt my face up and kiss him. I intend for it to be a peck, but as soon as my mouth finds his, I kiss him with a hunger that surprises us both. His hand slides into my hair, cradling the back of my head with a tenderness that makes my chest ache.

I kiss him like I’m trying to crawl inside his skin, one hand fisted in his shirt, the other gripping his jaw, and he lets me. Lets me take whatever I need from his mouth, his breath, the solid warmth of him beneath my hands.

When I finally pull back, gasping, I don’t let go. My forehead rests against his, our breath mingling as I keep my grip on his shirt because the idea of creating even an inch of space between us feels unbearable.

“Thank you,” I whisper. The words are inadequate for what I’m feeling, but they’re all I have. “For finding me. For… everything.”

His thumb brushes my lower lip. “You don’t need to thank me for that.”

“I know. But I’m going to, anyway.”

He almost smiles. The corner of his mouth ticks up, just for a second, before his expression settles back into something quieter.

I take a breath, steeling myself for what I want to say next. “I heard you,” I whisper. “When you told me that you love me. I heard you, Domenico.”

His eyes find mine.

“And I should have said it back then, but I was … I don’t know, scared, or something. And then I felt like I had to wait until after the funeral.”

My hand finds his face, thumb tracing the rough edge of his jaw.

“But there’s no right moment. There’s just now, and I love you, Domenico. I’m in love with you. I have been for a while.”

“Mm, baby.” His hand covers mine, pressing my palm harder against his cheek. “I love you too, Kira.”

I kiss him again, softer this time, and when I pull back, I curl against his chest and let his arm tighten around me. We lie like that for a while, his heartbeat under my ear, my fingers tracing idle patterns on his sternum through his shirt.

The happiness in my chest expands, warm and bright, and for a few minutes, nothing exists except this room and this bed and the weight of his arm across my back.

Then I remember Paolo.

The happiness dims, not gone but banked, like a fire someone’s turned down. I lift my head. “How’s Paolo doing?”

Domenico’s expression changes. There’s a small tightening around the eyes, a slight hardening of his mouth. “He lost a lot of blood.” His voice is even. “The surgery went as well as it could, but his antibody profile is making replacing the blood he lost difficult. They’re running low on compatible units.”

My stomach drops. “Oh, no. What does that mean?”

“It means he might need more blood than they have on hand.” Domenico’s thumb traces a circle on my hip, the gesture at odds with the gravity in his voice.

“Okay,” I murmur. “Do I… should we see if I can donate blood? Or maybe—”

“It’s taken care of, baby,” he assures me.

I furrow my brows, not liking the edge in his tone or the way he suddenly averts his gaze. “What does that even mean?”

“His mom’s almost here. She’s a known compatible donor. She landed twenty minutes ago, and Gio’s bringing her from the airport.”

Wait, I didn’t hear him correctly. Clearly my concussed head is playing tricks on me.

“Say that again,” I whisper, sitting up so I can face him fully. “Who’s coming?”

He swallows thickly. “Paolo’s mom, Shirley, is on her way here now.”

“But I…” How can that be?

How can the woman everyone in Boston believes Domenico murdered be alive? She’s the ghost whose absence shaped every rumor about the DeLuca family I’ve ever heard. The dead wife whose memory hangs over my marriage like a shadow I’ve learned to live with.

“His… mom?” The words come out hollow. Disbelieving. “But she’s—”

“Alive.” Domenico’s eyes don’t leave mine. “She’s been alive the whole time.”

The room tilts. Not from the concussion—from the sheer weight of what he’s saying, the tectonic shift it creates in everything I thought I knew about him.

“This life wasn’t for Shirley. She wasn’t happy, and the only thing she wanted was to get out,” he continues. His voice is quiet. “She was unhappy for years, and once Paolo was old enough to understand, we arranged it and faked her death.”

“So why do people think you did it?” I ask, not sure I’m following.

Domenico takes my hand and brings it to his mouth, gently biting the pad of each finger before answering. “I planted that rumor,” he clarifies. “It was the easiest way to avoid people asking questions or looking for the truth.”

My other hand has gone still on his chest. I can feel his heart beating under my palm, steady and unhurried, while mine hammers against my ribs like it’s trying to escape.

“She lives outside Chicago now. In a small house with her new husband. Brian’s a decent guy who owns a hardware store. She teaches piano.” A pause. “Paolo visits her twice a year.”

“You let everyone believe you killed her.” My voice doesn’t sound like mine. It’s flat, distant, the voice of someone standing very still while the ground collapses beneath them.

“Yes.”

“Paolo knows.”

“Yes.”

“Gio knows.”

“Yes.”

“And you never…” I can’t finish the sentence. The words stick in my throat, too big, too impossible to shape.

Domenico’s hand finds my face. His palm is warm against my cheek, his thumb brushing just below my eye where the skin is tender from crying.

“I never killed my wife, Kira. She wanted a life without me, and I gave it to her.”

The simplicity of it is what breaks me. Not the conspiracy, not the years of secrecy, not even the fact that Domenico kept it secret from me.

Domenico DeLuca, the man everyone fears, the man rumored to have murdered his own wife, let the woman he loved walk away because she asked him to.

He let her go.

I have about a dozen questions running through my head, but Domenico’s phone rings before I can ask more. The sound cuts through the quiet of the hospital room like a knife, and I watch his face as he answers, the way his expression hardens into something focused and immediate.

“She’s here,” he says after a moment, pocketing the phone. He stands, adjusts his cuffs with that automatic precision that means his brain is already three steps ahead of his body. “Gio’s bringing her up. You don’t have to come if you’re not—”

“Oh, I’m coming,” I interrupt.

The words come out sharper than I intend. Domenico looks at me, his eyes doing that thing where they see more than I want them to, and he nods once.

“Okay.”

The hallway is too bright. Fluorescent lights buzzing overhead, the smell of antiseptic and floor wax, the distant sound of monitors beeping behind closed doors. My head throbs in time with my heartbeat, the concussion making the world slightly too vivid, slightly too sharp at the edges.

Shirley is alive.

The thought repeats with each step, a mantra I can’t turn off. Shirley DeLuca… wait, is that even her name anymore? Probably not. Either way, the supposed dead wife is alive. She’s in this hospital. And I’m about to meet her.

As Domenico wraps his arm around me, I lean into the touch. The rational reason is that my legs feel like they’re made of something that isn’t quite solid. But the real reason is that… he’s my husband, and I love him.

As long as there are no other skeletons coming back to life from his closet, I’ll get over the shock.

When we round the corner toward the surgical waiting area, Gio’s already there. He looks exhausted. Dark circles under his eyes, his suit jacket wrinkled, the same bloodstains on his sleeve from earlier that he hasn’t had time to change out of.

He stands beside a woman I’ve never seen before, and the sight of her stops me cold.

Shirley is beautiful.

Not pretty. Not attractive. Beautiful in a way that makes the word itself feel inadequate. She’s tall, willowy, with almost white hair pulled back in a messy knot and eyes the same startling shade as her son’s.

She’s wearing jeans and a sweater, clothes thrown on in a hurry, and even exhausted from the flight, terrified for her son, with no makeup and circles under her eyes that match Gio’s, she is stunning.

I stare at her because I can’t not stare. This is the woman Domenico was married to and started a family with.

Her eyes find Domenico first. Something complicated moves across her face—not anger, not warmth, something in between that I don’t have a name for. A history compressed into a single glance.

Then her gaze shifts to me, and I feel myself being assessed in a way that’s entirely female and entirely unavoidable. She takes in the cut above my temple, the butterfly strips, the way I’m standing beside Domenico.

“Kira,” she says. My name in her mouth sounds strange—familiar and foreign at once. “I’ve heard a lot about you.”

I have absolutely nothing to say to that. What do you tell the dead ex-wife who isn’t dead? Instead of coming up with words, I just nod. And then immediately regret it when my head pounds harder.

Shirley’s attention is already moving, pulled toward the doors leading to the surgical wing as if there’s a physical force dragging her. “Where is he? Can I see him?”

As if summoned, a man in blue scrubs appears from a side corridor, tablet in hand, eyes scanning the small group until they land on Shirley.

“Mrs. Larsson?” When she nods, he waves her over and murmurs something to her.

“Do the doctors know who she is?” I whisper to Domenico.

“No.” He shakes his head. “Only three, well, now four, people know she’s alive. To everyone else, she’s just a relative.”

“And no one asks any questions?”

“They like donations more than answers,” he says with an unapologetic shrug. “No one digs too deep when it threatens their finances. It’s also the reason no one bothered to ask too many questions when I reported Shirley’s death—”

“Oh,” I gasp, only now realizing that with her still being alive, Domenico should be a divorcee and not a widower. “But…”

“But?” he prompts when I trail off.

“So you are a widower, at least on paper?”

He smiles. “If what you’re really asking is if our marriage is over legally, the answer is yes, baby. I’m not married to anyone but you.”

Even though I want to pretend that it doesn’t matter, it does. I’m not sure how I’d have handled it if I found out our marriage wasn’t legal. It would feel like… doesn’t matter. Not when I’m his one and only wife.

When I look back to where Shirley and the doctor stand, she waves. Then she follows the doctor without looking back, without saying goodbye to Domenico, while Gio falls into step with her.

I watch her walk away. The straight line of her spine, the determined set of her shoulders both make it clear that her focus is absolute, single-minded. The focus of a mother whose child is hurting and nothing else matters.

Then she’s gone, through a set of swinging doors, and Domenico and I are alone in the hallway.

The silence between us is thick with everything unsaid. I stare at the spot where Shirley stood seconds ago, trying to reconcile the woman I just met with the story I’ve believed since the day I married Domenico DeLuca.

He killed his wife.

That’s what everyone said. That’s what I believed. A man capable of that kind of violence, that kind of coldness. The man I fell in love with despite the rumors, because the rumors made sense of the hardness in him, the distance, the way he sometimes looks at the world like he’s expecting it to disappoint him.

Except he didn’t kill her.

He let her go.

“Did you love her?” I ask because I really, really need to know that.

“In a way,” he replies. “We were married for years, and I cared about her. I loved her for giving me Paolo, for being there for him. But I was never in love with her. Not the way I’m in love with you.”