Page 32 of Rent a Mob Boss

We’re in the kitchen. Lillie is at the island, eating cereal and telling Poptart’s life story to a stuffed rabbit. Quinn is standing by the window with her coffee, looking out at the east lawn where two men are standing in positions that have nothing to do with gardening.

“Can we go to the park today?” she asks. Light, casual. The tone she uses when she already knows the answer and wants to see if I’ll lie about the reason.

“Not today,” I reply before sipping my own coffee.

“It’s been three days,” she murmurs.

“I realize that.” I join her by the window, keeping my voice low for Lillie’s sake. Let’s face it, for my own sake as well. I don’t particularly feel like being bombarded this morning.

“You know, she’s been asking too.” Quinn glances at Lillie, who has gone suspiciously silent. “She wants to see the ducks. She’s been talking about it for days.”

“Not today,” I repeat as gently as I can. “There’s some work I need to stay close to. We’ll do something here. The paddock, the pool.”

“We’ve done the paddock and the pool.” She takes a sip of her coffee and says nothing else, which is somehow worse than arguing.

I watch her eyes move across the lawn again. She’s keeping tabs on the men. I know she is, because she’s been doing it for days.

I’m losing her, aren’t I? Not in the way I feared. Not physically, not through danger. I’m losing her to the lie. I have to get her back somehow. So I make a decision.

“Tonight,” I say. “We’ll go out tonight. Lillie’s favorite pizza place. All three of us.”

Quinn looks at me. I watch as her suspicion flickers, then recedes. It’s not gone, but it’s shelved for now, set aside in favor of something she wants more than answers right now, which is normalcy. “Really?” she murmurs.

“Really. Tell Lillie.”

We don’t have to tell Lillie. Lillie heard. Lillie has been hearing this entire conversation with the supernatural auditory range of a child who wants something. She’s already off her stool and launching herself across the kitchen. “Pizza! Quinn, we’re getting pizza!”

“I know!” Quinn catches her, laughing, and I watch them spin in the middle of my kitchen. The warmth in my chest is so sharp it almost hurts. Underneath it, the cold thing sits and waits, the way it always waits.

I pick up my phone to text Tristan. Taking them out tonight. Gino’s. 7 PM. I want four on the restaurant, two on the street, and someone on the kitchen exit. Nobody visible.

It takes less than ten seconds for him to reply. Understood.

Then, five seconds later: You sure?

I’m sure.

He doesn’t respond again, which is his way of saying he disagrees and will do it anyway. That’s what Tristan does. He disagrees with me quietly, prepares for the worst without being asked, and is right often enough that ignoring him is a calculated risk I take with open eyes.

Lillie takes forty-five minutes to get ready for pizza. It involves changing her outfit three times, insisting on the shoes with the butterflies, and asking Quinn to braid her hair in a way she saw on a video. It seems to require the engineering skills of a bridge architect.

Quinn does it, though. She sits on the bed with my little girl standing between her legs and her tongue poking out the side of her mouth. It’s the same face Lillie makes when she’s concentrating. She braids Lillie’s hair into something complicated and beautiful while Lillie narrates a movie she wants to see.

I stand in the doorway watching them, and I think about the warehouse just miles away. Does a man in my position have the right to take his family to a pizza restaurant on a random weeknight?

His family. I used that word without deciding to. It’s becoming harder not to.

We take the car. Sal drives. The security detail follows in a vehicle I chose specifically because it looks like every other SUV on the road—unremarkable, which is the point. Quinn doesn’t notice it. Lillie is too busy explaining the menu to Quinn, who has somehow never been to Gino’s, which Lillie considers a personal failing she intends to correct.

The restaurant is small, loud, and smells like garlic and burning wood. It’s been Lillie’s favorite since she was three, since the night I brought her here after Sofia’s funeral because I couldn’t face the house, and she wouldn’t stop crying. A man named Gino brought her a slice of pizza with extra cheese, and she stopped. Just stopped. Like the cheese was an answer to something.

We’ve been coming back ever since.

The bad feeling starts in the car and settles in my gut the way bad feelings do. It’s not sharp or specific, just a low hum of wrongness that could be paranoia or could be instinct. I’ve learned not to dismiss either one because they’ve kept me alive.

I scan the room as soon as we walk in. The booths along the walls, an open kitchen in the back, two exits—the front door and a service entrance through the kitchen. There are maybe thirty people in here. Families, mostly. A couple at the bar. A group of teenagers in one corner. Nobody who sets off the part of my brain that runs threat assessment in the background like an operating system I can’t shut down.

My guys are in position. I can’t see them, which means they’re doing their job. There’s one at the bar who I recognize by his shoulders—Marco’s cousin, new to the crew, reliable. There’s another outside, leaning against the building across the street with a phone in his hand, looking like every other guy waiting for an Uber. Two more I can’t place, which is exactly how it should be.