Pregnant with the Mafia King's Baby

Elena Voss checked her reflection in the tinted glass of the elevator one last time before the doors slid open onto the fortieth floor. Black pencil skirt. White blouse buttoned to the collar. Hair pulled back so tight it made her scalp ache. She looked exactly like what she was pretending to be—an ambitious, unremarkable assistant desperate for a job at Rossi Enterprises. She looked nothing like the daughter of Marcus Voss, the man Dominic Rossi's family had murdered eight years ago. "Ms. Voss?" A security guard the size of a refrigerator stood at the reception desk, his eyes scanning her up and down with the kind of practiced suspicion she imagined every visitor to this floor received. "This way." She followed him down a hallway lined with abstract art that probably cost more than her father's entire funeral, her heels clicking against marble floors so polished she could see her own pale face staring back up at her. Her pulse hammered beneath her composed exterior. Three years of planning had led to this hallway, this interview, this one chance to get close enough to Dominic Rossi to finally make him pay. The guard stopped before a set of heavy mahogany doors and knocked twice. "Enter." The voice on the other side was low, controlled, the kind of voice that expected obedience without needing to raise itself. Elena had heard recordings of it before—grainy surveillance audio her contacts had scraped together over the years—but nothing had prepared her for how it would sound in person, vibrating through solid wood. She pushed the door open and stepped inside. Dominic Rossi did not look up from the documents on his desk when she entered. He was exactly as the photographs had shown—dark hair cut close, a jaw that looked like it had been carved rather than grown, shoulders that filled out his charcoal suit like the fabric had been sewn directly onto muscle. But photographs, Elena realized immediately, hadn't captured the stillness of him. The way he occupied space like he owned the air itself. "Sit," he said, still not looking up. She sat. For nearly a full minute, the only sound in the room was the soft scratch of his pen against paper. Elena used the silence to study him—the way his knuckles, when he finally set the pen down, were faintly scarred. The way his eyes, when they finally lifted to meet hers, were a shade of gray so pale they looked almost silver under the office lights. "Elena Voss," he said, reading from the folder in front of him. "Five years at Kessler Financial. Fluent in three languages. No family listed as emergency contacts." Her stomach tightened. She'd anticipated this question, rehearsed the answer a hundred times in front of her bathroom mirror. "My parents passed away when I was younger, Mr. Rossi. I don't have anyone else." It wasn't entirely a lie. Her mother had died of grief eighteen months after her father's murder, unable to survive the loss of him. Elena had spent the years since building a fortress around herself, brick by brick, fact by fabricated fact, until the woman sitting in this chair bore almost no resemblance to the girl who'd once cried herself to sleep in her father's empty study. Dominic studied her for a long moment, and Elena forced herself not to look away, not to blink, not to give him any reason to doubt the careful lie she'd constructed. "Why do you want to work for me, Ms. Voss?" he asked finally. "You understand what this company actually does. I assume you did your research." "I did," she said, keeping her voice level. "I understand exactly what I'm applying for." Something flickered behind his silver eyes—amusement, maybe, or interest. "Most people who understand what this company does don't apply for a position inside my office." "Most people aren't as good at their jobs as I am," she said. The corner of his mouth twitched. Not quite a smile, but close enough that Elena felt a strange, unwelcome flutter of satisfaction at having provoked it. The interview lasted another twenty minutes, Dominic testing her with rapid-fire questions about financial structuring, discretion, and confidentiality agreements that she suspected were less about her actual qualifications and more about seeing whether she'd crack under pressure. She didn't. Three years of preparation had taught her how to hold a lie steady even when her heart was pounding hard enough to bruise her ribs. "You start Monday," he said finally, sliding a contract across the desk toward her. "Eight sharp. If you're late, don't bother coming at all." Elena signed her name—Elena Voss, not a single letter of it false, because some ironies were too perfect to waste—and slid the contract back toward him. "One more thing," Dominic said, as she stood to leave. His eyes traveled over her, not with the crude appraisal she'd braced herself for, but something colder and more assessing, like he was calculating a variable he hadn't accounted for. "You'll be working closely with me. Personally. I don't tolerate assistants who ask questions about things that don't concern them." "I don't ask questions I don't need answered, Mr. Rossi," Elena said, and this time, the lie tasted like copper in her mouth. Because the truth was, she had exactly one question, and she intended to spend however long it took to find the answer buried somewhere inside the walls of Rossi Enterprises. Who gave the order to kill my father. And how do I make you watch everyone you love burn the way I did. Elena didn't allow herself to breathe properly until she was three blocks away from the building, tucked into a corner booth of a coffee shop where she'd arranged to meet the only person left who knew the full truth of what she was doing. "Well?" Marissa asked, sliding into the seat across from her. Marissa had been her father's old business partner, one of the few people who'd survived the purge that had taken Marcus Voss's life, and the only person Elena trusted enough to bring into her plan. "Did he buy it?" "He hired me," Elena said, wrapping both hands around her untouched coffee cup to keep them from shaking. "Starting Monday. Personal assistant." Marissa's eyebrows lifted. "Personal assistant means close access. That's faster than we expected." "Faster isn't always better," Elena said quietly. "He's not what I expected, Marissa." "What did you expect?" Elena thought of the way his eyes had settled on her—not the leering, careless gaze she'd prepared herself to endure, but something sharper, more dangerous in its precision. A man who studied people like puzzles, cataloguing every inconsistency, every crack in the mask. "I expected a monster," Elena admitted. "Someone I could hate without complication." "He's still the man who ordered your father's death," Marissa reminded her, voice hard. "Whatever face he wears in that office doesn't change what he is." "I know that," Elena said, and she did know it, had built her entire adult life around that singular, unshakeable fact. But something about the stillness in Dominic Rossi's eyes had unsettled her in a way she hadn't anticipated, a small crack in the certainty she'd carried into that office like armor. She thought about it the entire train ride home, replaying the way his voice had dropped when he'd said personally, the way his gaze had lingered on her just a fraction too long before he'd looked back down at his paperwork. She told herself it meant nothing. Told herself she was imagining significance where there was only the ordinary calculation of a dangerous man sizing up a potential threat. She told herself a lot of things that night, lying awake in her narrow apartment with her father's photograph propped against her nightstand, his kind, gentle smile a stark contrast to the ruthless empire that had swallowed him whole. She did not, could not, have told herself the truth—that some small, traitorous part of her had felt something other than hatred when Dominic Rossi's eyes had met hers across that desk. Something that felt dangerously close to curiosity. And curiosity, Elena knew better than anyone, was the first crack in any carefully built wall. Monday morning, she would walk back into that office and begin the slow, careful work of destroying the man sitting behind that desk. She had no idea, not yet, just how completely her plan was about to unravel—or how much of herself she stood to lose in the process.