Falling for My Ex’s Mafia Dad — Episode 26
At dawn, Fay stood outside Kent’s office with her hand raised to knock. The corridor was silent except for the distant change of guards, yet she could still hear his broken breathing from the night before. She hated that the memory made him seem less dangerous. A wounded predator remained a predator, and sympathy was not the same thing as trust.
Kent told her to enter before her knuckles touched the wood. He sat behind a spotless desk in a dark suit, the bandage hidden beneath his cuff and every trace of panic erased. Only the untouched coffee beside him suggested the night had cost more than he intended to show.
“You said I could negotiate,” Fay began. Kent corrected her: he had agreed to conditions for her confidentiality, not granted permission to exploit a medical crisis. His tone was cool enough to make last night feel imaginary, but his eyes followed her when she deliberately glanced at his concealed hand.
Fay said she had protected his secret from Lorenzo without knowing whether Kent deserved that loyalty. Now she wanted evidence that he understood the difference between protection and imprisonment. She wanted scheduled calls with David and Janeen, supervised visits, access to her attorney, and a real plan for returning to clinical work.
Kent leaned back, studying her demands. He asked what would stop Lorenzo from using those freedoms to reach her. Fay replied that confinement had not stopped Lorenzo from recruiting her inside Kent’s own library. Isolation did not eliminate manipulation; it merely ensured she faced it without allies.
The accuracy of the point irritated him. He rose and crossed to the window, flexing his injured hand once when he believed she could not see. Fay waited rather than filling the silence. Fiona’s lesson had already proved useful against one Mafia don, and it worked just as well against another.
Kent agreed to daily calls on a secure line and one family visit each week, provided his guards controlled the route. Her attorney could review the marriage contract on the estate. Work, however, remained impossible until he neutralized Dean’s remaining network and anyone who knew the Alden heiress had resurfaced.
“That could take months.” Fay refused to let an undefined threat become a permanent cage. Kent promised a security review every two weeks and said she could continue professional education remotely in the meantime. It was less than freedom, but more structure than she had possessed yesterday.
She pushed further. Fay wanted permission to walk the grounds without an escort hovering at her shoulder and to leave the protected wing with Daniel or Fiona. Kent said Fiona did not count as security. Fay almost smiled; the complaint carried the exhausted familiarity of a man who had lost that argument many times.
They settled on two guards at a distance, access to the gardens and training facilities, and supervised trips approved in advance. Kent wrote each concession on a legal pad, transforming reluctant promises into terms that could be remembered and challenged. Fay insisted he sign the page.
His brows lifted. “You think my word is insufficient?” She told him a signed agreement protected them both from different memories of the same conversation. After a long stare, Kent signed with a fountain pen and slid the paper across the desk.
Fay read it twice before folding it into her pocket. The victory was narrow, conditional, and dependent on the goodwill of a criminal king. It still belonged to her. She had entered the office as a prisoner asking for air and would leave with the first written limits ever placed on Kent’s control.
He stopped her before she reached the door. There was a condition he had not written down: she would wear Daniel’s engagement ring whenever anyone outside the immediate household could see her. The alliance had to look unquestionable while Lorenzo’s attorneys revised the contract.
Fay looked at her bare hand. The ring remained in a velvet box upstairs, where she had hidden it after Daniel’s proposal became a political performance. Wearing it felt like lying about Daniel and denying the dangerous truth of her attraction to his father.
Kent crossed the room and placed a small black box on the table beside her. He had anticipated the objection. Inside lay the enormous diamond Daniel had offered, reset overnight in a slimmer band that fit Fay’s hand and looked less like a shackle.
“You changed it,” she said. Kent claimed the original setting was impractical for someone who used her hands professionally. The explanation was sensible, almost considerate, and therefore more destabilizing than an order. Fay wondered when he had noticed how she worked or why he had cared.
She slid on the ring herself. Kent’s attention settled on it, satisfaction competing with something that looked painfully like resentment. The diamond announced that she belonged to Daniel, but the man who had redesigned it stood close enough for Fay to feel his warmth.
“Our bargain is complete,” Kent said. Fay reminded him that treatment remained available if he changed his mind. His expression shuttered, but he did not threaten her again. Instead, he told her to be ready at noon because Fiona had planned an event that required his approval.
Fay opened the door and found Daniel waiting in the corridor. He noticed the ring and smiled for the guards, then quietly asked what she had traded for her new privileges. Fay answered that she had traded nothing belonging to anyone else, a distinction Daniel understood without explanation.
At precisely noon, Fiona swept into Fay’s bedroom followed by six assistants wheeling a forest of white garment bags. She threw open the curtains, announced that every girl deserved one beautiful fantasy before the Mafia turned it into strategy, and unzipped the first bag to reveal a wedding gown Kent had personally chosen.
