Cute Baby Smiles, New York, NY (2026)

Welcome to Cute Baby Smiles, where we celebrate the purest form of joy—the enchanting smiles of adorable babies!

09/10/2026

One Kind Act Made the Mafia Boss Fall for His Housemaid—and It Cost Him Everything
-----
PART 1
If you tell him I helped you, I will lose this job.
The boy looked up at me from beneath the grand staircase.
His small hands wrapped around two dinner rolls and a folded napkin.
Rain tapped against the tall windows of the Moretti estate.
Somewhere beyond the dining hall, men in dark suits spoke in low voices while silverware touched porcelain and no one laughed.
I had worked in that house for six weeks, long enough to know that silence was part of the uniform.
“Who is the food for?” I asked. Luca glanced toward the basement corridor. “Mr. Hale.”
The name belonged to an older groundskeeper who had been dismissed three days earlier.
The staff said he had stolen medicine from the household supply room. I did not believe them.
Men who steal do not leave their reading glasses behind.

Luca pressed the rolls into his coat pocket. “He has nowhere else to go.”
I should have called the head housekeeper.
I should have returned to the dining room before anyone noticed the missing tray.
Instead, I took a bowl of soup from the service cart and followed Luca down the narrow stairs.
The basement smelled like stone dust and old rain.
At the end of the corridor, a storage door stood slightly open.
Mr. Hale sat on a folded blanket beside a furnace pipe, pale and shivering beneath an old wool coat.
“Grace,” he whispered. “You should not be here.” “Neither should you.” I set the soup beside him.
“But hunger does not care about house rules.” Luca smiled for the first time that week.
I knelt and checked the medicine bottle near Mr. Hale’s shoe. Empty.
The label showed a prescription that had expired months ago. “Why did they dismiss you?” I asked.
His eyes moved toward the ceiling as though the answer lived somewhere above us.
“Because I remembered something they wanted forgotten.”

Footsteps sounded behind me: slow, heavy, certain. Luca’s smile disappeared.
Adrian Moretti filled the doorway in a black suit, broad shoulders blocking the light.
His sleeves were rolled to his forearms, revealing dark ink beneath his skin. Everyone in the estate lowered their eyes.
When he entered a room, I kept mine on his. “Luca,” he said. “Go upstairs.”
“Uncle Adrian, I brought him food.” “I can see that.” His voice stayed calm. That made it more dangerous.
Luca looked at me. I nodded and he slipped past Adrian without another word. The door remained open.
Adrian’s gray eyes moved from the soup to Mr. Hale, then to me. “You lied to the housekeeper.” “Yes.”
“You removed food from a private dinner.” “Yes.” “You entered a restricted part of my home.” “Also, yes.”
He stepped closer. “Do you understand who you just lied to?”
My heart struck once against my ribs: a man powerful enough not to need me afraid of him.
Mr. Hale closed his eyes. Adrian did not move for several seconds. Only the furnace spoke.
Then he looked at the empty medicine bottle. “Why is he here?”
“Because someone dismissed a sick man and assumed the cold would finish the conversation.” Adrian’s face changed, but only slightly.
“Who gave you permission to interfere?” “No one.” “Then why did you?”
I covered Mr. Hale’s shaking hands with the blanket.
“Because kindness that requires permission is usually just obedience wearing a better name.”

Adrian stared at me as if no one in his house had ever answered him without asking what it would cost.
Then Mr. Hale reached beneath his coat and pressed a tarnished silver coin into my palm.
The Moretti crest was stamped on one side.
On the other, someone had scratched a single name: Bennett, my father’s name. “Where did you get this?” I whispered.
Mr. Hale looked at Adrian before answering: “From the night your father disappeared.”
Adrian’s expression hardened: “Your father worked for this family.” “He was a driver,” Mr. Hale said.
“And he did not steal from them.” The coin felt cold against my skin.
Adrian looked at it, then at me. “Grace,” he said quietly. “Your father died because of that symbol.”
Adrian’s words settled over the basement like dust: “Your father died because of that symbol.”
I closed my fingers around the coin. “That is not an answer.” Mr. Hale shifted beneath the blanket.
Adrian looked toward him, then back at me. “Upstairs,” he said. “Now. He needs medicine.
A doctor is already on the way.” I had not heard him call anyone.
That was the first lesson of Adrian Moretti’s power. Decisions moved before his voice finished making them.
Two staff members appeared at the end of the corridor with a wheelchair and fresh blankets.
Mr. Hale caught my wrist before they helped him stand. “Do not let them call Daniel Cross,” he whispered. “Why?”
“Because your father trusted the wrong signature.” Adrian heard him. His expression did not change, but the air did.
“Take care of him,” he told the staff. “No paperwork leaves this house.” Then he faced me: “My office.”

The room upstairs was all dark wood, rain, and quiet authority. Family photographs lined one wall.
None of the faces smiled.
Adrian closed the door and placed the silver coin beneath a desk lamp: “Your full name.” “Grace Bennett.”
“Your father’s name.” “Samuel Bennett.” His jaw tightened. “He drove for my family sixteen years ago.
He was accused of stealing money—$280,000.” “He did not steal it.” “That is what Mr. Hale believes.”
“What do you believe?” Adrian opened a locked drawer and removed an old personnel file.
My father’s photograph stared up at me. Same brown eyes, same stubborn mouth.
A red stamp crossed the page, “Terminated for theft and disappearance.” At the bottom was an approval signature: Adrian Moretti.
I looked at him. “You signed this.” “I was twenty-three.” “Were you unable to read at twenty-three?” His eyes sharpened.
“Vincent prepared the report. I signed hundreds of files that year. That does not make this one less real.”
No, the admission came too quickly to comfort me. He turned the file around.
“Your father vanished three days after this was approved.” “My grandmother told me he left because he was ashamed.”
“Your grandmother was told what the family wanted repeated.” My throat tightened, but I kept my voice steady.
“Why hire me if you knew my name?” “I did not. Household staff is handled through an agency.”
“You own the house. I do not memorize every resume.” “That sounds convenient.”
Adrian leaned back, studying me as if I were the first person in years to make him explain himself.
“How much do you owe for your grandmother’s care?” “That is none of your business.”
“I can have the balance cleared tonight.” “No. You have not heard the amount. It would still be—” “No.”
His hand rested beside the coin. Dark ink disappeared beneath his cuff. “Why?” “Because I gave a sick man soup.”
“I did not sell you the right to own my gratitude.” Something changed in his face, not anger, recognition.
“Then what do you want?” “The truth about my father.” “Truth can be expensive.” “So can silence.”

Rain struck the windows harder. Adrian opened another file, older and thinner.
Inside was a ledger summary with several names blacked out. Samuel Bennett appeared beside a transfer account.
The approval line carried Adrian’s signature. “I do not remember signing this,” he said. “But you did.” “Yes.”
“Then start there.” He reached for the telephone, but I stopped him. “No favors. No private cleanup.
No money sent to my grandmother.” “You are giving orders in my office.” “I am setting terms around my life.”
For a long moment he said nothing. Then he nodded: “Agreed.” I should have felt relieved.
Instead I noticed the date on the file. It was three days before my father disappeared.
Beneath Adrian’s signature and smaller handwriting, someone had added a note: “Driver transferred to harbor route assignment.”
Adrian saw it too. “That company never had drivers,” he said. “Then where did they send him?”
He looked toward the locked drawer. “Somewhere. Vincent did not expect anyone to search.”
-----
We're finalizing the next part (and the ending) — it'll drop in the comments soon. Drop a like and a comment so we know you're hooked and we'll prioritize getting it out. ❤️

09/10/2026

I Hid My Face Behind My Hair — The Mafia Boss Kissed the Side I Never Showed
-----
PART 1
For 10 years I hid the left side of my face behind my hair and I had made peace with the idea that no man would ever want to look at it.
Then the most feared man in Philadelphia walked into my little restaurant with his elderly aunt, and he looked at me in a way no one had looked at me since the fire.
He never asked about the scars. He never stared at the hair. He simply saw me.
What I could not know that night was that my face was the key to a secret someone had burned an entire building to keep, and that the man everyone called a monster would end up kissing the side of my face I had never shown anyone in front of the whole city.

You should understand the woman I was before that night, because it matters for everything that followed.
I was 28 years old and I ran my family's restaurant on a corner in South Philadelphia.
A small place with red checkered cloths and a menu unchanged since my grandmother's day.
I could calm a screaming kitchen and balance a checkbook to the penny, but I planned my whole life around one thing: keeping the left side of my face turned away from people.
The burns did not cover my whole face, and that was the cruel part.
In a way, the right side was entirely ordinary. The face of any woman you might pass on the street.
The left side, from my temple, down past my cheek and jaw, was a patchwork of tight, discolored skin that made strangers freeze mid-sentence.
For 10 years I had heard all of it: the whispered questions, the men who talked to my profile instead of my eyes, the ones who were kind about it—which was somehow worse, because kindness told me louder than cruelty ever could, that what I was hiding was something to be pitied.
So I kept my hair long and down and I told myself I didn't want the things other women wanted.

Then my father's oldest friend, a man everyone called Dom, made a booking that would change my life: a party of two, he said, for a birthday.
A Mr. Calderi and his aunt.
If I had known that Enzo Calderi owned half the waterfront and most of the shadows behind it, I might have done things differently.
The night arrived, cold and rainy, and I saw the cars.
First, three black sedans—absurd for a party of two—and then the men who got out.
Big men in dark coats who scanned the street like soldiers. My heart did a strange little dance.
Then the man himself walked in and I understood why people spoke his name quietly.
Enzo Calderi was 40 years old, tall and broad-shouldered, with silver threading the dark hair at his temples and eyes—the color of a winter harbor.
He was handsome the way a drawn blade is handsome, elegant, dangerous, and perfectly still.
His security men began to move through my dining room like they owned it, and one of them told a family they would need to move.

Here's the thing about me. I was not a woman who knew how to stand up to men like that.
I had spent 10 years learning to be small and forgettable.
But something old and stubborn refused to let those men push around my regulars in my own restaurant.
I walked over and said as calmly as I could: "Nobody is moving anywhere.
This is my place and everyone in it is my guest."
One of the security men stepped toward me and I thought: "Well, this is how it ends: buried under a busboy's apron in the alley."
Then a voice behind me said, calm as winter: "Carlo, enough," and the security man stopped like a dog that had heard its name.
Enzo Calderi looked at me, eyes traveling from my face to the name on my apron, but never once dropping to the side I was hiding.
"There is nothing to solve here," he said.
"My aunt simply wanted to eat somewhere for her birthday, and you were recommended to us.
Can we still have our table?" "The table is yours," I said. "Nobody moves."

His aunt, thank heaven, was the kind of woman who decided what she thought of you in the first 30 seconds and never changed her mind.
Beatrice was 76 years old, small and white-haired, and sharp as a tack, and she took one look at me and announced that I reminded her of her own mother—God rest her—who had run a restaurant in the old country and had never once been told what to do by a man in a black coat.
I laughed. I had not laughed like that in months.
Enzo heard his aunt laugh and looked at me with something I could not name: not attraction, yet closer to recognition, as if he had been carrying something heavy for years and had just glimpsed a place where he might set it down.
The birthday dinner was a quiet success, and I did not hide from myself that I hovered near their table all evening.
Not because I was interested in him, because I was. The way you cannot stop watching a wolf.
He ordered for her. He cut her cutlet. He listened to her talk and never once checked his phone.
There is no faster way to a woman's attention than watching a dangerous man be gentle.

He came back the next week and the week after, always with Beatrice, always to the same corner table, the one that left my scarred side toward the wall.
He never asked why and never tried to move it.
I began to notice he was coming less for the food and more for something he refused to name.
The strangest thing was the way he treated my staff.
Men like him usually looked through people like my busboys as if they were furniture.
Enzo learned Jimmy's name and the new girl, Rosa's name, and he remembered that Rosa's mother had been in the hospital.
By the fourth week, I stopped pretending I did not look forward to Tuesdays and Fridays.
I had begun to feel, for the first time in 10 years, like a woman who was being seen.

The night he finally asked, we were closing up.
He had stayed past his usual hour, nursing a coffee gone cold, and I knew he was waiting for something.
Rosa and Jimmy had gone home. It was just the two of us and the rain against the window.
"I want to ask you something," he said, and the quiet in his voice made my chest tighten.
"I asked you not to," I said. "I have not asked you," he said.
"I have waited every week for you to tell me and you have not.
And I am not asking you now. Whatever it is you keep turned away, it is yours.
You do not owe it to me."
And that was the moment I knew, with a certainty that terrified me, that he had known about the scar the entire time.
He had seen it.
The first night when the wind caught my hair and I was not fast enough, and he had chosen, week after week, to look at my eyes instead.
Ten years of men who could not look at my face and this one had looked at nothing else.
I sat down across from him and my hands were shaking, and for the first time in a very long time, I did not reach for the hair.
"You want to know what I am hiding?" It came out as a confession.
"I want to know you," he said. "Whatever you are willing to show me whenever you are ready. Nothing more.
And if you are never ready, that is a thing I can live with."

I was not ready that night.
I told him I was burned at 18 in a fire at a banquet hall down by the river where I had worked one summer as a catering girl, and that the official story was faulty wiring and a sprinkler system that failed, and that the scars were mine to carry.
And that was all there was to it.
He listened without interrupting, and when I finished, his face had gone very still.
"They said the fire started in the kitchen," I told him, "because that was what the papers said.
They said it was an accident. They gave the families money and closed the file.
I was the only one who got out with anything worse than smoke in my lungs, and I was young enough to believe the world had simply made a mistake that would never be repeated."
Enzo was silent so long that I thought I had lost him, that he was one of those men who could not bear to look once the ugly part had a name.
Then he said in a voice I had never heard from him, low and tight: "What hall?"
-----
We're finalizing the next part (and the ending) — it'll drop in the comments soon. Drop a like and a comment so we know you're hooked and we'll prioritize getting it out. ❤️

09/10/2026

"Please, Can You Just Come?" She Whispered From the Stairwell—Her Boss Answered on the First Ring
-----
PART 1
Please, can you just come? I don't know what else to do.
I said it barely above a whisper, standing in the stairwell of my own building, with my back pressed against the cold concrete wall, listening for footsteps on the other side of the door.
I don't know why I called him. That's the honest truth.
Out of everyone in my phone, my sister in Kelowna, my friend Dana from university, even my building super—I scrolled past all of them and landed on his name, Voss.
I'd saved him under his last name, like he was a business contact, which I suppose he was.
My employer, the man who signed my paychecks, the man I had successfully avoided making eye contact with for seven months.
And yet there I was, whispering into the phone, like my life depended on it, because maybe it did.
His voice came through the line after exactly one ring. Not two, not three. One. Where are you?
Not what's wrong? Not who is this? Just where, like my answer was the only variable he needed.
I told him the address. I heard movement on his end, something shifting a door.
He said, "Stay on the line." And I did.
I stood in that stairwell for 11 minutes, holding the phone to my ear, listening to the sound of him breathing, of a car starting, of the city at night.
I didn't say anything else. He didn't either.
It was the strangest 11 minutes of my life and somehow they were also the safest I'd felt in months.

My name is Fay and I need you to understand something before I tell you the rest of this story.
I am not a woman who calls for help.
I grew up the oldest of four in a house in Sudbury where my mother worked nights at the hospital and my dad did his best, which some weeks was pretty good and other weeks meant frozen dinners and permission slips he forgot to sign.
I learned early that if you want something done, you do it yourself. If you're scared, you breathe through it.
If something is wrong, you fix it quietly, because falling apart is expensive and we couldn't afford it.
I carried that with me when I moved to Toronto at 22, with a suitcase and a plan, a business administration degree, a shared apartment in the Annex with two roommates I found on Kijiji, and a job at a staffing agency that placed me in a series of progressively less terrible office environments until at 26 I landed at Voss Capital Group.
The title was Executive Assistant.
The reality was that I ran the daily operations of a man who barely spoke, moved through the office like weather, and had a reputation so severe that the woman who trained me, a very composed person named Helen, who had clearly seen things, told me without blinking, "Don't take it personally.
He's not warm. He's not going to be warm. Just be good at your job and he'll leave you alone."
I was very good at my job. He left me alone. It was fine.

His name was Cion Voss, pronounced Kan, which I got wrong twice in my first week, out loud in front of people, until his assistant from the London office corrected me, with the particular cruelty of someone who'd been waiting for exactly that opportunity.
Cion, Irish name, Canadian man, built the company from nothing by 34 and was now 38 and spoke to people in complete, precise sentences that left no room for misinterpretation.
He was not unkind. He was simply economic. Words were currency. He spent carefully. I respected that.
Actually, it made him easy to work with, in a way: no mixed signals, no games, no standing in the breakroom, wondering what he meant by the way he said good morning.
He was clear. I was efficient. Seven months passed without incident.

And then there was Mitchell. I'd been with Mitchell for two years before I took the job at Voss Capital.
He was the kind of man who was very charming in social settings and very different at home, and it took me an embarrassingly long time to understand that the gap between those two versions of him wasn't something I could close if I just tried harder.
He had a habit of going through my phone.
He'd frame it as curiosity, "just looking at your photos, babe," and then I'd find things moved.
Messages read, a screenshot he'd taken of a conversation with my coworker that he'd then question me about, calmly, systematically, like he was presenting evidence.
He never raised his voice. Mitchell believed raised voices were for people who lacked self-control.
He preferred the quiet kind of control, which is harder to name and harder to leave.

I left twice before I left for good.
The first time I stayed at Dana's for a week and then went back because he said the right things and I wanted to believe them.
The second time I put a deposit on my own apartment—a one-bedroom in Leslieville, nothing fancy, radiator heat and a balcony that fit exactly one folding chair—and I told him it was over and I meant it.
And I changed my number. He found the new number within three weeks. I don't know how. I never asked.
By the time I was working for Cion, Mitchell and I had been done for eight months: legally, completely, fully done.
But Mitchell had a different understanding of the word "done" and the calls had started again.
And then the showing up, not at my apartment, not yet, but at places I mentioned in passing: the coffee shop I liked, the gym near my office.
Once, at a fundraiser for a children's hospital that I was attending on behalf of Voss Capital, he appeared in a room full of people I worked with and he smiled at me like we were old friends.
And I smiled back because I didn't know what else to do with a hundred witnesses in the room.
I didn't tell anyone at work. What would I say?
I was trying so hard to be competent, professional, unremarkable in the best possible way.
The woman who could handle anything, the assistant who never needed help.

And then, one Tuesday in November, Mitchell showed up at my apartment. It was just after nine at night.
I'd worked late.
Cion had a call with investors in Zurich and I stayed to take notes, and I'd stopped at the Sobeys on Queen for groceries and I was standing in my kitchen putting things away when the buzzing started.
My intercom, long and insistent. I didn't answer.
I stood very still next to the counter, holding a bag of frozen edamame, and I waited to see if he'd stop.
He didn't stop.
He buzzed four more times and then my phone rang, his name on the screen, and I let it ring out and then the intercom again and then silence.
I made pasta. I watched television. I told myself he was gone.
At quarter to ten, I heard the door to my floor open. He had gotten in through the main entrance.
Somehow, I don't know. A neighbor who thought nothing of holding the door. Probably. It's Toronto.
People are polite in ways that don't account for situations like this one.
And he knew my unit number because he'd picked me up here before, back when things between us were something I still called a relationship.
He knocked.
He said my name twice, then three times, his voice very steady and very reasonable, the voice he used when he wanted something and knew that patience would get it for him.

I went to the stairwell. I don't know why.
I think I just needed to not be on the other side of a door from him.
I needed concrete walls. I needed to be somewhere he wasn't.
And I stood there in the stairwell, cold in my socked feet, and I opened my phone.
I scrolled past my sister. I scrolled past Dana. I don't know what I was thinking.
I don't know if I was thinking.
My thumb stopped on Voss and I pressed call before I could talk myself out of it.
He picked up on the first ring. "Please, can you just come? I don't know what else to do."
I said it before he said anything, before he could even say hello, just those 12 words.
And then I stopped because I was afraid if I said more I'd start crying and I wasn't going to cry.
A pause, very brief. And then, "Where are you?"
-----
We're finalizing the next part (and the ending) — it'll drop in the comments soon. Drop a like and a comment so we know you're hooked and we'll prioritize getting it out. ❤️

09/09/2026

“You Belong With Me”—The Mafia Boss Comes to My Door Drunk and Confesses Everything
-----
PART 1
Nobody expects the man who controls the city's criminal underworld to show up on a peeling apartment doorstep at 3:00 in the morning.
Alex certainly didn't.
She especially didn't expect Dominic Russo to be dead drunk, bleeding through a bespoke suit and smelling heavily of copper and expensive scotch.
When he finally lifted his head, the ruthless, untouchable boss was gone.
In his place was just a broken man who stared at her and slurred the five words that changed everything.
"You belong with me."

The radiator in Alex's apartment had been clanking since November.
It was a rhythmic metallic thud that she usually drowned out with a desk fan, even in the dead of winter.
Tonight the fan was off.
The only sounds in the cramped living room were the radiator, the relentless drum of rain against the single-pane window, and the scratch of her pen on cheap ledger paper.
Alex was an accountant, not a high-powered corporate CPA with a corner office, but a neighborhood bookkeeper who untangled the messy finances of laundromats, family-owned bodegas, and 24-hour diners.
It was quiet, tedious work.
It paid just enough to keep her out of the city's worst neighborhoods, but not enough to put her in a good one.
She rubbed her eyes, smudging a bit of mascara into the corner of her left eyelid.
The clock on her microwave blinked: 3:14 AM in bright, aggressive green.
She was tired, the kind of tired that settled into the bone marrow and made the air feel thick.
She reached for her coffee mug, cold. She drank it anyway, grimacing at the bitter sludge at the bottom.

Then came the knock. It wasn't a frantic, police-style pounding. It was heavy, deliberate, and sloppy.
The sound vibrated through the cheap wood of her front door, rattling the chain lock. Alex froze.
The mug stopped halfway to the desk. In this building, a knock at 3:00 in the morning meant trouble.
It meant a drunk neighbor locked out, an angry ex-boyfriend looking for the wrong apartment, or someone scouting to see if anyone was home before they kicked the jam in.
She slid her hand towards the heavy brass paperweight on her desk. She waited.
Silence stretched, just the rain and the radiator.
Then another knock, weaker this time, followed by the unmistakable sound of a heavy body sliding down the other side of the door, ending with a dull thud against the floorboards of the hallway.

Alex stood up, her bare feet silent against the worn linoleum.
She crept to the door, holding her breath, and pressed her eye to the peephole.
The hallway bulb was flickering, casting a sickly yellow strobe over the peeling floral wallpaper. At first she saw nothing.
Then she looked down: a pair of Italian leather shoes, dark wool trousers, a hand resting on the carpet, knuckles split and raw; a heavy gold signet ring catching the bad light.
She knew that ring.
She had seen it tap impatiently against the counter of the diner whose books she balanced every Tuesday.
She had seen it rest on the steering wheel of a black SUV that sat idling outside her building.
For the past three weeks, Dominic Russo. Panic, cold and sharp, spiked in her chest.

Dominic Russo didn't do house calls. He didn't exist in the same stratosphere as Alex's walk-up.
He was the man whose name was only spoken in hushed tones in the back rooms of the businesses she audited.
He owned the streets, the docks, and most of the police precinct. He was violence wrapped in expensive tailoring.
Alex backed away from the door. She should call the police. The thought died before it fully formed.
You don't call the police on Dominic Russo. That was a death sentence.

She crept forward again. Through the peephole, she saw his head tilt back against her door. His eyes were closed.
His face, usually set in lines of hard, terrifying calm, was slack.
A dark, wet stain was spreading across the left shoulder of his gray suit jacket.
He was bleeding and, by the way he was swaying slightly, even while sitting, he was incredibly drunk.
Alex swore under her breath, a harsh, ugly sound.
She unlatched the chain, turned the deadbolt, and opened the door, just a crack.
Dominic slumped backward as the door gave way, catching himself on the floor with a grunt.
He didn't reach for a weapon; he didn't bark an order.
He just sat there in the dingy hallway, blinking up at her through a haze of alcohol and pain.

"Alex," he breathed. His voice was a gravelly wreck, slurred and thick.

"What are you doing here?" she hissed, keeping her voice low. She looked up and down the hallway. Empty.
Thank God. If anyone saw him here, she was dead by association.

"Raining," he offered, as if that explained why the head of the local syndicate was bleeding on her welcome mat.

"You're bleeding."

Dominic looked down at his shoulder with mild, detached interest. "Yeah, grazed. Hurts like a..."
He looked back up at her. His dark eyes, usually sharp and calculating, were completely out of focus.
"You have terrible lighting in this hallway."

"Get up," Alex said, grabbing his uninjured arm. She couldn't leave him out there.
The cynical part of her brain, the part that kept her alive in this city, told her to slam the door and lock it.
But if he died in her hallway, it would be her problem.
If his enemies found him here, it would be her problem.
Dominic tried to stand, his boots slipping on the threadbare carpet. Alex braced her feet and pulled.
He was heavy, solid muscle and thick wool.
He groaned as he got his feet under him, leaning heavily against the door frame.
The smell of him hit her then. It wasn't just blood and scotch.
It was ozone, gunpowder, and a faint trace of expensive cologne trying, failing, to mask the scent of a terrible night.

"Inside," she ordered, yanking him over the threshold. He stumbled forward, nearly taking her down with him.
Alex kicked the door shut with her heel and threw the deadbolt. She locked the chain.
It felt entirely useless now that the monster was already in the room. Dominic didn't make it far.
He took three unsteady steps past her tiny kitchen before his knees buckled.
Alex caught him under the arm, staggering under his weight, and steered him towards the living room.
She practically dropped him onto the cheap beige Ikea sofa. The springs protested loudly.
He groaned, letting his head loll back against the cushions. His eyes fluttered shut.

Alex stood over him, hands on her hips, her heart hammering against her ribs like a trapped bird.
She stared at the man ruining her upholstery. His suit was ruined.
His tie was loosened, hanging haphazardly around his neck.
There was a smear of dirt on his jaw, right above the sharp, arrogant line of his chin.

"Russo," she said sharply. He didn't move. "Dominic, look at me."

One eye cracked open. "You're yelling."

"I'm whispering intensely," she corrected, pacing a tight circle in front of the coffee table.
"Why are you in my apartment? How do you even know where I live?"

A slow, crooked smile spread across his face. It was completely out of place.
It made him look younger, reckless, and entirely too human. "I know everything, Alex. You're...
you're on the third floor, Apartment 3B. You buy cheap coffee and you work too late."

"You've been watching me." It wasn't a question. She had suspected it ever since the SUV started appearing.
She had told herself she was being paranoid. She wasn't important enough to be watched.

"Watching over you," he corrected, his speech muddy.
He tried to wave a hand dismissively but winced, grabbing his bleeding shoulder instead. Alex stopped pacing.
She looked at the blood. It was soaking through the wool, dripping onto the seat cushion.
The stain on the beige fabric was going to be impossible to get out.

"I need to call a doctor," she said, turning toward the kitchen where her phone sat on the counter.

"No." The word was suddenly sharp.
The drunken haze cleared for a fraction of a second, replaced by the terrifying authority she was used to seeing.
"No doctors, no hospitals, no one knows I'm here."

"You're bleeding out on my couch."

"It's a graze," he muttered, the commanding tone vanishing as quickly as it appeared.
He slumped further down into the cushions. "Just give me a minute. Just need to close my eyes."

"You are not dying in my apartment, Dominic." Alex marched into the cramped bathroom down the hall.
She yanked open the cabinet under the sink and pulled out a first aid kit, a bottle of rubbing alcohol, and a stack of clean towels.
When she returned to the living room, he had managed to shrug out of his suit jacket.
It lay in a heap on the floor. His white button-down shirt was soaked red on the left side.
He was working blindly at the buttons with his right hand, his fingers clumsy and uncoordinated.
Alex set the supplies on the coffee table. She slapped his hand away. "Stop. You're just smearing it everywhere."

Dominic looked up at her, surprised. Nobody slapped Dominic Russo's hand away.
He let his arm drop to his side, watching her with a strange, heavy intensity.
As she stepped between his spread knees, she kept her eyes on his shirt, refusing to look at his face.
Her fingers were deft, working the small bloody buttons through the buttonholes. Her knuckles brushed against his chest.
He was radiating heat beneath the expensive fabric.
She could feel the hard, unyielding muscle, the steady thumping rhythm of his heart.
She peeled the ruined shirt off his shoulder. He hissed in pain, his jaw clenching.
It was a messy wound, but he was right. It was a graze.
A bullet had carved a shallow, ugly trench across the meat of his upper arm, just below the shoulder joint.
It was bleeding sluggishly, but it didn't look deep enough to require stitches.

"You're lucky," Alex muttered, uncapping the rubbing alcohol.

"That's what they tell me," he whispered.

"This is going to burn." She didn't give him time to brace for it.
She soaked a cotton pad and pressed it firmly into the wound. Dominic violently flinched.
A sharp, guttural sound tore from his throat.
His right hand shot out, wrapping around her wrist in a vice grip. His fingers bruised her skin instantly.
Alex froze. She didn't pull away. She looked down at his hand, then up to his face.
He was staring at her, breathing hard through his nose, his eyes dark and dilated.
The air in the room suddenly felt entirely too thin. For ten agonizing seconds, they didn't move.
The silence was heavy, thick with something dangerous and unspoken.
Alex could feel the pulse jumping in her wrist beneath his grip.
She could see the fine sheen of sweat on his forehead.
-----
We're finalizing the next part (and the ending) — it'll drop in the comments soon. Drop a like and a comment so we know you're hooked and we'll prioritize getting it out. ❤️

Address

New York, NY
123456

Website

http://cutebabysmiles.vercel.app/

Alerts

Be the first to know and let us send you an email when Cute Baby Smiles posts news and promotions. Your email address will not be used for any other purpose, and you can unsubscribe at any time.

Contact The School

Send a message to Cute Baby Smiles:

Cute Baby Smiles

09/10/2026

09/10/2026

09/10/2026

09/09/2026

Address

Website

Alerts

Contact The School

Shortcuts

Featured

Share

Category

Listing takedown request