It took Daniel nearly a week to recover from the majority of his bruises and wounds, during which time he and I spent most of our time in Carmen's apartment. She and I quickly bonded as friends, and I found the spicy, seductive, diminutive Latina a great match. Her life experiences were vastly different from mine, and she was more than willing to open up to me.

"You're up early, aren't you?” Carmen said.

I looked over at the clock and saw that it was nearing nine in the morning. “If you can say that. What are you doing awake? I figured you'd sleep until noon at least.”

She shrugged and changed the channel. “Tomorrow I probably will. But I never sleep all that much, although I'll probably try and take a nap before heading in today. She flipped channels again, settling on a game show on some cable channel and setting the remote down next to her. “You know, Adriana, you certainly don't fit the image I had of you.”

“You don't fit the image of a stripper either. Well, I mean, except for the bangin' bod.”

She patted her overdeveloped chest and laughed. “The best money can buy."

I couldn't help but laugh. “Carmen, I've thanked you a lot over the past few days, but I wanted to ask you something.”

“Sure. Go ahead.”

"If things work out the way Daniel and I are planning, what's on your agenda after this?”

She shrugged. “Daniel talked to me about maybe getting out of the stripping game, and I told him about my dream of opening my own dance school, but I don't know now. I'm just happy that I'm helping some worthwhile people. Lucky for me, the Bertolis aren't scheduled for another pickup from the Club for another week. Already, word on the street is that the Godfather's losing his shit looking for you.”

“I guess he would be.” I sighed, feeling a bit of homesickness, but not regret. “Then again, he shouldn't have had Daniel beaten with a garden shovel either.”

“Were you really giving him a boob job when they kicked in the door?” Carmen asked suddenly with a laugh. “Damn, that's pretty low, interrupting one of those. And what a mood killer.”

“Especially since I was just figuring out how to do it,” I added.

We were both laughing when Daniel came in to interrupt. “By the way, we need to start planning on getting your fake ID. And we'll need to go to campus.”

“What for?” I asked, then slapped my head. “The registrar's.”

Daniel nodded. “If you don't go in, they'll void all your credits. If you want even a prayer of returning to your normal life, you're going to need to go in and fill out the paperwork for a sabbatical.”

I closed my eyes and rubbed at my temples, torn by indecision. “Daniel, if we go there, we've got a higher chance of running into Carlo's men. Besides, if we're going to restart our lives under new identities, who the hell cares if I'm listed as on sabbatical or dropped out anyway?”

Daniel reached across the table and took my hands, gently squeezing my fingers. “Ade, I care. I never went to college, and let's be honest, I'll never get the chance, as we explained. For those few weeks that I was taking you around campus, though, you let me get a glimpse at that world, and I saw what it could do for a quality person like yourself. If there is any chance of you going back to school and finishing your degree, I want you to do it. It's that important to me.”

I looked into his eyes, moved by his vehemence. I realized that for so long, years even, I'd underestimated him, lumping him in with so many of the other men in the Bertoli organization. Men who not only didn't care about college, but would never have fit in either. In Daniel, I saw the shining example that some of my more liberal classmates tried to hold up as a reason for their pie-in-the-sky schemes, the diamond in the rough who had been denied his maximum potential simply due to bad luck. At least in Daniel, he'd overcome most of it, in my opinion.

“Okay,” I said, taking a deep breath and giving him my best smile. “We go in. What's the deadline?”

“We need to go in by Wednesday, I think,” he said, tapping his chin. “But we should probably get a Wi-Fi connection. Have you logged onto your school email and sent in the preliminary stuff? There will be some risk with it, especially if your uncle has hired people to put tracers on your email system, but we can work around that.”

“How so?” I asked.

“Simple,” Daniel said with a laugh. “We go to a coffee shop. This is Seattle, after all. What else are young hipsters supposed to do but go to coffee shops and cruise the net?”

I laughed and picked up his hands, kissing the fingers. “Daniel, you can be almost anything you want to be. But you, my love, are never going to be a hipster.”

We took thirty minutes to drive to a coffee shop, making sure we were as far from Carmen's Georgetown apartment as we could get. We drove south until we found a Wi-Fi spot—not a coffee shop, but a truck stop, of all places. I turned on my computer, taking a moment to realize that I hadn't even opened the lid since the morning I'd run from campus. I had seen Daniel using his, processing and gathering more information on Vincent Drake. I'd seen him tapping at his cellphone occasionally too, more than likely trading messages with his contacts, and occasionally with Drake himself, if I read his expressions properly.

“This is going to take a while. The connection here is slow,” I said as the little task bar started loading. “I wonder how many messages I've gotten.”

Unfortunately, I was wrong. I had over fifty messages on my email. “Should have remembered that Mom and Carlo are trying to contact me too,” I muttered. “Glad we're in a truck stop and not a coffee house.”

“Oh, we've still got plenty of money,” Daniel said, sipping. “I've been frugal over the past few years. I saved a lot of what I earned.”

“How much?” I asked, curious. “I mean, not that it matters, but I'm technically destitute at this point. And you did say we didn't have enough to live in Tahiti.”

Daniel leaned in, and I shivered as his warm breath tickled my ear. “Right now? About three million dollars.”

I nearly spit out my coffee and looked at him blankly. “What?”

“Uh-huh,” Daniel whispered. “Like I said, I saved a lot of what Carlo paid me. When I said not Tahiti, it was because I don't have enough for us to live in style in Tahiti. Not that we can't take a vacation.”

I looked through the messages, which were mostly the same, namely Carlo or Mom asking where I was and to contact them. It wasn't until the end and a new message came from Mom that I really felt it.

It took me ten minutes to stop crying from the simple message. Daniel put his arm around my shoulders, letting me have my tears. When they were gone, I sniffled and wiped my nose. “We're going in tomorrow,” I said softly. “No matter what, Daniel, I want to be able to see my mom again.”

“I agree,” Daniel replied. “In fact, send her a reply. Let her know you're safe. Then send the message to the registrar's. We can go in tomorrow to sign the paperwork.”

When we got back to the apartment, Carmen wasn't as enthusiastic about our plan. “Are you two loco?” she asked, her eyes wide. “Seriously, you're going to intentionally go to the one place where everyone knows you in order to fill out a single piece of paperwork?”

“It's something I have to do,” I said, sighing. I'd come to recognize that while Carmen rarely spoke with as heavy a Hispanic accent as she put on for work, she did let it slip a bit when she was emotional. “A sense of completion.”

“Oh, you're going to be complete, all right. Completely underground and buried,” she groaned, storming back and forth in the living room. “I can't believe you two! Seriously, what sort of Mafioso are you?”

“Two Mafioso who don't want that in their life anymore,” Daniel said quietly, and I jerked my head toward him, surprised. He looked at me and shrugged. “I kind of came to that realization over the past few days. Sorry if I didn't mention it to you yet. I guess it was going to be sort of an organic decision.”

I thought about it, then nodded. “So you don't want to be an enforcer anymore?”

“No,” Daniel said simply. “I want to be your husband.”

Carmen stopped her pacing and stared at Daniel, then at me. When I didn't say anything, she shook her head. “Well?”

“Well what?” I asked, then realized we hadn't told her about that either. “Sorry, he asked me a few days ago when you were at work. We're planning on a long engagement though. Think you'd like to be one of the bridesmaids?”

Carmen threw her hands up and walked away, muttering loudly to herself in Spanish, only to come back a moment later, still muttering before pointing at me. “You are absolutely insane. You decided you want to get married to a renegade Mafia enforcer, and now you ask a stripper to be one of your bridesmaids?”

“I asked a beautiful girl who's a good friend and a good person to be my bridesmaid,” I replied evenly. “Think about it.”

“Oh, I don't even need to. I'm in. Now, I've got two hours before I have to go in to work. Please talk me through your crazy plan so I don't have to think about it all night and can have some peace of mind. The boobies bounce much better when I have peace of mind.”