Beneath the Surface

It all started on a rainy Thursday afternoon.

Amy Grey stood under the overhang outside Maple Hill Elementary, the final bell ringing in the background as small feet thundered toward the parent pick-up zone. She adjusted her cardigan—cream-colored, like most of her wardrobe—and smiled warmly at the kids as they disappeared into cars and buses.

“Ms. Grey?” one of the secretaries called from the front office. “Lucas DiAngelo’s uncle is here for pickup!”

Amy tilted her head. That was new.

Lucas was usually picked up by a nanny who rarely spoke. But the man walking toward her now wasn’t the nanny. He was taller than anyone she’d ever met in person, wearing a black tailored coat that probably cost more than her yearly salary. His black dress shoes were immaculate despite the wet sidewalk. Everything about him was sculpted—sharp cheekbones, jet-black hair slicked back, and eyes so dark they bordered on inhuman.

He looked like someone who didn’t belong in a school zone.

“Nickolia DiAngelo,” he said smoothly, extending a hand. “Lucas’s uncle. You must be Mrs. Grey.”

“Ms. Grey,” she corrected softly, shaking his hand. “Amy.”

His eyes lingered on hers a second too long, enough to make her nervous. “Amy,” he repeated like a secret.

After that day, he showed up more often.

Sometimes he picked Lucas up early, waiting quietly by the classroom door. Other times he brought the boy lunch. And sometimes—when Amy least expected it—he would just appear. Standing beside her at a bookstore. At a coffee shop she’d never seen him at before. Once, she caught him watching her from a black SUV parked outside her apartment.

She should’ve been afraid. But somehow, she wasn’t.

He never crossed a line. Not directly.

When she asked him about it, he only smirked.

“I don’t like leaving things to chance,” he said. “Especially when I find something I want.”

She laughed nervously. “You don’t even know me.”

“I know everything,” he replied. “You wear the same perfume every day. Your rent is always paid on the first. You’re always ten minutes early, and you lie awake at night worried that you’re wasting your life. I know you, Amy.”

When they kissed, it was on a night she shouldn’t have let him in.

Lucas had a stomachache. Nickolia brought him home early and stayed after the boy fell asleep on the couch.

“I should grade these papers,” she said, holding a red pen like a shield.

“I should be at a board meeting in Milan,” he murmured, stepping closer. “But I’m here.”

The kiss was fire and consequence. When it ended, she felt ruined.

“You shouldn’t want someone like me,” he whispered against her throat. “I’ve done things—things you wouldn’t forgive.”

“Then don’t tell me,” she whispered back. “Not tonight.”

It wasn’t long before Amy learned the truth.

Nickolia DiAngelo wasn’t just a billionaire. He wasn’t just Lucas’s uncle.

He was the DiAngelo. Head of the Syndicate. The man whose hands brokered weapons deals, whose whispers made rivals disappear.

And he was being forced to marry into one of the old crime families—an arrangement made decades ago. A business merger in the form of a wedding.

“I have to marry rich,” he told her one night, his voice hollow. “A contract my father signed before he was assassinated. If I don’t, the alliance crumbles, and blood will follow.”

“Then go,” she said, blinking away tears. “Do what you have to.”

But he only stared at her. “I’m not marrying a legacy I don’t want. I’m choosing you”

Choosing her came with a price.

They were hunted. Amy’s apartment burned to the ground. Her friends were questioned. Her quiet life disappeared under the weight of secrets and power.

“I’m sorry,” Nickolia said as he held her in an anonymous safehouse miles from the city. “I promised I wouldn’t drag you into my world.”

“You didn’t,” she whispered, clutching his hand. “I stepped into it for you.”

Years later, Amy still taught.

Her students didn’t know that the man who waited for her in a black car every afternoon used to order assassinations over espresso. They didn’t know that she wore a ring bought with blood money—but also with love.

Nickolia never changed who he was. Not really. He still operated in the shadows. Still kept secrets. Still did things Amy never asked about.

But for her, he broke the rules.

And for him, she stayed.

Even when it cost everything.

*3 years later*

The manor was quieter than it had ever been.

Not silent—no, silence had never been possible with a newborn—but calmer. Softer. Amy rocked gently in the nursery, her cardigan draped over her shoulders as she cradled the baby girl swaddled in pale grey. Outside, the storm tapped lightly at the windows. Inside, it was warmth and lullabies.

“She looks like you,” Nickolia said from the doorway, his voice uncharacteristically gentle.

Amy smiled without looking up. “She has your eyes.”

He crossed the room, stepping carefully, like the marble floor beneath him might crack under the weight of what he felt. Nickolia DiAngelo—the most feared man in two hemispheres—paused beside a white crib lined with silver trim.

“She’ll never know what I was,” he said quietly.

“She’ll know who you are,” Amy corrected. “And that’s all that matters.”

He knelt beside the rocking chair, brushing his knuckles softly against the baby’s cheek. She stirred slightly, then curled closer to Amy’s chest with a tiny sigh. It nearly undid him.

“I never thought I’d have this,” he whispered. “A family. A daughter. Peace.”

Amy leaned forward and kissed his temple.

“You broke every rule for me,” she said. “Now we get to rewrite the rest together.”

Later, when the baby was asleep, Nickolia held her again—this time in the crook of his arm, like she was made of glass. He looked over at Amy, who was watching him from the bed with tired, happy eyes.

“Have you picked a name?” he asked softly.

Amy nodded. “I was thinking… Liana.”

He blinked. “That was my mother’s name.”

“I know.”

He swallowed hard and sat beside her. “She would’ve liked you. She always told me that love doesn’t make a man weak. It makes him dangerous—because now he has something worth fighting for.”

Amy rested her head on his shoulder, her fingers lacing through his. “Then she raised a good man.”

And as thunder rolled over the cliffs outside, Nickolia DiAngelo—the billionaire, the killer, the king of shadows—sat in a nursery filled with soft light and promise, cradling the one thing he never thought he’d deserve:

A future.