I FED THE MAFIA BOSS’S STARVING BABY ON A PRIVATE JET008
Part 2
Elena Rossi knew better than to move quickly around frightened men.
Especially armed ones.
Especially the kind who stood with their hands folded in front of them while their eyes calculated blood, distance, and consequence.
So she rose slowly.
Her legs felt weak beneath her. The cabin lights gleamed over polished wood, crystal glasses, cream leather, gold trim, all the obscene softness that wealth bought when it wanted to pretend the sky belonged to it. Outside the oval windows, the Atlantic stretched below them like a black wound. There was no land. No hospital. No stranger on a street corner who might help.
Only this plane.
Only this crying baby.
Only Matteo Volkov, looking at her with the flat black eyes of a man who had ordered deaths without raising his voice.
“Sit down,” one of the bodyguards said.
His voice was quiet, but the command snapped through the cabin.
Elena stopped two steps into the aisle.
The baby whimpered.
It was a small sound. Almost nothing. But Elena felt it strike her harder than a scream.
She looked past the guard to Matteo. “She needs to eat.”
No one breathed.
The bodyguard’s hand shifted under his jacket.
Matteo did not move. His daughter lay against his chest in a pale pink blanket, her little fist opening and closing as if gripping air. She had dark hair, too much of it for such a tiny baby, damp against her forehead. Her mouth trembled. Her face was flushed from crying, but the fury had gone out of her now.
That frightened Elena most of all.
Matteo’s gaze moved over Elena’s face, down to her coat, to the damp spreading at her chest. She saw the instant he understood.
Something changed in his expression.
Not softness.
Never softness.
But recognition.
“You have milk,” he said.
Elena’s cheeks burned. “Yes.”
The flight attendant made a strangled sound near the galley, as if scandal mattered at thirty thousand feet with a starving infant in the cabin.
The bodyguard said, “Boss—”
Matteo lifted one finger.
Silence returned so sharply it felt unnatural.
Elena stood in the aisle with her hands clasped to keep them from shaking. She had spent months folding herself smaller. After the funeral, everyone had spoken to her as if grief had made her glass. Her mother had stayed for two weeks and cried in the kitchen. Her sister had packed the twins’ clothes into boxes when Elena could not. Her neighbors had left casseroles at the door until the smell of reheated food became unbearable.
And still her body had kept producing milk.
For babies buried under white marble.
Now a living baby lay only a few feet away, hungry enough to fade in her father’s arms.
Elena did not know what kind of man Matteo Volkov was beyond the rumors. But she knew what kind of sound a starving baby made.
She swallowed.
“I was a nurse,” she said. “Neonatal ward. I know how to help her latch.”
Matteo stared at her.
For a second, something like shame flickered across his face. It vanished quickly, crushed beneath control.
“Her wet nurse died,” he said.
Elena froze.
The words were not offered gently. They landed like stones.
The flight attendant lowered her eyes.
Matteo looked down at the infant. “The formula makes her vomit. She refuses the bottle. Her mother is gone.”
A strange cold moved through Elena.
Gone.
That word could mean many things in the world of men like him.
Dead. Hidden. Sold. Escaped. Buried. Betrayed.
Elena had no desire to ask.
The baby made another weak sound.
Elena took one more step.
The nearest guard moved into her path.
Matteo said, “Nikolai.”
The guard did not look away from Elena. “She is a passenger.”
“She is a mother,” Matteo said.
Elena felt the word strike her chest.
A mother.
She had tried to stop being one because there were no children left to mother. She had tried to become something else. A widow. A survivor. A woman with paperwork to sign and insurance calls to ignore. But no matter what the world called her, that one word still turned a key somewhere inside her.
Nikolai stepped aside.
Elena walked the rest of the aisle.
The closer she came, the more she noticed what fear had hidden from her before. Matteo Volkov smelled faintly of cedar, smoke, and expensive soap. There was a thin cut above his left eyebrow. His tie had been loosened, his collar open at the throat. A smear of dried milk marked his black shirt where the baby had spit up. His enormous hands held the infant with terrified care.
The baby’s name was embroidered on the blanket.
Anya.
Elena whispered it before she could stop herself. “Anya.”
Matteo’s eyes sharpened.
“You can help her?” he asked.
“Yes.”
“If you hurt her—”
“I won’t.”
His jaw tightened. “If you try anything—”
“What would I try?” Elena asked, more tired than afraid for one reckless second. “We’re in the sky.”
One of the guards exhaled through his nose. It might have been amusement. It might have been disbelief.
Matteo said nothing.
Elena removed her coat with stiff fingers. The damp patches on her blouse had spread badly now. Humiliation flashed through her, hot and useless. Then she thought of the baby’s fading cry and killed the feeling where it stood.
“There needs to be privacy,” she said.
No one moved.
Elena looked at Matteo. “Not for me. For her. She’s overstimulated. Too many eyes, too much tension. Babies feel it.”
His mouth curved very slightly, but there was no humor in it. “Everyone out.”
The flight attendant blinked. “Sir?”
“Out of the cabin.”
“Boss, we can’t leave you alone,” Nikolai said.
Matteo did not raise his voice. “Are you afraid she will overpower me?”
Nikolai’s face remained blank. “No.”
“Then stand behind the door.”
Within seconds, the cabin emptied. The guards disappeared beyond a partition near the rear lounge. The flight attendant fled into the galley and pulled the curtain shut with trembling hands.
Elena and Matteo were left alone in the front cabin, with only the engine hum and Anya’s fading distress between them.
Matteo stood.
For a heartbeat, his height stole the air from the space. Elena had to force herself not to step back. He came close enough to place the baby in her arms, and the transfer was clumsy only because he did not seem to know how to let go.
Elena understood that, too.
He released Anya one finger at a time.
The baby was painfully light.
Too warm.
Her little face turned blindly toward Elena’s chest.
“Oh, sweetheart,” Elena whispered.
The words broke something inside her.
She sat in Matteo’s seat because it had the most room. He stood near the aisle, rigid, his hands curled into fists at his sides as if standing still cost him more effort than violence ever had.
Elena unbuttoned her blouse enough to nurse, shifting Anya carefully into position. Her hands remembered what her heart did not want to. Support the neck. Tummy to tummy. Nose to nipple. Wait for the mouth to open wide.
Anya rooted frantically.
Then latched.
The first suck was desperate.
Elena gasped and shut her eyes.
Pain, relief, grief, and milk released through her all at once. The sensation was so familiar that it became unbearable. For one impossible second, she was back in the old apartment at 2:17 in the morning, a twin at each breast, her husband Marco asleep in a chair with a bottle warmer humming beside him. Luca kicking one sock off. Leo making angry little snorts because he hated waiting his turn.
She saw their faces with the cruel clarity grief sometimes allowed.
Then the present returned.
Anya suckled hard, furious and hungry, her tiny body relaxing by degrees as milk filled her. Her fingers opened against Elena’s skin.
Elena bowed her head over the baby and wept silently.
Matteo did not speak.
Minutes passed.
The cabin seemed to soften around them, though nothing in it had changed. The engine noise became a low hush. The leather beneath Elena was warm from Matteo’s body. Somewhere behind the partition, men stood guarding a door against enemies that could not reach them. But here, in the first-class glow of the private jet, a starving child drank from a grieving stranger, and all the money in the world had become irrelevant.
When Anya paused, Elena helped her burp gently against her shoulder.
Matteo flinched at the small sound.
Elena looked up.
He was staring at his daughter as if she had returned from the dead.
“She’ll need the other side,” Elena said.
He gave one sharp nod.
Elena shifted Anya and helped her latch again.
This time, the baby nursed more calmly. Her lashes fluttered. Her breathing deepened.
“You said you were a nurse,” Matteo said at last.
“I was.”
“Not anymore?”
“No.”
“Why?”
Elena kept her eyes on the baby. “I lost my children.”
The silence afterward was absolute.
She had not meant to say it. Not to him. Not to anyone on this plane. Usually she avoided those words because people did not know what to do with them. They recoiled inwardly, then covered it with pity. They asked questions they regretted asking. Or worse, they said things about angels and heaven and time healing wounds, as if time were a nurse changing bandages.
Matteo said nothing for a long while.
Then, quietly, “How many?”
“Two.” Her voice thinned. “Boys. Twins.”
His gaze lowered to Anya.
“How old?”
“Seven months.”
He closed his eyes for half a second.
It was the first human thing Elena had seen him do.
“I am sorry,” he said.
The words sounded unused in his mouth.
Elena almost laughed. Not because it was funny. Because Matteo Volkov, whoever he was, had just offered her the same helpless phrase everyone offered. And yet from him, somehow, it did not feel polished or rehearsed. It felt like a stone placed carefully on a grave.
“She’s better now,” Elena said, because she could not bear more sympathy. “But she may need to feed again soon. If she’s been refusing bottles, her blood sugar could drop. She should be monitored.”
“She has a doctor in Paris.”
“Paris?”
“We land in two hours.”
Elena’s stomach tightened.
Paris was not her destination.
The plane had boarded in New York as a private charter arranged through an international medical charity. Elena had been traveling to Lisbon, where her sister had rented a small coastal apartment for the summer and begged her to come. The plan was simple: leave her empty apartment, cross the ocean, spend three months pretending the sea might teach her how to breathe again.
She had not known who owned the aircraft until she boarded.
She had not asked enough questions.
Now Matteo Volkov was watching her with the stillness of a predator deciding whether a door had opened by accident or invitation.
“This flight was supposed to stop in Lisbon,” she said.
“It was.”
“Was?”
“My daughter needs a doctor.”
Elena held Anya tighter. “Then of course you should land where her doctor is.”
Matteo’s eyes did not move from her face. “You will come with us.”
The words were soft.
They still slammed into her.
“No.”
His expression did not change.
Elena felt her pulse begin to pound. “No. I helped her. I’ll help until we land if she needs it. But then I’m going to Lisbon.”
“You are coming to Paris.”
“No, I’m not.”
Anya stirred at the tension in her body. Elena forced herself to breathe and softened her hold.
Matteo noticed. Of course he noticed everything.
“My daughter may need to feed again.”
“Then I’ll express milk into sterile containers before I leave.”
“She refuses bottles.”
“She may take one after feeding properly.”
“She may not.”
“That does not make me yours to command.”
There.
The sentence hung between them, reckless and alive.
Behind the partition, something shifted. The guards had heard. Elena was sure of it.
Matteo took one step closer.
Elena did not look away.
She should have. Any sensible person would have lowered her eyes, apologized, remembered who he was and what men like him did when refused. But grief had burned away some essential instinct of self-preservation. There were days she did not care if she lived. There were nights she had stood in the twins’ nursery and thought the only reason she remained breathing was that her body had forgotten to stop.
Fear required attachment to the future.
Elena had very little of that left.
Matteo seemed to recognize it.
His voice lowered. “Do you know who I am?”
“Yes.”
“Then you know I could make this simple.”
“Yes.”
“And still you refuse.”
“I refuse because I know who you are.”
For the first time, anger entered his face. It was controlled, but it changed the air pressure.
“You think I would harm the woman feeding my child?”
“I think men who take what they want always have a reason.”
Anya unlatched and gave a sleepy whimper.
Elena adjusted the blanket and wiped the baby’s mouth with her thumb. The tenderness of the small act made Matteo’s anger falter.
He turned away, dragging a hand over his jaw.
The tattoo across his fingers shifted as he flexed them. Elena noticed letters there, dark ink over bone. Not Russian. Latin.
M O R T E.
Death.
Of course.
When he spoke again, his voice was colder. “My enemies know my daughter cannot feed. The woman who nursed her was poisoned in my house three days ago. My wife died giving birth to Anya. The formula stocked for this flight was tampered with. The doctor in Paris is the only man I trust, and until he tells me my daughter is safe, I will not let the only person who can keep her alive walk away.”
Elena’s anger drained, replaced by something more complicated and much worse.
Poisoned.
Tampered with.
A baby’s hunger turned into a weapon.
She looked down at Anya, now limp with sleep against her breast, milk drunk and peaceful. A tiny bubble of milk rested at the corner of her mouth.
“How do you know I’m not part of it?” Elena asked.
Matteo turned back to her.
The question seemed to interest him.
“Are you?”
“No.”
“Then why ask?”
“Because you should.”
His eyes narrowed.
Elena went on, “You trust no one, but you’re willing to take me with you because I have milk. That makes you desperate. Desperate men make mistakes.”
A slow, dangerous silence followed.
Then Matteo smiled.
It was not warm. It was not safe. But it was real.
“You are either brave,” he said, “or ruined.”
Elena looked down at his sleeping daughter. “Both, maybe.”
The smile disappeared.
The flight shifted slightly, a smooth drop through invisible air. Elena’s stomach rolled. She realized she was half undressed in the seat of a mafia boss, nursing his child while telling him he was desperate.
Part of her wondered when her life had crossed from tragedy into madness.
Part of her thought it had happened long before she boarded this plane.
Matteo pressed a button near the wall. The partition opened almost instantly. Nikolai appeared, expression empty.
“Bring Dr. Moreau on the satellite line,” Matteo said. “And find everything on Elena Rossi. Everything.”
Elena stiffened. “You don’t have permission to investigate me.”
Matteo looked at her. “You are on my plane, feeding my daughter, after poison nearly killed her. Permission is not the currency here.”
“I have rights.”
“Not in the air.”
The words were calm.
Too calm.
Nikolai vanished.
Elena’s mouth went dry.
She looked toward the window. The black Atlantic stared back at her. No rights in the air. No exits. No witnesses who would help. Even the flight attendant was trapped in the orbit of this man’s power.
Anya sighed in her sleep.
Elena’s fury returned, but helplessly.
“You said her mother died,” she said.
Matteo’s face closed. “Yes.”
“What was her name?”
His jaw tensed.
For a moment, she thought he would refuse.
Then he said, “Sofia.”
“Did Anya look like her?”
A long pause.
“Yes.”
That one word was almost inaudible.
Elena saw then what she had missed. Matteo Volkov was not only terrified for his child. He was haunted by her. Every time he looked at Anya, he saw the woman who had not survived bringing her into the world. Every cry was a demand he could not answer. Every hunger was proof that his empire, his guns, his money, his locked gates, his loyal men, had failed in the one room where it mattered.
“You’re not the only one who lost someone,” Elena said quietly.
His eyes flashed. “Do not use my grief to negotiate with me.”
“I’m using mine.”
That stopped him.
Elena buttoned her blouse carefully after easing Anya away, keeping the baby against her shoulder. “You want me to keep her alive. I understand that. But I am not property. I will not be disappeared into your life.”
Matteo’s gaze moved to the baby.
“She is five weeks old,” he said. “She has survived one dead mother, one poisoned nurse, and one attempt to starve her before we reached France. I will not apologize for choosing her life over your freedom.”
The cruelty of it was that Elena understood.
She hated that she understood.
If Luca or Leo had needed something, anything, she would have torn down doors with her teeth. She would have stolen, lied, begged, crawled, sold her own soul and not looked back.
But her sons had not been saved by love.
Love had stood beside two tiny hospital beds and watched monitors flatten.
Elena closed her eyes.
The satellite phone rang through the cabin.
A doctor’s voice filled the air, accented and urgent. Matteo spoke in French too fast for Elena to follow completely, though she caught fragments. Refusal. Vomiting. Poison. Breastfed. American nurse. Land in Paris.
Then Matteo held the phone toward her. “He wants to speak to you.”
Elena took it reluctantly.
“This is Dr. Moreau,” the man said. “You fed the infant?”
“Yes.”
“For how long?”
“About twenty minutes total. Strong latch after initial weakness. She was flushed, frantic, then fatigued. She settled after feeding. No vomiting yet.”
“Wet diapers?”
Elena looked at Matteo.
He answered, “One in six hours.”
Elena repeated it.
The doctor cursed softly in French. “She may be dehydrated. Continue feeds on demand. Do not attempt formula. Do not give water. Keep her warm. Monitor breathing, color, responsiveness. We will have a pediatric team on landing.”
“And after landing?” Elena asked.
A pause.
Dr. Moreau’s tone changed. “Madame Rossi, for the next several hours, you may be very important to this baby’s survival.”
“I have been informed.”
Another pause. He heard what she did not say.
“I understand this situation is difficult.”
“No,” Elena said. “You don’t.”
Matteo watched her with unreadable eyes.
Dr. Moreau sighed. “Perhaps not. But the child needs you now.”
Everyone needed women like Elena now.
Newborns. Grieving relatives. Men with money. Doctors on phones. People always found a way to make a woman’s body public property when a child was at risk.
And the worst part was that the child truly was at risk.
Elena handed the phone back.
Matteo ended the call.
For a while, neither of them spoke.
Anya slept.
Elena felt the deep exhaustion that followed adrenaline. Her body ached. Her breasts still felt heavy. Her head throbbed from crying without making sound.
Matteo sat across from her now instead of beside her, as if distance proved restraint. He leaned forward, elbows on his knees, hands clasped loosely.
“I will compensate you,” he said.
Elena laughed once, sharply. “Don’t.”
“Name the amount.”
“You really don’t understand normal people.”
“No,” he said. “I understand them well. Most are less expensive than they pretend.”
She looked at him with disgust.
He accepted it without blinking.
“I don’t want your money,” she said.
“Everyone wants money.”
“I wanted my children alive. Can you buy that?”
The words cut through him.
She saw it.
Not on his face. His face barely moved. But his hand tightened around his wrist until the skin whitened.
“No,” he said.
“Then don’t insult me.”
The cabin lights dimmed slightly as the plane began its gradual descent. Somewhere beyond the cockpit, pilots communicated with air traffic control. The Atlantic would soon give way to France, then runways, then black cars, then whatever waited inside Matteo Volkov’s guarded world.
Elena looked at Anya and tried to feel nothing.
It did not work.
The baby’s small weight had already entered her bloodstream. Her warmth. Her hungry mouth. Her tiny hand curled into Elena’s blouse. Biology was a traitor. Grief was worse. Together, they built a bridge Elena had not consented to cross.
Nikolai returned with a tablet.
He approached Matteo but looked once at Elena before speaking.
Matteo took the tablet.
His eyes moved over the screen.
Elena watched his expression harden.
“What?” she asked.
He did not answer.
“What did you find?” she demanded.
Matteo looked up slowly.
“Your husband was Marco Rossi.”
Elena’s body went cold.
“Yes.”
“He worked in pharmaceutical logistics.”
Her grip on Anya tightened before she controlled it. “He managed distribution contracts for hospitals.”
“He testified before a federal inquiry last year.”
Elena stopped breathing.
That was not public.
The inquiry had been sealed. Marco had told her very little, only that something was wrong with shipments, that people were dying from counterfeit medication entering legitimate supply chains, that he had found signatures that should not exist.
Then the car accident happened.
A truck ran a red light in Queens and crushed their SUV against a construction barrier. Marco died at the scene. Luca and Leo died eleven hours later.
Elena survived because she had been home sick with mastitis.
The police called it tragic.
The company sent flowers.
The driver claimed brake failure.
Elena had been too destroyed to ask the right questions for months.
Now Matteo Volkov sat across from her with a tablet full of ghosts.
“What does my husband have to do with you?” she whispered.
Matteo’s eyes were dark.
“The counterfeit route he exposed belonged to my brother.”
The plane seemed to tilt, though it had not.
Elena stared at him.
“No.”
Matteo said nothing.
“No,” she repeated, but the word was weaker.
“He was not my brother by blood,” Matteo said. “But close enough. His name was Adrian Volkov. He handled medical imports through shell companies. I shut him down after Sofia became pregnant. I thought I had ended it.”
Elena could hear her own pulse.
“My husband died because of your family?”
“I don’t know.”
“Don’t lie to me.”
“I said I don’t know.”
His voice cracked like a whip, and Anya startled in her sleep.
Elena glared at him until he looked away first.
That frightened her more than his anger.
Matteo lowered his voice. “Adrian disappeared eight months ago. I believed he had fled to Cyprus. Three days ago, my daughter’s wet nurse died from a toxin used by men who once worked for him. Today, formula on my plane was tampered with. And now a woman whose husband helped expose Adrian’s operation is placed by chance on my aircraft with the one thing my daughter needs.”
Elena felt nausea rise.
“Placed?”
“The charity that arranged your seat received an anonymous donation to include you on this flight.”
“My sister arranged—”
“Your sister was contacted by the charity after a cancellation.”
Elena’s mind raced backward through emails, phone calls, the relief in her sister’s voice. A donor-funded medical charter. A safe flight. A quiet way to get across the ocean without commercial airports and crowds. It had sounded like luck.
She had stopped believing in luck the day her family died.
“You think I’m part of this?” she asked.
Matteo stood.
“No,” he said. “I think you are bait.”
The word entered her like ice.
Anya slept against her, unaware that every adult around her had become a piece on someone else’s board.
Elena’s mouth went dry. “Bait for whom?”
“For me. For my daughter. Perhaps for both of us.”
The captain’s voice came over the speaker, calm and professional, announcing their descent into Paris.
Elena barely heard it.
The cabin brightened as the aircraft lowered through clouds. Dawn began to stain the horizon, a cold blue line cutting through darkness. France waited beneath them.
So did armed cars. Doctors. Enemies. Answers.
Matteo took his jacket from the seat and draped it over Elena’s shoulders without asking. It was warm, heavy, and smelled like him.
She wanted to throw it off.
She did not, because Anya was sleeping and the cabin had grown cold.
“This does not change what I said,” Elena whispered. “I am not going home with you.”
Matteo looked down at her.
For the first time, there was something almost like regret in his face.
“No,” he said. “You misunderstand.”
The landing gear groaned beneath them.
Elena’s heart pounded.
Matteo’s voice dropped so only she could hear.
“Elena Rossi, until I know who arranged your presence on this plane, who killed your husband, and who is trying to kill my child, there is no home for you to return to.”
The wheels hit the runway with a violent scream of rubber.
Anya woke and began to cry again.
Not weakly this time.
Hungrily.
Alive.
Elena held her while the jet slowed, while black vehicles raced alongside them with flashing lights, while Matteo’s men moved into formation as if war had been waiting on the tarmac.
Then Nikolai looked at his phone.
His face changed.
It was subtle, but Matteo saw it instantly.
“What?” Matteo demanded.
Nikolai turned the screen toward him.
Elena could not see the message, but she saw Matteo go completely still.
Then his eyes lifted to hers.
For the first time, Matteo Volkov looked afraid.
“Elena,” he said, very softly. “Your apartment in New York exploded twenty minutes ago.”
The cabin disappeared beneath the roar of blood in her ears.
Her home.
The nursery.
The boxes of baby clothes.
Marco’s watch on the nightstand.
The last photographs.
Everything she had been running from.
Everything she had left behind.
Gone.
And then Nikolai’s phone rang.
He answered, listened for three seconds, and handed it to Matteo without a word.
Matteo put it to his ear.
A voice spoke loudly enough for Elena to hear.
It was male. Smooth. Familiar in a way that made her skin crawl before her mind understood why.
“Brother,” the voice said. “I see you found my gift.”
Matteo’s face became stone.
Elena clutched Anya against her chest.
The voice continued, amused and intimate.
“Tell Mrs. Rossi her husband should have stayed quiet. And tell her the twins cried less than your daughter.”
Elena stopped breathing.
Matteo’s eyes closed once, slowly.
When they opened, something terrible lived inside them.
The voice laughed.
“Welcome to Paris.”
The line went dead.
Outside, men with guns surrounded the plane.
Inside, Anya rooted against Elena’s blouse, alive because Elena had stepped into the aisle.
And Elena understood, with a horror too vast to feel all at once, that Matteo Volkov had not trapped her in his world.
May you like
She had always been in it.
She just had not known who owned the shadows.
