The mafia boss hired the poor maid everyone laughed at—then his violent little boy kissed her and changed the whole city
The mafia boss hired the poor maid everyone laughed at—then his violent little boy kissed her and changed the whole city
The first nanny left with a bleeding wrist. The second ran barefoot down the marble driveway, sobbing into her phone. The third locked herself in the guest bathroom and begged security to call her husband. The fourth slapped a lawsuit on Vincent Romano’s desk before her car had even reached the gates.
But the fifth?
The fifth was Ruby Jenkins.
She was broke, exhausted, too soft for the cruel world, too proud to beg, and carrying an eviction notice in her purse like a death sentence.
And when Chicago’s most feared mafia boss watched his two-year-old son throw a wooden train at her chest hard enough to leave a bruise, he expected her to quit like the rest.
Instead, Ruby sank to her knees.
Not from weakness.
Not from fear.
She lowered herself until she was eye to eye with the furious little boy everyone in that mansion called impossible.
Then she opened her arms.
And the child who had kicked, screamed, bitten, and bloodied every nanny in Highland Park walked straight into them and kissed her on the nose.
That was the day Vincent Romano realized the woman standing in his library was not a maid.
She was the first miracle his house had seen since the bomb.
Before Ruby Jenkins ever saw the Romano estate, she was sitting on the edge of a sagging mattress in a damp Pilsen apartment, staring at a pink eviction notice taped to her front door.
The apartment smelled faintly of old pipes, cheap detergent, and the fried onions drifting up from Mrs. Alvarez’s kitchen downstairs. Rain tapped against the window air conditioner that had not worked since July. Ruby’s best dress, a faded navy thrift-store piece with a missing button near the waist, hung from the closet door like a joke.
She was twenty-four years old, five foot four, and heavy in a world that punished heavy women for breathing too loudly.
People noticed Ruby only when they wanted to judge her. On the bus, strangers let their eyes slide over her hips, her stomach, her round cheeks, as if her body were public property. At the pharmacy where she stocked shelves in the afternoon, teenage boys sometimes snickered when she climbed the step stool. At Pete’s Diner, where she cleaned fryers before sunrise, the night cook had once told her, “Girl, you’re built like you could block a doorway.”
Ruby had smiled because she had learned early that smiling was safer than crying.
But she was not smiling now.
Her father had died six months earlier after lung cancer stripped him down to bones and breath. Ruby had promised him he would not die in some filthy county hallway. She had found a decent hospice room. She had paid what insurance would not. Then she had borrowed the rest from Mickey Sullivan, a neighborhood loan shark with a gold tooth and dead eyes.
Now Mickey wanted his money.
With interest.
Her phone buzzed on the mattress beside her.
Ruby snatched it up so fast she almost dropped it.
“Hello?”
“Ruby Jenkins?” The woman on the line sounded rushed, nervous, and expensive. “This is Mrs. Hastings from Lakeshore Domestic Placement.”
Ruby straightened. “Yes, ma’am.”
“You said you were available for live-in work.”
“I’m available for anything.”
A pause.
“This placement is unusual.”
Ruby closed her eyes. “Ma’am, I clean grease traps at three in the morning. Unusual doesn’t scare me.”
“The client is wealthy. Extremely private. The estate is in Highland Park. The position pays in cash weekly, four times standard nanny-maid rates.”
Ruby’s mouth went dry.
Four times.
That would not just pay rent. That would make Mickey stop sending men to stand under her window at night.
“I’ll take it,” Ruby said.
“You haven’t heard the details.”
“I’ll take it.”
Mrs. Hastings exhaled. “There is a child. Two years old. His mother died violently last year. He has severe behavioral issues. The last nanny was treated at Northwestern Memorial.”
May you like
Ruby looked around her apartment. The cracked ceiling. The secondhand lamp. The plastic bag of overdue bills on the kitchen counter.
“Was she alive when she left?” Ruby asked.
