“SIR, YOU’RE LISTED AS THE FATHER,” THE NURSE SAID – AND WHEN MY MAFIA EX WALKED IN, I KNEW MY NEXT SECRET COULDN’T STAY BURIED

“SIR, YOU’RE LISTED AS THE FATHER,” THE NURSE SAID – AND WHEN MY MAFIA EX WALKED IN, I KNEW MY NEXT SECRET COULDN’T STAY BURIED

The pediatric ER nurse did not mean to ruin my life when she asked for the father.
She asked it the way people ask ordinary questions in ordinary emergencies.
Calm voice.
Steady hands.
Eyes already on the chart instead of my face.
But nothing about my life had been ordinary since the day I signed divorce papers from Giovanni Moretti and found out a month later I was carrying his child.

“My son’s fever is one-oh-three point two.”
I heard my own voice shaking and hated it.
“He’s seven months old.”
“He was crying, and now he’s barely responding.”

They took Luca from my arms before I could kiss his forehead a second time.
His little fingers had been curled around my blouse in the waiting area like he knew I was the only thing in the room still pretending we were safe.
He had stopped crying in the elevator.
That silence scared me more than the fever ever could.

A doctor with wire-rimmed glasses appeared ten minutes later and said the words no mother should hear alone.
“We need to rule out meningitis.”
“We may need a lumbar puncture.”
“I also need family medical history.”
“Especially the father’s.”

The father.
The ghost I had spent seven months erasing from forms, from conversations, from the fragile little life I had built in Boston with secondhand furniture and too many unpaid bills.
The father I had hidden from my son because I thought distance could pass for protection.
The father who had once looked at me in the dark and said children were liabilities in his world.
Targets.
Leverage.
Weakness with a heartbeat.

“Is there any way to reach him?”
The doctor asked it gently.
He did not know he was pressing a knife into the one part of my life that still bled on contact.

I had not spoken to Giovanni in fifteen months.
Not after the divorce.
Not after the nights he came home wearing silence like armor.
Not after I learned that loving a powerful man and knowing him were two completely different things.
I had walked away from penthouses and polished marble floors and beautiful lies.
I had promised myself I would never dial his number again.

Then my son’s temperature climbed.
And the world made my pride irrelevant.

I called my old divorce attorney from the plastic chair outside the treatment room.
I remember the rain beating the hospital windows.
I remember the smell of bleach and bad coffee.
I remember counting my breaths because if I did not count them, I would start thinking about all the ways a seven-month-old baby could be lost in one terrible night.

She gave me Giovanni’s number after a long silence.
She sounded like she wanted to ask a hundred questions.
I gave her one sentence instead.
“My son is in the hospital, and they need his father.”

It rang three times.
Three small rings.
Three chances to hang up before everything I had buried came clawing back to life.

When he answered, his voice was rough with sleep and irritation.
“Who is this?”

My throat closed.
In my imagination, I had rehearsed this moment a thousand different ways.
I was cool in every version.
Controlled.
Untouchable.
Then I heard him speak, and every careful script inside me burned to ash.

“Giovanni.”
“It’s Lauren.”
“I need your medical history right now.”

Silence.
Dangerous silence.
The kind he used to weaponize during our marriage.
The kind that made dinner parties pause without understanding why.

“Why would you need my medical history?”
He asked it flatly.
Not curious.
Not warm.
Not anything I could survive for long.

Because our son is in the hospital.
Because he has a one-oh-three fever.
Because they think it might be meningitis.
Because I kept him from you for seven months and now I need your blood type before they put a needle into his spine.

The words came out shattered and fast.
I did not give them to him so much as throw them and hope he caught enough to matter.

There was a silence after that which felt different.
Not cold.
Not controlled.
The silence of a man who had just realized the ground beneath him was not what he thought it was.

“What did you say?”

“We have a son.”
“His name is Luca.”
“He’s seven months old.”
“He’s sick.”
“I need your medical information now.”

He did not yell.
That would have been easier.
He asked one question instead.
“Where are you?”

“Boston General.”

“Don’t move.”
“I’ll be there in three hours.”
“Give the phone to the doctor.”

That was when the room shifted.
Not because I trusted him.
Not because I forgave him.
Because Giovanni Moretti had not asked for proof.
He had not accused me of lying.
He had not wasted a single second on outrage while our son was in danger.
He moved like he always moved in crisis.
Fast.
Precise.
Like the world owed him answers and would break before he accepted delay.

The doctor spoke to him for less than two minutes.
When he handed the phone back, his expression had changed.
“Mr. Moretti was thorough.”
“He’s bringing additional specialists.”
Then he looked at me more carefully.
“Who exactly is your ex-husband?”

I should have lied.
A normal woman would have lied.
My mouth opened and closed around several acceptable versions of the truth.
Businessman.
Investor.
Difficult man with resources.
Instead I said the only thing I could say without insulting reality.
“He has connections.”

The lumbar puncture started while rain hammered the hospital glass hard enough to sound like warning shots.
I stood in the hallway outside pediatric treatment feeling like the entire life I had built in Boston was collapsing one fluorescent panel at a time.
I had fled Giovanni because he locked people out.
Because his love came with closed doors and unfinished answers.
Because marriage to him felt like living beside a fire while pretending the heat was decorative.
Now he was on his way to my son.
Our son.
And I still did not know if I was about to be saved or destroyed.

He arrived in less than three hours.
Of course he did.

I heard him before I saw him.
Raised voices at the ER entrance.
Security trying and failing to slow down a man who had never mistaken rules for limits.
Then he crossed into the waiting area with rain on his hair, a black coat over a black suit, and three men behind him who moved like they had permission to kill if the night required it.

He looked older than I remembered.
Harder around the mouth.
More dangerous in the stillness.
But that was not what unsettled me.

Fear unsettled me.
Because I saw it in his eyes the moment he found mine.
Real fear.
Sharp enough to crack the mask.

“Where is he?”

That was all he said to me at first.
Not hello.
Not how dare you.
Not why.
Just where.

“They’re finishing the procedure.”
“We have to wait.”

He stepped close enough that I caught the familiar scent of cedar and dark spice and something colder underneath.
“My son is not going through that alone.”
“He has doctors,” I said.
“He doesn’t have his parents,” he replied.

Then his anger came.
Low.
Controlled.
Far more frightening than shouting.

“You kept my son from me for seven months.”
“You said you didn’t want children.”
“I said children were dangerous in my world.”
“I never said I would not want my own.”

The old wound split open so fast it made me dizzy.
“You shut me out of everything.”
“You expected me to stand beside you in public while knowing nothing real in private.”
“How was I supposed to bring a baby into that?”

Before he could answer, the doctor returned and took us to Luca’s room.

Giovanni stopped in the doorway.
I saw the exact second the air left his body.
Our son was so small in the hospital crib.
So flushed.
So still.
Tiny wrist bandaged around the IV.
Dark hair damp against his forehead.
A machine breathing numbers into the room while I tried not to understand how close we had come to losing him.

Giovanni walked forward slowly.
Not like a man entering a battlefield.
Like a man approaching something holy and breakable.
He put one hand on the crib rail.
His knuckles turned white.
Then he said my son’s name for the first time.

“Luca.”

His voice cracked.
That terrified me more than his anger had.
Because men like Giovanni did not break in front of witnesses.
Not unless the wound was deeper than pride.

“I’m your father,” he whispered.
“And I’m never leaving you again.”

Luca recovered over three brutal weeks of antibiotics, blood draws, sleepless nights, and terror that never fully unclenched.
Boston General became a maze of exhausted nurses and vending machine dinners and prayers I did not know I still believed in.
Giovanni stayed for all of it.

He moved into a suite at the Four Seasons five blocks from the hospital.
He brought in pediatric specialists without asking permission from anyone who thought they outranked urgency.
He learned how Luca liked his bottle warmed.
He learned which stuffed rabbit made him settle faster.
He learned the exact rhythm that got our son to sleep against his shoulder.

And every single thing he did made my life harder.

Because the problem with Giovanni was never that he could not love.
It was that he loved like a man who thought possession and protection were the same language.
By the time Luca was discharged, Giovanni had already decided what would happen next.
He wanted us back in New York.
Under his protection.
In his world.
Inside walls thick enough to stop bullets and secrets.

He came to my apartment four days after we got home from the hospital.
Luca slept in a portable crib between us while rain tapped the windows like gossip.
Giovanni stood in my kitchen holding a folder.

“I want custody.”

The words dropped between us like glass.

“Shared custody?”
I asked.

“Full custody.”
“You can see him every day.”
“You can live close.”
“But I will not leave my son unprotected in a city where I cannot control the threats.”

I laughed because if I did not laugh, I might throw the coffee mug at his head.
“You think you can just take him because you have money and men in dark suits?”
“I think you hid my child from me, live paycheck to paycheck, and cannot protect him from what is coming.”
His tone did not rise.
It did not have to.
“Those are facts.”

The ugliest part was that he was not entirely wrong.

My Boston life had been survival dressed up as independence.
Daycare bled my paycheck dry.
Rent sat on the counter like a threat.
I had built everything alone and still felt one bad week away from collapse.
Giovanni saw it all in one glance.
The cheap dishes.
The water stain on the ceiling.
The stack of late notices I had shoved beneath a grocery flyer and forgotten to hide.

“Come back to New York,” he said.
“Work for me.”
“Legal work.”
“Legitimate work.”
“Live where security can reach you before danger does.”

“I’m not taking your money.”

“Then earn it.”

That should have infuriated me more than it did.
Instead it sounded like the man I married on his very best days.
Direct.
Impossible.
Offering rescue with control braided through it so tightly you could not separate one from the other.

I asked for guarantees.
Joint legal custody.
Independent work.
The right to remain more than Luca’s mother and Giovanni’s former mistake.
He agreed too quickly on some things and not enough on others.
When I asked whether he would let me leave if I changed my mind, something hardened in his eyes.

“I won’t stop you from leaving me.”
“But I won’t let you take my son somewhere I can’t keep him safe.”

It should have been the end of the conversation.
Instead I signed the papers two days later with a pen that felt heavier than it should have.
I told myself I was doing it for Luca.
For the doctors.
For the money.
For the security cameras and panic buttons and pediatric specialists.
That was only half true.

The other half was more humiliating.
Part of me still wanted to know what kind of father a man like Giovanni Moretti would become when the child was actually his.

Jessica told me I was making a mistake.
She had earned the right to say it.
She was the one who listened to my silence after the divorce.
The one who brought takeout to my apartment when Luca was too new and sleep was too rare and my entire body felt like one long emergency.

“He’s dangerous,” she said over the phone.
“He can love Luca and still be dangerous.”
“Those things are not opposites.”

I looked across the room at Giovanni holding our son while Luca chewed on his tie like it belonged to him.
“I know,” I whispered.
“That’s the problem.”

Then I started digging.

I researched Giovanni’s companies first because that was the part of him I knew how to read.
Import.
Real estate.
Construction.
Layers of paperwork so polished they looked clean from orbit.
Then I dug beneath them.
Names.
Rumors.
Territories.
Shipping routes.
The Cartel de Sinaloa.
Russian groups he had negotiated with.
An alphabet of violence hiding behind legitimate business filings.

That was when I called the FBI tip line from a burner phone.

I told myself I was not betraying him.
I was protecting Luca from all the things Giovanni thought his own reach could control.
I gave them small things at first.
Unusual activity near the docks.
Patterns.
Whispers.
Movements that felt wrong.
Three days later, Special Agent Thomas Reed called my personal cell.

My blood went cold before he even finished introducing himself.

We met in a coffee shop in Cambridge where the windows fogged from the cold and the espresso was too bitter to trust.
Reed had the kind of forgettable face men in his line of work probably practiced wearing.
He put surveillance photos on the table.
Giovanni entering my building.
Giovanni carrying Luca.
Giovanni looking like a father in a way no courtroom would ever doubt.

“We’ve been building a case against the cartel for years,” Reed said.
“They’re expanding.”
“Moretti is one of the few people standing in the way.”
“If they decide to remove him, they’ll go through anyone close enough to hurt.”

“Why should I trust the FBI more than Giovanni?”

“Because we answer to laws.”
“He answers to power.”

It should have been a simple choice.
It was not.
Because I had already seen what Giovanni’s power looked like when aimed at a hospital bed.
And I had already seen what his fear looked like when aimed at a crib.

I moved to Manhattan first.
An apartment on the Upper East Side with floor-to-ceiling windows, three bedrooms, marble counters, and security so discreet it felt like a threat with good manners.
There were always men outside.
Some clearly Giovanni’s.
Some not.
I learned the difference faster than I wanted to.
His men protected.
The others watched.

A month later he moved us again.
Westchester.
An estate hidden behind stone walls and iron gates.
A fortress pretending to be a home.

When I saw the cameras, the reinforced doors, the disguised panic buttons, I understood two things at once.
Giovanni had not exaggerated the danger.
And protection could look a lot like prison when you did not hold the keys.

I kept talking to Reed.
Burner phones.
Encrypted messages.
Tiny pieces of information that painted the shape of an approaching war.
I never gave him anything that could burn Giovanni’s legitimate businesses.
I never crossed that line.
I told myself the boundary mattered.
I told myself it proved I was not a traitor.
I told myself a lot of things in that house just to sleep.

Sleep never came easy anyway.

The nightmares started during the second week in Westchester.
Men with tattoos and dead eyes taking Luca from his crib while I could not move.
Sometimes I woke on the hallway floor outside the nursery without remembering how I got there.
One night Giovanni found me there at three in the morning.

“The same dream?”
He asked.

I nodded.
He remembered because of course he remembered.
Giovanni forgot nothing that could be used later.
The problem was that I no longer knew whether he was using my fear against me or protecting it from swallowing me whole.

He took me to his study and poured whiskey into two glasses.
The room smelled like leather and cedar and every argument we never finished during our marriage.
He sat across from me in lamplight and looked suddenly less like a boss and more like a tired man built out of old damage.

“Do you have nightmares?” I asked.

“Every night for twenty years.”

He said it so simply that it hurt.

Then he told me the thing he never gave me in our first marriage.
Truth.

His father had taught him early that love was weakness.
Family was leverage.
The moment a man cared about something, he handed his enemies a weapon.
That was why he had shut me out.
Not because I did not matter.
Because I mattered enough to terrify him.

I should have hated the explanation.
Instead I hated that a part of me understood it.

That was the beginning of the second fall.

Not one dramatic moment.
A series of small betrayals against my own caution.
Watching him with Luca in the nursery.
Hearing him soften his voice for our son in ways he never softened it for the rest of the world.
Finding him in the kitchen at dawn warming a bottle himself because he did not want to wake the nanny.
Catching him asleep in a chair beside the crib with one hand still hooked through the rail like even rest should not separate him from his child.

The cruel truth about Giovanni was that he made fatherhood look effortless.
Tender.
Devoted.
As if the violent world that formed him had produced one impossible mercy by accident.

That should have made it easier to keep lying.
It made it harder.

Reed kept pressing for more.
The cartel had gone quiet.
Too quiet.
Drones started circling the edge of the property like metallic birds looking for weak points.
The house locked down in under an hour.
Extra guards.
Closed gates.
Weapons I tried not to notice.
Luca banged blocks together in his playpen through all of it like danger was just weather adults overreacted to.

Giovanni studied the surveillance feeds and said the meeting would happen next week.
Neutral ground.
Face to face.
His jaw tightened in a way I learned meant numbers were moving behind his eyes.
Risk.
Territory.
Casualties.
Probability.

“That’s insane,” I said.
“They’re testing your perimeter.”

“And if I don’t meet them, they escalate.”
“I won’t raise my son inside a war.”

That same night he handed me another folder.
Legal documents this time.
Full custody to me if he died.
Trusts for Luca.
Money that would outlive three lifetimes.
Security instructions addressed to his second-in-command.
Every page said the same thing in a different language.
If he did not come home, he had already arranged life after him.

I could barely hold the papers still.

“Stay tonight,” I said.

He looked up from Luca with something raw in his face.
Not triumph.
Not hunger.
Relief.

We put Luca to bed together.
Bath.
Pajamas.
A story about a bear who kept wandering away from home and always finding the right forest in the end.
When the nursery finally went quiet, Giovanni stayed in the doorway too long.
I stood beside him with my shoulder against his.
For one brief minute, we looked like a family in a normal house.

“What are we doing here?”
He asked without turning to me.

I should have lied.
I had practice.
But danger was set for morning, and I was tired of wasting truth on the wrong people.

“I’m falling in love with you again.”

He did not move at first.
Then he touched my face like he was checking whether I was real.
The kiss was not the kind we used to have during our marriage.
Not polished.
Not distracted.
It felt like two exhausted people giving up on self-defense for one reckless hour.

Later, in his room, with the estate silent around us and tomorrow waiting like a blade, I almost told him everything.
About Reed.
About the messages.
About the double game I had been playing for months.

“I need to tell you something,” I whispered.

“Tomorrow,” he murmured against my hair.
“Whatever it is, tomorrow.”
“Tonight, let me have this.”

So I stayed quiet.
That silence almost cost him his life.

He left before dawn with a note on the nightstand.
Taking care of business.
Be home for dinner.
I promise.

I hated promises from powerful men.
They always sounded strongest right before they shattered.

By noon, my nerves were flayed raw.
Luca was babbling over breakfast.
The nursery looked exactly the same.
Sunlight fell across the rug.
Nothing in the house admitted that somewhere across the river a meeting was deciding whether my son would grow up with a father.

I picked up the encrypted phone and texted Reed.
Newark.
Industrial district.
Route 1.
This is it.

His reply came back immediately.
FBI already positioned.
Stay put.

At one-fifteen, one of Giovanni’s men called instead of Giovanni.

“There’s been an incident.”
“The boss is hurt.”
“We’re bringing him back now.”

My body moved before my mind did.
Doctor on speed dial.
Clean towels on the dining table.
Luca sent upstairs with a guard.
Another call to Reed with an address and one sentence I did not realize I meant until it left me.

“Make sure they can’t hurt him again.”

When the SUVs tore into the driveway twenty minutes later, I was already in the foyer.
They half-carried him through the doors.
Blood through the shirt.
Face drained pale.
Jaw still set like pain was just bad timing.

His eyes found me.

“I kept my promise,” he said.
“I came home.”

That should have been the end of the twist.
It was only the beginning.

The doctor dug the bullet out at our dining table while I stood in the hallway gripping the wall hard enough to leave crescents in my own palm.
Luca slept upstairs through most of it.
By morning, Giovanni was alive, stitched, furious, and impossible.

Three days later Reed called.
Seven cartel leaders arrested across three states.
Raids timed off the Newark meeting.
Operations crippled.
East Coast leadership broken badly enough to spend years fighting itself.

“You did the right thing,” he said.

I stared at the dark window in Giovanni’s study after the call ended.
My reflection looked like a woman I would not have recognized a year earlier.
A lawyer.
A mother.
An informant.
A liar.
A woman who had saved a man by betraying him and could not decide which part of that sentence would matter more when he found out.

He found me an hour later.

One arm in a sling.
Shirt half-buttoned.
Face tired but sharp.
He closed the door behind him and sat across from me.

“We need to talk.”

My stomach dropped.
He had that tone.
The one that used to make men across boardroom tables rethink their next move.

“About what?”

“About how the FBI knew exactly where to strike.”
“About Agent Thomas Reed.”

The room went cold.

He held my gaze for a moment longer than necessary.
Then he said the sentence I had not seen coming.

“I’ve known for two weeks.”

There are confessions that explode.
This one hollowed me out in complete silence.

One of his men had seen me with Reed in Cambridge.
Giovanni had him investigated.
He put the pattern together.
The burner phones.
The timing.
The pieces I passed on.
He had known and said nothing.

“Why?”
I asked.

“Because I needed to know whether you were trying to destroy me or protect our son.”

That was the cruelest twist of all.
Because it forced me to see myself through his eyes.
Not as a heroine.
Not as a traitor.
As a mother making ugly choices in a war she never chose but could no longer escape.

“You were feeding the FBI cartel movement.”
“Not my legitimate businesses.”
“Not my finances.”
“Not my legal operations.”
“You drew your line and held it.”

I could barely breathe.
“You’re not angry?”

His mouth tilted without humor.
“I’m furious.”
“You lied to me.”
“You put yourself in danger.”
“You worked with federal agents behind my back.”
Then his face changed.
Not soft.
Not exactly.
Honest.
“But you were right.”

I had prepared for rage.
For exile.
For custody papers and locked doors.
I had not prepared for grace from a man who had built his life by making sure no one received it cheaply.

“The men Reed took yesterday were the ones who wanted me dead,” he said.
“You saw an option my pride refused to see.”
“You protected Luca.”
“And you protected me, whether you want to admit that or not.”

I stood because sitting felt impossible.
“I should have told you.”

“Yes.”
“You should have.”
He rose too, moving slowly because the wound still hurt.
“But I should have told you the truth years ago.”
“About who I was.”
“About how my world worked.”
“About what loving me would cost.”

Then he pulled me against him with his good arm.
He held me like a man who had come close enough to loss that pretending no longer interested him.

“I can’t promise safety in the way normal men promise it,” he said.
“But I will always fight to come home.”
“To you.”
“To Luca.”

I started crying then.
Not beautifully.
Not softly.
The kind of tears that come from spending too long surviving on nerve and debt and half-truths.
He let me ruin his shirt with them.
He did not flinch.
He did not rush me.
He just stayed.

That was the moment I understood why the first marriage failed.
Not because he never loved me.
Because he loved me without trust.
And love without trust is just another locked room.

After that, the rest came slowly.
Safer than I expected.
Messier than anyone would call simple.

Reed wanted testimony if the cartel cases went to trial.
I told Giovanni first this time.
He thought for a long moment and said yes.
Because keeping men like that caged mattered more than old grudges against federal agencies.
Because a family made him pragmatic in ways power never had.

The estate relaxed by degrees.
Not fully.
Never fully.
But enough that the air no longer felt like it belonged to a countdown.
Enough that Luca learned to walk without armed shadows turning every stumble into a tactical concern.
Enough that I started doing real legal work for Giovanni’s companies and demanding documents no one else in his organization dared hide from me.
Enough that he let me push back.
Argue.
Win.
Enough that partnership stopped feeling like a romantic word and started feeling like architecture.

Jessica came to visit once things calmed.
I watched her study Giovanni through dinner like she expected him to sprout horns between courses.
What she found was a man cutting Luca’s food too small because he worried about choking.
A man asking her about her job and actually listening.
A man who looked at me like he had finally learned the difference between holding and owning.

“He’s still dangerous,” she told me later in the guest room.
I smiled because there was no point pretending otherwise.
“I know.”

Then six weeks later, I married him again.

No ballroom.
No performance.
No crowd fat enough to call itself important.
Just a small ceremony at the Westchester estate with vows that did not pretend innocence either of us no longer had.
Jessica stood beside me.
Five of his most trusted men stood witness.
Luca tried to eat the corner of the paperwork and laughed when Giovanni stopped him.

I said yes because the second time, I knew exactly who he was.
And the strangest twist of all was that he did too.

Months later, I was in my office at Moretti Import-Export reviewing compliance documents for a shipment from Milan when my assistant told me there was a call on line three.
I knew his voice before he finished the first sentence.

“Come home for lunch.”
“Luca wants to show you something.”

“He’s fourteen months old.”
“What could he possibly need to show me?”

“Come see.”

By then home was no longer a word that made me flinch.
Home was the estate in Westchester.
The nursery with the white noise machine Luca could not sleep without.
The office where Giovanni pretended not to watch the driveway when I came back late.
The kitchen where we argued about security budgets and preschool lists with the same intensity we once wasted on pride.

I found them in the garden.
Giovanni crouched in the cold grass with a child-sized soccer ball.
Luca bundled up in a jacket that made him look rounder than he was.
He kicked the ball badly.
He laughed like he had personally invented joy.
Then he spotted me and ran.

I caught him against my chest.
Heavier now.
Warmer.
Alive in all the ordinary ways I once feared I would lose.
Giovanni came up beside us and put one hand against the small of my back.
Careful.
Protective.
No longer claiming anything I had not willingly given.

“There’s the surprise,” he said quietly.

I frowned at him.
Then I saw his eyes drop to my stomach and lift again.

I was four months pregnant.
He still looked startled sometimes when he remembered.
As if happiness had arrived through the wrong door and he was afraid sudden movement might send it away.

Luca pressed both palms against my belly and laughed for no reason except that babies trust joy before they understand it.
Giovanni looked at him.
Then at me.
Then at the life we had built out of panic, blood, betrayal, law, violence, forgiveness, and one impossible second chance.

The first time a hospital called him father, it tore our lives open.
The second time I watched him in a garden with our son, I understood something that terrified me almost as much as that first night in Boston.
He had not become less dangerous.
I had become less afraid of the truth.
And maybe that was the only reason any of this survived.

If you made it to the end, tell me this honestly.
Was Lauren wrong to keep Luca hidden, or was she the only one protecting him when the men around her confused love with power.