Page 9 of The Hidden Heir

"Then let me put it plainly." I step closer, and she doesn't retreat, and some traitorous part of me admires her for it. "If you force me to choose between your freedom and Michael's safety, I will choose him. He stays. He's raised a Petrucci, by Petruccis. And you stop being my problem. Permanently. I came to your door tonight with the suppressor already threaded, Valentina. Don't make me remember why."

It is the cruelest thing I have ever said to a woman.

Worse, it works.

She looks down at the monitor in her hands, at the small static hush of her son breathing one floor above us. When she lifts her head, her eyes are wet and absolutely unbeaten.

"For my son," she says. "Not for you. Never for you."

"I'll take it."

"And Luca." My name in her mouth, thrown like a knife. "I will make you regret ever finding me."

Something ignites low in my chest, vicious and bright and entirely inappropriate to the occasion.

"I'm counting on it."

She sets down the glass, takes the monitor, and walks out with her spine straight, and I let her go.

The order I carried to her door is still, technically, alive. No one has countermanded it but me, and I haven't said a word.

I don't need to. I knew it was dead the moment a two-year-old handed me half a cracker.

3

VALENTINA

Iwake up under a ceiling I don't know, in a bed the size of my old bedroom, and for three merciful seconds I don't remember.

Then I do.

Mikey is starfished beside me, one foot on my ribs, the hippo blanket wound around him like he fought it in the night and lost. I didn't put him in the crib they set up in the corner. I needed to feel him breathing.

The room is absurd. Silk drapes. A chandelier, an actual chandelier, throwing little coins of morning light across a rug my whole security deposit couldn't have touched. The Michelangelo Room. A cell with a name.

I slide out of bed without waking him and go to the window, and there it is: proof.

Gardens. A stone wall with wrought iron riding the top of it. Lake Michigan beyond, gray-blue and endless, glittering like it has no idea what kind of house it belongs to. A man in a dark jacket stands at the gate. Another crosses the terrace below me with the unhurried walk of someone doing a loop he's done ten thousand times. I count the cameras I can see from this one window. Three. Then I stop counting, because my hands have started to shake.

I know this neighborhood. Gold Coast. As a girl I was driven through streets like this in the back of Mauro's cars, and I'd press my face to the glass and think the people in these houses must be safe.

Now I'm inside one, and I have never been less safe in my life.

Last night comes back in pieces, out of order. The porch light. The cracker Mikey gave him. The suppressor. I came to your door tonight with the suppressor already threaded. Don't make me remember why.

He came to kill me. I keep arriving at that fact and bouncing off it, like a bird hitting a window. He stood on my porch with the gun already quiet, and the only reason I am standing at this beautiful window is that somewhere between my door and his ultimatum, Luca Petrucci changed his mind.

And I agreed to marry him.

I press my forehead to the cold glass. It wasn't a choice. I know it wasn't a choice; a choice has two ends you can live with. This had one. A ring for a shield. My name welded to his so that Mauro can't touch us without touching the Petrucci machine.

Stefano was right about one thing. His brother is the last man a woman like me should ever want standing at her door.

He never told me what to do once the man is standing inside the house.

Behind me, Mikey stirs and announces, to the ceiling, with total confidence: "Pancake?"

Despite everything, or because of everything, I laugh.