Iam hollow inside. Mom knew all the time where I was and chose to stay away. She says it was for my safety, but I’m not so sure. More like her own, and yet how can I judge her. She obviously did what she thought was for the best, and my walls come up, leaving me with more questions than emotion.
“I don’t understand why that woman spared your life and arranged all of this?”
I sweep my hand around the room because it’s obvious living like this doesn’t come cheap.
“She didn’t.” Mom shrugs. “I was given enough to rent a room in a town in oblivion, as she called it, and never to show my face again. If I did, she would carve your face from your body and send it to me as a souvenir.”
“Oh my God.”
Simeon sprints to my side and pulls me hard against him and says roughly, “Enough. We don’t require any more descriptions. Just tell me who this woman is and what family she is from.”
“No.”
Sarah glares at him, and my heart drops.
“Why not?”
Simeon is fast losing patience with this situation, and I can see it escalating wildly.
“Because it’s obvious what you are.”
Sarah fixes him with a derogatory sneer.
“I don’t want my daughter caught up in a mafia war; it’s what I’ve spent all these years preventing.”
Simeon is raging; I can tell by the pulse clicking in his jaw, and I attempt to calm turbulent waters.
“Listen to me!”
I have their attention.
“This is getting us nowhere. Simeon is not the enemy, Mom. He saved me from one criminal and has been nothing but kind.”
“Kind.” Mom shakes her head. “You married him, Alice. It’s obvious why.”
Simeon makes to speak, and I shake my head in warning.
“I know why, Mom and if you think I’m so gullible, you don’t know me. I have listened to your story, and it sucks. But what about my story? Are you even interested in that?”
“Of course.”
Sarah’s eyes fill with tears. “This has always been about you, Alice. Keeping you safe, and I’m not sure if I consider that the case anymore.”
Her sharp gaze could spear Simeon’s heart, and I hiss, “Simeon is the only man I trust right now. You say you gave up trying to get custody of me. You changed your name and hid here in the middle of nowhere to keep me safe. More like yourself, you mean. Do you have any idea what it was like for me believing you were dead? At the mercy of people who didn’t love me, just protected me like the investment I was to them. It’s no wonder I ran away with my sisters for a better life when our father died. It was our chance to escape another cruel woman who is even better at it than you.”
“That woman.”
Sarah almost spits her disdain.
“That woman was the one who paid for me to disappear. She orchestrated this entire madness and then moved in for the kill.”
“Morgan!”
The penny drops as I catch up, and Sarah nods. “She never loved Enrico; she merely wanted his business. Everything that happened in your life and all our lives was because of that family. They use human weakness to strike, and like a cancer, they rot away hope. They have everything covered and leave you nowhere to go. My father became an abuser because they blackmailed him over inappropriate meetings with a rival’s wife. They bled him dry, and he took it out on my mom and me with his fists. They isolated us from him, and when you were born and my inheritance transferred to you, courtesy of my mom, my fate was sealed. I was no longer of any use to them. They visited my mom and terrified her into paying my father’s debt. She had a stroke out of fear and never recovered. One digression caused or detected by them is enough to ensure you are in their debt forever, and they destroyed my family and were about to do the same to you.”
She takes a deep breath.
“I couldn’t risk it. I had to play by their rules, but there isn’t a day that passes when I don’t regret taking you with me that day and heading straight for the cops. One split-second decision cost me everything and subjected you to a childhood of misery. I am not proud of my part in that, but at least you are alive—we are both alive, which is more that can be said for your father.”
