He turns and the smile he gives me sends a tingling warning all over my body. Somehow I know I’m not going to like his answer.
“You know him very well.” Torrino grins. “But maybe not so well, eh? Since you didn’t know he was part ofourfamily.”
My mind starts racing, trying to figure out who he’s talking about. I toss about names and just as quickly throw them out.
The only people around me now are the ones I trust completely with my life.
And Sophia’s.
So, when Torrino casually tosses out the name, all the blood in my face drains to my toes.
“Marco.”
35
SOPHIA
I stare at the laptop screen until my eyes burn, scrolling through another database of Sicilian crime family records.
The clock on the wall reads 3:47 a.m.
In four days, Mikhail will step into that steel mill to fight Marco, and I still haven’t found anything that can stop it.
My hand drifts to my stomach, a gesture that’s becoming automatic. The baby is barely the size of a grape, but already I feel the weight of responsibility crushing down on me.
What kind of mother lets her child’s father walk into a fight he might not survive?
“You should be sleeping.” Mikhail’s voice comes from the doorway, rough with exhaustion.
I don’t turn around. “So should you.”
He crosses the room and places his hands on my shoulders, his thumbs working at the knots of tension there. “Sophia, you need rest. The baby needs rest.”
“The baby needs a father.” The words come out sharper than I intend, and I feel him tense behind me. “I’m sorry. I just…there has to be another way.”
“There isn’t.” He spins my chair around to face him, and the resignation in his green eyes breaks my heart. “I’ve been over every option. This is the only way to keep you safe.”
I grab his hands, holding them tight. “What if you lose?”
“I won’t.”
“But what if you do?” My voice cracks. “Torrino takes me as his property. Our child grows up without his father. Is that really better than running?”
“Running means looking over our shoulders forever.” He kneels in front of me, his hands moving to cup my face. “This way, if I win, it’s over. Really over. We can have the life we’ve been planning.”
“And if you lose, I become a slave to a Sicilian crime lord.” I lean into his touch, memorizing the feel of his calloused palms against my skin. “That’s not a life, Mikhail. That’s a nightmare.”
He pulls me into his arms, and I breathe in his scent, trying to commit it to memory. We stay like that for a long moment, holding each other in the pre-dawn darkness.
When he finally releases me and heads back to bed, I return to my research with renewed determination. There has to be something. Some leverage, some secret, some weakness in Torrino’s organization that I can exploit.
I dig deeper into the Torrino family history, following threads that lead to dead ends and connections that go nowhere.
My eyes are crossing with fatigue when I stumble across an old newspaper article from Palermo, dated twenty-three years ago.
Local Woman Found Dead in Apparent Suicide
The article is in Italian, but I run it through a translator.
