Page 33 of Accidental Alliance

He is in the backyard with a soccer ball at his feet, darting past one of the neighborhood boys with reckless confidence.

His shoelaces are tied unevenly because he still ties them too fast when he is excited.

He runs with his head slightly forward and his body thrown forward into motion without care.

Matteo is seven now.

There are mornings that still knock me off balance with the sheer fact of it. Seven years since I first held him against my chest in a dim hospital room under a false name.

His dark hair falls into his eyes as he runs, too long again because I keep forgetting to book his haircut and because part of me loves the softness of it curling over his forehead.

His skin bronzes easily in the sun, warmer in tone than mine, and his limbs are always scuffed from climbing something he should not or launching himself across the yard.

His eyes are honey-gold. Mine, undeniably.

When he was born, I had searched his face with the desperate hunger of a woman bracing for both a miracle and punishment.

I was terrified of what I would see, worried he would come out bearing too much resemblance to the man I had loved and lost.

Scared most of all that one day, I would look at my son and see history waiting to repeat itself in his bones.

Instead, Matteo arrived with a furious cry, a stubborn tilt to his chin, and my eyes.

It felt like a small mercy for everything else that had happened beforehand.

He scores a goal then and throws both arms into the air, cheering loud enough that I hear it even through the glass. The other boy groans dramatically, and Matteo laughs again, spinning around on the grass like victory has made him weightless.

A smile pulls at my mouth before I can stop it.

I finish tucking apple slices into the little compartment beside his sandwich inside his lunch box and screw the lid onto his water bottle tight.

Peanut butter, apple, crackers, the granola bar he likes with the chocolate drizzle, one folded note with a doodled heart and a joke corny enough to make him roll his eyes when he reads it at lunch. I tuck that in last.

He knows nothing of the wars that once swallowed my family whole. Nothing of the bloodlines that course through his veins. Nothing of the grandfather he will never meet, a man brilliant enough to command rooms full of dangerous men with a single look and brutal enough to survive in their midst for decades.

My father had taught me early in life how to read a chessboard before the pieces started moving.

How to smile through negotiations and see the fracture line in every alliance and know precisely where pressure would make it split. He taught me to survive a world that devoured softness, then that same world devoured him.

Matteo knows nothing of the man who walked away before our son ever took his first breath. Some days, that truth is only a dull ache. Some days, it flares bright and poisonous, usually when my son laughs with his whole body or tilts his head in a way that reminds me too much of the man I have spent the last eight years burying in my head with rage.

To Matteo, life is simple, only consisting of school projects, bedtime stories, pancakes on Sundays, a mother who tucks him in each night and tells him how the world is gentle. I have spent every day since he was born making sure it stays that way.

I know all too well what lives beneath the polished surfaces of the underground society and what men are capable of when power and fear begin to feed on each other.

I know how quickly a home can become a battleground, how swiftly love can be weaponized, and one bad decision, one wrong person trusted, can turn a life into nothing but ash.

So I built walls to keep us both safe.

A new name, new paperwork, in a town small enough to feel forgettable and far enough from every major city connected to my family that it makes digging for us completely insurmountable.

I learned how to make myself smaller and erase every visible trace of the woman I used to be. How to smile and dress like a person the eye passes over easily.

I go by Marina Hayes now.

Marina with her soft cardigans and practical flats. Marina who works as a receptionist at the community clinic three streets over where she schedules follow-ups for blood pressure checks and knows which patients need the quieter rooms because the fluorescent lights make their migraines worse.

The young single mother who keeps mostly to herself but always waves to the neighbors and brings store-bought cookies to school bake sales and apologizes too much when she is late and pretends she has never held eye contact across a dinner table with men who discuss murder in coded languages.