Page 71 of Accidental Alliance

Our entire life has been reduced to simple, far away memories that seem impossible to reach now. Ones I’m afraid we will never go back to.

What will happen once the Contis no longer have the patience to keep us around?

They won’t let us go, I know that much. Our freedom will not be a prize granted to us even if I somehow find the information they are looking for.

So, what’s next, then? Death? Isolation in another prison cell farther away than this one?

I press my lips to his forehead. “Because home isn’t safe right now.”

He is quiet for a long time after that. Then he asks, “Is it because of your other name? Isabella?”

It sounds strange coming from him, the name I had been running from for the past eight years. My arms tighten around him before I can stop them. “Sort of.”

He looks at me for a long time. “Is that your real name?”

I pull back enough to look at him fully, brushing my thumb beneath one tired eye.

He looks so young and so old at the same time, my beautiful boy with fear already tightening his open features, causing unsettling lines to form creases around his eyes and mouth.

I smooth them away with my thumb, trying desperately to erase them before they become permanent.

“Yes.” I say finally, because I cannot keep filling his world with lies if the truth beneath them is already starting to crack and show through. “It was my first name. Marina is the name I have been using to keep us safe.”

His brow furrows. “So… Marina isn’t fake?”

“No. Marina is still me. She’s just… the quieter part.”

He thinks about that with the same little crease between his brows Elio gets when he is sorting through his emotions. Then Matteo asks, “Who is that guy? Elio?”

His father’s name hovers in the space between us like a swinging guillotine.

I could lie.

I should lie.

Some instinct, old and desperate, reaches for the familiar shelter of half-truths that I’ve used to escape the harsh realities of my past since he was born to protect him from this world.

I could tell him Elio is a dangerous man. It isn’t exactly a lie. That he knew me before, which is also true.

I look down at him, at the tired curve of my son’s face and the way his dark hair falls into his eyes from running my hands through it over and over.

My mouth opens to say just that, my lips forming the words right as they die on my tongue.

He is watching me with that unnerving stillness, absorbing every hesitation and detail he can see written all over my face even if he has no understanding as to why it’s there in the first place.

“He is… someone I knew a long time ago,” I finally say.

Matteo’s eyes narrow slightly. “Did you like him back then?”

The question nearly makes me laugh. Or cry. Maybe both, judging by the way my eyes begin to burn so suddenly that I have to blink and look away for a second, pretending to adjust the thin blanket over his legs.

“Yes,” I say softly. “I did.”

For a second, Matteo says nothing. His brows draw together as if he is trying to fit this new piece of me into the picture of the mother he knows.

The mother who makes pancakes and reminds him to floss his teeth before bed, who folds laundry on Sunday morning while humming under her breath the same tune from his morning cartoons.

His mother named Marina, not Isabella.