Page 20 of Reign

Santo rises too, his face going stone cold.

“You stole from my home?”

I stare at Santo. “That’s what you’re angry about?”

My arms tremble. I hate that they tremble. It makes me look weak.

“I had no time with her. You both had her for years. I had eight. Eight!”

The word breaks out of me raw. Tears burn my eyes, fury and grief tangling so tightly I can’t tell which one is making me shake.

“She died on my birthday. You think this is a happy day for me?” My voice cracks, and I hate all of them for hearing it. “I was there when she was taken. You all forget that, but I never have. All I have are the bad memories. Nothing but nightmares.”

Silence presses around the table.

No one moves.

Not even Adriana, who looks like guilt has carved her open.

“So yeah,” I say, wiping furiously beneath one eye. “I stole a piece of her. I wanted to know her. To see her outside the lies.”

“What lies?” Angelo’s voice is sharp. Cutting. “What the hell are you talking about?”

The question slices through me. Because I want to throw it at him.

Part of me wants to take every awful word from those pages and lay them at my brothers’ feet. To make them understand why I took it. Why I hid it. Why it felt like mine.

But now that Angelo is looking at me, now that Santo is standing there like the world has shifted beneath him, I can’t.

Because once I say it, it stops being mine.

Her secret becomes family history. Her pain becomes something they can claim.

And I lose her again.

“I-I can’t—”

Adriana’s voice cuts through the room. “Your mother was trafficked.”

Silence.

The words don’t land. They detonate. My body goes hollow.

No.

No, she did not.

She wouldn’t.

But she continues.

About the townhouse Mamma squatted in as a homeless teen, her abduction, the trafficking—how Papa purchased her.

I stop breathing.

She’s not doing it right. She’s fucking it up.

She strips Mamma’s story of its context and rips the truth away like a bandage, as if speed makes it hurt less.