Then her face crumpled, and for the first time since I’d known her, I saw real fear.
“Giulia Cortese,” she whispered.
The name hit me like a punch to the chest.
Giulia Cortese. My father’s second cousin. A woman who had been angling for control of the family for years, using charm and manipulation where others used bullets.
A woman I had never fully trusted but had allowed to remain in the periphery because she was blood.
“She contacted you?” I asked.
Renata nodded, her hands trembling now.
“Three weeks ago. She told me there was a woman working in your house under a false name. She said the woman was dangerous. That she was connected to your father’s enemies. That if I didn’t remove her quietly, she would bring ruin to the Duca name.”
“And you believed her.”
“She’s family, sir. I thought—”
“You thought wrong.”
I turned away from her and looked back at the woman still holding her daughter.
Her face was pale, her eyes locked on mine.
“What’s your real name?” I asked.
She hesitated.
Then, slowly, she set her daughter down and whispered something into the child’s ear. The little girl nodded and walked toward the far corner of the room, near the tall windows overlooking the garden.
The woman straightened, pulled the pendant from beneath her collar, and held it between her fingers like a talisman.
“Sofia,” she said quietly. “Sofia Marchetti.”
The name didn’t mean anything to me at first.
Then the pieces began to fall into place.
Marchetti. The family that had served mine for generations. The family that had been wiped out in the same ambush that killed my father and three of my uncles.
“You were there,” I said.
She nodded.
“You pulled me out of the car.”
Another nod.
My throat tightened.
I remembered it in fragments. The gunfire. The screaming. The smell of gasoline and blood. And then a pair of hands dragging me backward through shattered glass, into the shadows, into the trees.
A woman’s voice telling me to run.
I had searched for her afterward. For months. But no one knew who she was, and eventually, I stopped looking.
I thought she was dead.
