“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.
“Why did you disappear?” I asked.
Her hands tightened around the pendant.
“Because they saw my face,” she said. “The men who set the ambush. They saw me pull you out. And they put a price on my head.”
“So you’ve been hiding.”
“For fifteen years.”
“And you came here.”
She nodded again, her voice barely above a whisper.
“I thought if I stayed close to you, they wouldn’t think to look for me inside your house. I thought I could keep my daughter safe.”
Her voice cracked on the last word.
I looked at the little girl standing by the window, clutching a stuffed rabbit and watching us with solemn eyes.
“How old is she?” I asked.
Sofia’s breath hitched.
“Six.”
Something cold settled in my chest.
“Who’s her father?”
Sofia looked at the floor.
And in that silence, I understood.
“They found you,” I said slowly. “After you saved me. They found you, and they—”
“Yes.”
The word was barely audible.
My hands clenched into fists.
“Who?”
She shook her head quickly, her eyes filling with tears.
“It doesn’t matter anymore. He’s dead. I made sure of it.”
I stared at her.
She met my gaze, and for the first time, I saw something hard and sharp beneath the fear.
This woman wasn’t just a victim.
She was a survivor.
And she had killed to protect herself.
I turned back to Renata.
