“I tried to get you your daughter, but Sonny’s men screwed that up. You can trade Vittoria for the kid.”

A trade? For Emma? What the hell is he talking about? I stop struggling, confused. I turn to look at Dmitri’s face. His ice-blue eyes.

Dmitri grins, passing me off to one of his men, and I watch as he steps right up to Lucien.

“The little girl isn’t mine. But I think you already know that.”

I watch, dumbstruck as Dmitri walks a menacing circle around Lucien, then comes to stand in front of him.

“I think I understand things now.”

Lucien looks back at me, then around at all the men. He miscalculated. And he knows it. He nervously checks his watch.

Dmitri takes him by the back of the neck and forces him to look up at him. “You have somewhere to be, boy?”

“The kid’s yours. I swear.”

“Impossible. Medically impossible.”

It takes a moment for the color to bleed from Lucien’s face, and I get a feeling Dmitri’s calm tone is a warning of the rage to come rather than anything else.

“She was going to come away with me. Did you know that?” He turns to me. “But she wouldn’t leave you behind. That’s why I let her stay in that house, knowing what I knew.” He turns back to Lucien. “But that day, she’d come to leave me.” He shakes his head. “I demanded to know if it was that bastard husband, if he’d raped her, because I was going to kill him. I was halfway out the door to kill that motherfucker like I should have done when I saw the first bruise. But she stopped me. She told me she was leaving me. She had to, or he’d take her children from her when he found out about us. She showed me a photo and told me there were more. So many more. And if she didn’t walk away, her husband would see them, and she knew he’d take away the thing she loved most.”

Tears fall for my mother. I sob for her. For the sadness of her life. For the loss of her.

“You look like her. So much like her. You even cry like her,” he says to me. “I don’t think I’ll ever forget that sound of her sobbing. She had no choice, she said, and I understood.” He releases Lucien and looks at me. “I loved her enough to understand why she was choosing her children over us.”

I feel a kinship with this stranger whose eyes shine with emotion at the memory of my mother. He loved her.