Chapter 10
Chapter ten
ISABELLA
Inearly collide with Signore Ferraro in the corridor outside the chapel.
He's ending a phone call, his face the color of old ash. The Calabrian—'Ndrangheta, if I remember my father's files correctly—has the look of a man who hasn't slept in days. Maybe weeks.
"Signora." His nod is curt. Professional. "Enjoying the grounds?"
"Learning about them." I pause, thinking of Siobhan's fervent hope, the way her eyes went bright when she talked about her dead daughter returning. "Siobhan mentioned your nephew is here?"
Something cracks in his careful composure. Just for a moment.
"Leukemia. Ten years old." He looks past me, toward the sea visible through the window at the end of the hall. "The doctors in Rome said there was nothing more they could do. Experimental trials, specialists, prayers—we tried everything."
"And Dr. Theos offered something different?"
"Dr. Theos offered hope." His laugh is bitter, exhausted.
"The 'Ndrangheta has resources. Connections.
We've funded research hospitals, bought access to treatments that haven't been approved anywhere.
None of it worked." He meets my eyes, and I see myself in them—the desperation I felt during chemo, when I would have believed anything, tried anything.
"When you're watching a child die, hope is worth more than certainty. "
"Hope isn't treatment," I say quietly.
"No." His smile doesn't reach his eyes. "But sometimes it's the only thing that gets you through the night."
He walks away, phone already rising to his ear again.
These people aren't stupid. They're desperate. And desperate people will believe anything that hurts less than reality.
But Ferraro mentioned conventional treatments failed. Siobhan said her daughter was beyond medical help. What is Theos actually promising them? What does he claim to do that real doctors can't?
And why does it require my blood?
I find my mother alone for the first time.
She's sitting by the window in her room, oxygen tube in her nose, watching the sea. Without the audience—without Dr. Theos or the Greeks or the believers—she looks smaller. Older. More like the woman I remember and less like the stranger who pointed a gun at me.
"You're wondering which version of me is real," she says without turning around.
I freeze in the doorway. "How did you—"
"Because I would wonder the same thing." She gestures to the chair beside her. "Sit. We should talk while we can."
I sit, keeping distance between us. "While we can?"
"I have good days and bad days. Today is good. Tomorrow might not be." Her eyes are clear—clearer than I've seen them since I arrived. "Dr. Theos's supplements help with the pain, but they also cloud things. Make it easier to believe what I need to believe."
"And what do you need to believe?"
"That I'm not a monster." Her voice cracks. "That everything I've done—leaving you, faking my death, making deals with men like Alexandros—had a purpose beyond my own survival."
My chest tightens. "Did it?"
She's quiet for a long moment. Outside, the sea crashes against rocks.
"When I left, I told myself I was protecting you," she says finally. "Your father was already planning the auction. I knew I couldn't stop it—not while I was alive. Dead, I could work from the shadows. Build resources. Make alliances."
"With the Greeks."
"With anyone who would help." Her hands twist in her lap. "But the truth? The truth I didn't want to admit? I was also running. Saving myself. Choosing survival over you."
The words hang between us.
"I spent thirteen years talking to your grave," I say quietly. "Telling you about my life. My dancing. The cancer." My voice hardens. "I told a marble headstone about the chemo that almost killed me. About the early menopause. About everything I lost. And you were alive the whole time."
"I know."
"You could have come back. After the diagnosis. After—"
"I did." She turns to face me fully. "I came to the hospital. Twice. Once during the worst of the chemo, when they weren't sure you'd survive the night. I bribed a nurse to let me sit with you. You were so thin, Isabella. So pale. I held your hand for three hours and you never knew I was there."
I remember that night. Fever dreams and the smell of disinfectant and a hand on my forehead, a voice singing something softly.
I thought I'd imagined it.
"Why didn't you stay?"
"Because your father had men watching. It cost Marco his life later.
They saw him. They hunted him. And his own research couldn't save him.
And because if your father knew I was alive, he'd have used it against you.
Against us both." She shakes her head. "I thought I was protecting you by staying away. Maybe I was just a coward."
"Maybe both."
"Yes." She doesn't argue. "Maybe both." She lifts her wrist, showing me a thin medical alert bracelet I hadn't noticed before. Plain, utilitarian. Nothing special—unless you know what you're looking at.
"Dr. Theos's precaution. If I leave the compound, it sends an alert. If I try to remove it—" She shrugs, but her hand trembles as she lowers it. "I didn't ask what happens."
A leash. She's literally on a leash.
"Mom—"
"I'm not telling you this for sympathy." Her voice firms, that steel I remember from childhood surfacing through the frailty. "I made my choices. I'm living with them. I hope you'll be able to help me. That we'll help each other. I love you," she murmurs.
And I can't say the words back to her.