Chapter Fifteen
Rafael
The room is quiet.
Bianca sits beside me, propped against the headboard with a book resting in her hands. The soft glow of the bedside lamp casts warm light across her face as she reads, calm and completely undisturbed.
I wish I felt the same.
My laptop is open in front of me, half-written emails and documents waiting for my attention. Work I would usually finish without a second thought, yet I haven't properly read a single line in the last twenty minutes.
My mind keeps returning to what happened earlier in my office.
Sabrina knows.
The thought doesn't sit right, no matter how many times I go over it. She knows about the island. About the mafia. She knew enough to see straight through me when I tried to explain it, and she didn't even hesitate to call me out.
I exhale slowly, leaning back as I drag a hand over my face before pushing the laptop aside. There is no point pretending I'm getting anything done.
None of it makes sense.
I replay the moment in my office – the way she looked at me, the way she spoke about it. Calm and controlled. She wasn't surprised, and she certainly wasn't afraid.
That was the part that stayed with me.
Most people, when they realise what we are, react in one of two ways: fear or denial. Sabrina had done neither.
And now that I think about it, when we went to her apartment, she knew then too.
I hadn't noticed it at the time, but now it seemed obvious. The way she held herself, the way she didn't hesitate or panic when faced with strangers like us. She recognised us as Cosa Nostra.
Then, in New York, when she ran, she ran from the Mafia, not from her family. She didn't know us in that way.
And that left me with one question.
Why?
Why would a seventeen-year-old be so accustomed to something like this that her first instinct was to run? She shouldn't know this world. She shouldn't recognise it on sight.
Yet she did.
Too well.
My fingers tap lightly against the laptop as my thoughts shift again.
Valeria Leyva.
Sabrina knows her. She trusted her enough to run with her, and that alone raises more questions than it answers.
Valeria Leyva isn't someone you simply meet. She's deeply rooted in the Cartel, the kind of person anyone outside our world would avoid unless they were already part of it.
So how on earth did Sabrina end up anywhere near her?
The moment Sabrina and Dario left my office, the questions started.
Luca had been the first.
“Why was she living in an apartment?”
“She's seventeen. Shouldn't she have been at the orphanage?”
I'd told them all about the headmistress. About how Sabrina had been kicked out because she kept disappearing without explanation, and how she'd been left to fend for herself.
Even now, thinking about it, something cold settles in my chest.
My daughter.
Left alone.
Forced to survive on her own.
I dealt with the headmistress, but it doesn't change the fact that it happened. It doesn'tchange the fact that Sabrina went through all of that without us.
Then Matteo spoke, and the entire room shifted again.
“What about the plane?”
I look down at my hands, the memory still fresh.
The way she screamed. The way she woke up like she was fighting for her life.
That wasn't normal.
I close my laptop slowly, the quiet click echoing through the room.
There's more to Sabrina than we know.
A lot more.