MILANA
I’m trailing aimlessly through the house, letting little details guide us.
The place is a museum, filled with priceless antiquities from ancient civilizations, antique furniture, sculptures, and paintings.
It could be chaotic, but the pieces are curated to somehow feel warm and inviting.
To think all this art has lived—and survived—through centuries.
It reminds me that humans are transient, and that I’ve just gotten a second chance at life.
Zoe is calm in my arms, and I hug her closer, still trying to find my equilibrium.
I haven’t had a chance to digest anything that happened yet, Zoe being the perfect distraction, but how it ended with Masha is still going to haunt me.
I lift Zoe closer to me to drop my nose to her little head, breathing in her sweet scent.
No words could ever describe how grateful I am for Masha’s sacrifice, or for Luca’s.
I pray he’ll recover. He is suffering so much, but just like he sat through torture quietly, he travelled here without saying much about being in pain.
The farther away we got from Russia, the easier I breathed, but I need to be back on American soil. In my Rapunzel tower, I can safely work through everything and come to grips with what has happened. It’s going to take time.
I startle, halting midway into the sunroom I’ve walked into. A woman’s voice. English. With an accent I can’t place. My arms tighten around Zoe, and I turn my head to the soft voice, but not my body, protecting my baby.
A woman is lounging on a daybed near one of the tall windows, the soft light of a winter sun falling over her.
She’s young and angelic looking, in a white flowy dress that flows over her pregnant stomach and fans out over the seat like her thick brown hair is doing over the pillows.
She stares at me, her hand slowly settling by her side as she closes the book she was reading.
“Carla?” My shoulders drop a bit as tension leaves my body, and I turn to face her.
“That’s me. Carla Trapani.” Her gaze glues to Zoe, her eyes widening.
“Steph said you don’t leave your suite. I didn’t think you’d be here. Sorry, I would’ve knocked—”
“It’s okay.” She shakes her head with a weak smile. “I don’t leave my room because I don’t want to bump into Papa or Gigi. Since they’ve left for London, I finally have some space.” She swallows, shifts up, and her pregnant belly becomes very evident with this move. “She’s asleep.”
“She is?” I look down at Zoe, who has nodded off in my arms. “Sweet angel.” My pulse slows as I look at my baby, feeling no threat in this room.
Carla stands, and her dress’s white layers fall to her feet, making her look like a Greek goddess. She’s further along than I anticipated, and every emotion she must be going through charges through me again. I was just like her, unexpectedly pregnant, with the father out of the picture.
Like me, she chose to keep the baby, which speaks volumes.
Unlike me, who would still kill Dimitri if he walked up to me in the street, Carla doesn’t look like she has murder on her mind for the man who fathered her child.
I can’t say for sure, I can only hazard a guess by the way she tears up as she strokes Zoe’s fat little fist where it has settled on my chest.
“She’s so beautiful, I—” She breaks off, her voice faltering as tears run down her cheeks.
“Oh, malyshka,” I murmur, her world opening to me as if I’m looking back at my life mere months ago.
“Don’t be scared. Not of having the baby, not of being able to get through the birth, or of taking care of it.
Most of all, don’t be scared that you won’t be able to love it with all your heart and more. ”
She drops her hand from Zoe’s, wipes at her tears, and shoots me a woebegone smile. “Thank you. I’m petrified, but nobody seems to get it.”
I bite my lip. “I get it. She wasn’t exactly planned, either.”
Carla studies my gaze for a moment, and I could kick myself for being so sloppy and giving away my secret.
Just like Gabi, that night when she slipped and revealed that she understood Russian.
But Carla is so young to be having a baby.
Luca mentioned she’s just eighteen. I was mentally ready to have a child, despite everything else.
“Oh, God,” she whispers. “You did it though.” She waves for me to sit down.
I don’t hesitate, needing to manage this situation.
“Tell me your love story,” I ask once she’s settled back, leaning against a pile of pillows. Her hand rests on her stomach, her gaze never leaving Zoe’s face.
“You know, nobody has ever asked me that,” she whispers, emotion raw in her voice.
“All I get is constant judgment for being dumb and naive. At least that’s what it feels like to me.
My papa is furious, what with us being Catholic and this pregnancy being out of wedlock.
I don’t know what he was thinking. That I’d be a virgin when I got married?
God help us all,” she scoffs. “Anyway, he is trying his best to hide his disappointment. Gigi is worse in a way. Like a mother hen, and it irritates the living hell out of me, because she’s also so in love with Steph, I can’t watch them.
I want them to be happy, but it sickens me to see them together when I’m staring into this dark abyss, not knowing what happened to Vito. I’ll probably never know.”
My heart bleeds for her. After all, I returned to Long Island with the mission of figuring out what happened to Dimitri, because not knowing was driving me mad.
I doubt she’ll trust me with her story, or if she even should, but she is privy to mine now.
Although she doesn’t know the details, she’s clever enough—woman enough—to draw lines between all these dots and conclude that Zoe isn’t Luca’s child which he had with another woman, but mine, conceived with another man.
Who am I fooling? I gave myself away just by walking into this room with Zoe, lips to her precious darling head, humming to her, not thinking.
Carla glances up and our eyes lock. “Your secret is safe with me.”
I’m coming full circle. Carla might say my secret is safe with her, but she might blackmail me with it too, just like I used Gabi’s secrets against her.
It’s karma. I sigh as I sit on the edge of the daybed. “Tell me yours, so we can be on an equal footing here.”
Carla sniffs, but there is a smile too. “I’m not keeping count, if you were wondering.”
“You’d better not. We’re women, married into this family. We need to look out for each other, or we screwed.” I shoot her a wobbly smile.
“You’re so right.”
“And before Luca, I was with someone more than ten years older than me, so I get the allure.” I pray her story is purer. Maybe true love. Even if it was all lust and nothing else, it can only be better than the way I was used.
“More than ten years?” she says with a quirked brow.
“Yep. Fell for him like a ton of bricks.”
This makes her smile, and she nods, her lips trembling as she sniffs, fresh tears flowing in memory.
“He was my bodyguard. I was so annoyed when Gigi told me I had to have one, and that he’d move in with me over the summer, trailing my every step.
To be honest, I have no idea how they could have sent someone like him my way and then expected me to feel nothing.
And behind their backs, they call me the naive idiot. ”
I smirk. Now I want to see a photo of this guy. “Unfair expectations. I get it, completely.”
“I know, right? And now they think the worst of him. This is also why I stay in my room, because whenever I’m with Gigi or Papa, all I hear about is how I’m too young, how he abused his position of power over me, that the age gap is crazy, and he must have manipulated me—abused me—somehow,” she says, her voice mocking.
“That he was unprofessional. But he wasn’t.
They say they care about me, but nobody asks how we happened.
Who he is. The type of man he is.” She blinks at fresh tears and shakes her head.
“What they don’t know is that I am in love with Vito. ”
Am in love, not was. She still hopes he’ll come back. It’s probably the only thing that keeps her going.
“This is why you refused to leave for London, isn’t it?” I ask softly. “You’re praying that any moment now, he’s going to walk back through that front door, returning to you.”
Carla blinks. She bites her lip. Tears fall as a sob rips from her chest. “Yes! And they don’t understand any of it.”
“I do. I totally get it.”
She slumps against my shoulder, and I let her cry.
At least she isn’t bitter, unlike me and my memories of Dimitri.
Everything she said summed up my life before I left for Russia to avoid the coup, and if anybody knew about me and Dimitri and made similar comments back then, I would have been offended too, because I thought Dimitri was a good man.
But this girl, she has hope. It keeps her going. And after everything Luca and I have gone through, I’ve learned hope is the one thing that we can count on. For all we know, Vito might just walk through that front door like she prays he will.