ng moan. Sofia’s.
Her heart almost uprooted itself in her chest and every muscle trembled as she stepped through a door she hadn’t noticed was ajar in the dimness of the corridor, one a barricade announced off-limits.
The room inside was pitch-dark, but its French windows opened to a terrace, from which their voices emanated.
Then she saw them.
In the lights coming from the garden, under the canopy of a starlit night, Antonio stood like a monolith with his back almost to her as Sofia hugged him frantically.
Then slowly, as if he couldn’t resist anymore, his arms wrapped around her.
Ten
Lili froze.
The sight in front of her... Antonio, with another woman...
There was nothing. No more air. No more heartbeats.
Then the woman’s lament pierced her like a bullet. “You have to believe me, Antonio. I never wanted to give you up.”
The agony the words contained lodged like an ax in her chest.
They...they had a previous affair? And Antonio still felt that fiercely for her? Still loved her? But he’d said she was his first love. He’d said he’d grown a heart to love her.
Antonio pushed Sofia away on a butchered groan, as if tearing himself from her arms hurt him, badly. The sound of his torment made Lili shrivel.
Had he been with her only because he’d thought Sofia had abandoned him? Because he couldn’t have her? And now that he evidently could, he was fighting his desire for her?
But Lili didn’t want him honor-bound or obligated. If he didn’t love and desire her as completely as she did him, she only wished him to have what he wanted. If that was no longer her, she had to set him free. Now. Now.
Before she could force her numb legs to move, Sofia started sobbing, and what she said robbed Lili of all power, made her sag to her knees.
“I held you only once after my C-section when I was still drowsy from anesthesia. You were the most perfect baby boy.”
Sofia was...was...his mother.
“When I fully came to, my family had sent you away. I threatened to kill myself if they didn’t return you but they told me it was too late, that an undisclosed adopter took you. I went mad. I tried to commit suicide.” She extended her hands to him so he could see the scars she still bore. “After I was saved, I knew I’d been stupid, since I couldn’t find you if I died. But there seemed no way to find anything about you, and I fell into a deep depression. Three years later I met my first husband, and he promised to help me find you. But his investigations only discovered that my parents and uncle had lied, that they’d put you in an orphanage. When Mark found out which one, I eloped with him and we went to the orphanage. But you were no longer there and we couldn’t find your trail. I drove myself insane imagining you’d fallen into the worst of hands.”
A vicious huff crackled from Antonio. “You can’t even imagine the kind of hands I fell into. They make slave traders look like Good Samaritans.”
The sob that tore through Sofia sounded as if it had ripped her apart inside. She reached her hands out to him.
“Don’t.” He pulled away, as if her touch would burn him. “I don’t need your pity or your guilt. As you can see, I far more than survived.”
She tried to approach again before her hands fell to her sides, defeated. “You’re right. I can’t even imagine what you went through, or how you conquered your horrific beginnings and then the world. I can only tell you my side, how I lived with the trauma of your loss, of imagining your fate.” A sob choked her, soaked her voice in tears. “But I did always feel you were out there, alive, strong. Then I saw a photo of you in a magazine and felt that I knew you. Then I saw you face-to-face and felt the connection between us. Your half siblings felt it, too, even if they couldn’t imagine what drew them to you like that. I thought I was crazy, but the way you looked at me, at them, made me hope you felt it, too. But today, I just knew who you are, and that you know who I am. I felt you didn’t want me to acknowledge our relationship. But I had to do it. Had to tell you I recognized you, that losing you tore a hole in my soul that nothing has ever mended, not even having more children, or adopting two boys who reminded me of you. My father and uncle died years ago, and my mother is now senile, but I still curse them every day as I did for the past forty years, for what they did to you and to me.”
This time, when she reached for him, he let her cling to his arms. She looked up at him, her eyes beseeching. “I know I can never undo what’s been done to you. I can’t do anything...” Another harsh sob escaped her throat. “Nothing but hope that you’ll let me know you, and maybe one day, in some way, I’ll make it up to you.”
Lili was a mess of tremors. Sofia’s impassioned confession shook her far more than her father’s had. To imagine what some of those Accardis—his family like they were hers—had cost him, was beyond endurance.
Then he finally spoke, his voice darker than the night. “When I discovered what your family did to me, what I thought you agreed to, I planned to exact punishment, on you and on the whole family whose rules dictate throwing away unwanted children. I wanted to buy your ancestral assets, lure you all into a merger with the promise of saving you from bankruptcy, so I’d end up in control of your very lives, before I took my time destroying you, each in the way you deserve. But even in their desperation, the Accardis rejected my life raft because, of all the irony, I wasn’t ‘family’.”
The realization hit Lili so hard she felt her head would burst with it. What she’d always felt but couldn’t even guess at. The reason he’d approached her in the first place.
He’d needed an in into the family.
It had been her.