Chapter 10 Bloodlines
The heat of anger eased into a complicated ache I couldn’t sort. He stepped back then—an unspoken truce—but he didn’t go anywhere. He remained near the doorway where he could see everyone and everything. His presence stitched new tension into the room, the kind that said we had crossed a line we couldn’t uncross.
When evening fell and the lights in the ward softened, Sofia woke and asked hunched little questions—about the IV, about the food—things a five-year-old sees as simple curiosities. Then, sleep-soft, she asked the brutal one.
“Mommy,” she said, fingers exploring my face as if cataloguing me, “Miss Carla says we have to write about Father’s Day. What do I write about my father?”
The question landed like a hand slipping inside my chest and twisting. I looked down at her and the world tilted with the memory of a boy who used to steal my notes in college and kiss me behind the stacks of the library until the pages blurred. I thought about the name I’d never spoken aloud when I taught Sofia lullabies—how I’d left that name in the ash.
What did I tell her? The truth in any form felt like handing her a shard. A lie felt like stealing a piece of her.
“You can draw,” I said at first, because it was the gentlest option. “Draw what makes you happy.”
“But everyone’s writing,” she complained, the small dignity of a child who wants to belong. “My friend Mia’s dad is a fireman. Luca’s dad works at the bank, he said. I don’t—”
“You can write about someone you admire,” I said, and my voice was steady even though my hands were not. “Someone who teaches you, or reads to you, or stands up for you.”
She thought for a breath, then nodded. “Okay.” Her eyes closed. “Can you write it for me? I don’t know how to write big words.”
I swallowed. “Yes,” I whispered. For a moment I imagined sitting at the small kitchen table at home, pen in hand, writing a version of the truth so soft it wouldn’t hurt her—something about a brave man who loved from afar. But thought alone is a poor armor.
Adriano watched, his face unreadable. He stepped closer now—not to threaten but to see. “Do you want me to help?” he offered, the question both practical and poised like a test.
“No,” I said, too quickly. I’d told myself for six years that I would never let him in like this again. That it was safer to hold the walls up. But watching Sofia, I felt the old fracture in me where fatherless questions lodged and refused to be soothed. “I’ll write it,” I added. “For her.”
He inclined his head, accepting the refusal. But I saw it in the way his fingers tightened on the paper cup he kept twisting—an impatient insistence. He would find the truth, he would pry it open. Whether I wanted him to or not.
When night quieted the ward to breathing and the low rustle of nurses’ shoes, I sat with Sofia’s small hand in mine and promised myself again what I had promised earlier in the week: whatever came, I would keep her safe. If that required walls, I would build them. If it required compromises, I would weigh them.
But as Adriano’s silhouette blended with the hallway shadows outside the window, I felt the net drawing tighter. The past had teeth, and it was circling us both.
Adriano
I can’t stop pacing. Luca’s office feels too small, too bright, too damn clinical for what’s boiling in my chest.
Her face won’t leave me. Sofia. Those wide eyes, the curve of her cheek—my cheek. The math is undeniable: six years. The fire. Isabella’s silence. The truth has been staring at me and I’ve been blind.
“She’s mine,” I bite out, breaking the silence.
Luca leans back, calm as ever, hands folded like a surgeon prepping for incision. “You don’t know that yet.”
I whirl on him. “Don’t insult me. Her age. Her face. The way Isabella looked at me when she thought I wasn’t watching. You think I don’t recognize my own blood?”
His voice is steady, infuriatingly so. “Fits isn’t proof, Adriano.”
I slam my palm against his desk. The crack of skin on glass vibrates through the room. “She lied to me, Luca. Let me bury her in my mind, let me mourn her. And all the while she was raising my daughter in silence.”
Luca doesn’t move. Doesn’t blink. He just studies me, eyes sharp and too knowing. “Maybe she had reasons.”
I grit my teeth until my jaw aches. Reasons. Excuses. Lies. I don’t care what she tells herself—she stole six years from me. Six years where my daughter grew, laughed, cried without knowing her father existed.
“You think I don’t deserve to know her?” My voice comes out lower, harsher.
“I think if you storm into this like you storm into everything else, you’ll lose them both,” he says. “Isabella doesn’t trust easily. And Sofia—she doesn’t need another ghost. She needs something steady.”
Ghost. The word slams into me. I’ve been a ghost to them both. A shadow in the corner of their lives. And the thought tears through me worse than any bullet.
I force myself to face the glass wall, to breathe, to look at the city I own but suddenly feels foreign. My reflection stares back, harder, older. A man who can burn the world but doesn’t know how to hold a five-year-old without breaking her.
“She asked about Father’s Day,” Luca says behind me, quieter now. “She doesn’t even know what to write.”
My throat tightens. I swallow fire, steel, rage—whatever it takes to keep me upright. “Then she’ll know soon,” I say. My voice is a vow. “She’ll know exactly who her father is.”
Luca doesn’t answer right away. His silence feels like judgment.
Finally: “Make sure you’re telling her for her sake—not to soothe your own wounds.”
I turn to him, heat in my veins, ice in my eyes. “She’s my blood. That’s reason enough.”
But even as I say it, I feel the lie burning in my chest. Because this isn’t just about blood. It’s about the six years Isabella stole from me, and the fact that I’ll never forgive her for it.