Page 159 of Modern Romance Collection December 2024 Books 1-4

Her hand stills for a moment, then resumes tracing slow, reassuring circles over my chest. I stare up at the ceiling, eyes wide-open but not seeing anything except a dirty apartment with a single mattress on the floor and broken windows that didn’t stand a chance against the sweltering heat of summer.

“My first real memory was when I was about four. We didn’t have anything to eat. My mother sat on the mattress, holding me, crying and telling me how sorry she was.”

“She cared about you.”

I hear the question in her voice, the confusion.

“She cared for me as much as she could.” I swallow past the resentment I can feel building even now as I tell my story. “Dessie knew you needed a mother’s touch, a steady influence in your life. So she drove hours to see you at least twice a month. When things got bad, she made a home for you. Provided for you.

“My mother turned to alcohol. She just drank more until there was nothing left. I have my suspicions about how she earned the little bit of money she brought in, but I never asked.”

I had come home to the occasional scent of too much cologne or the faint whiff of a cigar. Nothing concrete. But I grew up too fast to not know how some people earned their meager income.

“The one good thing she did was never let me see that side of her life.”

Juliette’s palm flattens on my chest and rests over my heart. The weight is comforting, steadying.

“When she was sober, she would make plans on how to finally get Lucifer’s attention. She tried reaching out multiple times, but he had instructed his staff to rebuff her. He didn’t want his wife, Rafe’s mother, knowing he had another child.”

“I always knew I hated him.” Juliette’s voice is a vicious whisper. “But I had no idea how truly hideous he was.”

“He seduced an eighteen-year-old hotel maid, kept her in his penthouse for a week and gave her a taste of the kind of life she had never imagined. When he left, someone reported her for fraternizing with a guest. She was fired. When her family found out she was pregnant and unmarried, they kicked her out.”

I feel Juliette’s breath catch, but she stays silent.

“It’s possible, I’ve come to realize, to have pity and compassion for her, and still be angry with how things turned out.”

“I wonder if things would have been different if her family would have taken you both in.”

I shrug. I used to ponder the same thing as a child. Now, it doesn’t matter.

“I came home one day from running around the neighborhood, picking tourists’ pockets, and discovered her dead on the mattress we shared.”

There’s no gasp, no strong reaction. There’s just Juliette, her hand over my chest, her head warm against my shoulder. She knows exactly what I need and, for the first time as I revisit the past, there’s no anger for my mother. Just a bittersweet pain of knowing what could have been but wasn’t.

“How did Lucifer find out about you?”

“The police. I found a neighbor, who called them. My mother had written a letter she had entrusted to a friend in the event of her death. The friend gave it to the police when they came to our flat.”

I can still remember the look of incredulity on one of the officer’s faces when he had opened the letter and read my mother’s claims.

“They took me away kicking and screaming. I had overheard my mother trying to talk to Lucifer’s staff on and off over the years. I didn’t expect a limo to pull up outside the police station and take me to a nearby dock. One of his security guards took me on the boat over to his private island.”

I still remember walking into that palace of an office, shelves two stories high and arranged perfectly to feature awards, rare books, works of art. Even to an uneducated eight-year-old, Lucifer’s private study had screamed wealth.

“He looked up, saw my eyes, and leaned back. He said, ‘So she was telling the truth.’”

“That’s it?”

“No.” This part I still cannot remember without anger, without fury against a man so cold and so selfish that he couldn’t even have a moment of compassion for a grieving child. His grieving child. “He approached me and looked me up and down. Then he smiled and said I might be related to him by blood, but he would bet that I would prove to be more like my mother than him.”

“What?”

“Weak. Unmotivated. A failure. He told me those words himself.”

The little sliver of heart I had left, the secret longing to finally meet and perhaps be loved by the father I’d always heard about but never met, had shriveled up and died that day. In its place, though, anger had been planted. Anger that just a month later, once Rafe had walked by me and dismissed me with such casual indifference, had twisted and morphed into determination. Determination and a vow to never let anyone close enough to break me again.

“He told me he would support me until I was eighteen. After that, I was on my own. I could either take advantage of the opportunities he offered me or live the good life until he turned me out on my ass.”

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