Page 135 of Mafia Don's Secret Twins

Finally, I can’t take the silence anymore.

“Why do you keep looking over your shoulder?”

He sighs. “More landslides. Moretti. Your father, coming after us with his men.”

I stop. “My father?”

Dino looks at me, his eyes shining in the dark. “I found him,” he says quietly.

“Was he alive?”

He looks away. “Not for long. I’m sorry,” he says hoarsely.

I… don’t know what to say.

“Um. I… Thank you. I think,” I say.

Dino is quiet.

Instead of my brain whirling around this information alone, I start to just… say it out loud.

“I’m not close with my father. He’s a monster. He’s been the boogeyman that I’ve been afraid of for most of my life. So I’m not sad. I’m not. But he… I think he saved me,” I say hollowly. “He pushed me aside right as the mud swept away the side of the house where I was standing. He helped me. And lately he’d been talking to me like… like he cared about me.”

I heave in a huge breath, confusing thoughts rushing through me like a tidal wave.

“He’s always been a bad man. The worst man. But how can he be a bad man and one that wanted to save me?”

“People are complicated,” Dino says softly. “Everyone seems to have their reasons for doing shit, and sometimes it’s hard to know what the fuck they mean by it.”

Dino’s words are bitter.

Like he’s been grappling with this too.

“What were you doing? When I found you?” I ask.

Dino glances at me. “You want to do this here?”

“Yeah,” I say.

“Marisol. We need to get off the fucking mountain. It’s at least a fifteen mile walk back to the city. You’re cold, and we’re covered in mud that might contain the next fucking plague.”

“I’m not cold,” I say defiantly.

Almost on cue, my shoulders start to shake.

Dino’s face pinches with concern. “I think you’re going intoshock. We need to get out of the fuckin’ rain like… now,” he growls.

“Dino…”

But he’s ignoring me. He grabs my hand, tugging me forward, and we follow the path of the mud as it wiped away the jungle down the mountainside.

After walking for a while, I realize that I am, in fact, really cold.

More than that, I’m… freezing.

I can’t stop my teeth from chattering. My legs feel like lead, like I can’t move them forward because every step is painful. I’m actually not sure that I can keep up, because my head is pounding and my vision is kind of fuzzy.

It isn’t until the darkness creeps at the edges of my vision, though, that I fall behind.

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