Page 43 of Mafia Don's Secret Twins

“Papai, how am I to trust that someone can well and truly win my hand if it is so easy for me to escape?” I ask casually.

He snorts. “Easy? No, Marisol. It was not easy.”

“It was easy enough.”

“Only because that Italian bitch brought you out of here!” he snarls.

My mother freezes, and I bump her knee with mine.

I know well how to handle his rages.

“Easy enough. And I’ll do it again, if I have to prove my point.”

“And what point is that, Marisol?” he sneers.

Casually, I pick up a fork and stab the chicken sitting in the middle of the table. “That those guards were not worthy of your employ.”

“Marisol,” he growls. “I am not in a position to lose the men I have, which you well know.”

I do.

I shrug. “Then I will leave again.”

“Your mother will die if you do.”

Mãe laughs at that. “You couldn’t kill me if you wanted to, Benicio.”

“Watch me, Isadora.”

My mother mutters in her native Spanish, which usually means she’s plotting something.

She told me she thinks better in Spanish.

That’s good.

“How about this, Papai,” I say casually. “If you let Mãe go, I’ll agree to your stupid plan.”

“You’ll agree to it either way, you ungrateful, unworthy child,” he spits.

Interestingly, my father never calls me names. Not truly. He calls me all kinds of things, but he’ll call my half siblings ‘bitch’ or ‘bastard’ about a hundred times in a sentence.

Again, for some reason, I am his favorite, and we have no idea why.

“Perhaps. But imagine, when I escape again, and Mãe stabs you through the heart, how you’ll feel then, knowing you could have simply made this deal.”

“There is no deal to be made,” he growls.

I look at my mother, who shakes her head slightly.

Then, my eyes slide to Moretti.

I take a deep, steadying breath.

Please forgive me, Andrei, and please, for the love of God, don’t betray me either.

“Let mother go.”

“No.”

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