Page 111 of Trapped

“Your knuckles are all ripped up.”

“I got into a fight.”

“I’m sorry,” I whispered, my arms tightening around him. “I’m sorry for all the times I pushed you away. It’s not because I don’t care—it’s because I care too much. And I…there’s something I need to tell you. I tried to tell you earlier, but you brushed me off.”

Would this be the last time he looked at me like this?

Santino stared at me, unblinking. “What is it?”

Taking a deep breath, I gathered all my courage. My heart screamed to tell him how much I loved him and how desperately I wanted us to build a future together. Instead, I focused on the other truth that needed to be shared.

“Luca is alive, and he’s in Providence.”

THIRTY-EIGHT

DELILAH

I handed Santino my phone.

The screen illuminated a candid photo of Luca and me at Christmas, wearing sullen sneers as someone, probably my aunt, harassed us to smile. I scrolled to another, each image a piece of a puzzle I’d been too scared to solve until now. All of them showed Luca, not as a memory lost to a fire, but as a boy who grew up with me under the Romanovs.

I’d spent hours digging through digital albums, looking for evidence tying the man I knew to the child everyone believed perished in the fire. Slowly, I’d gathered photos from my childhood and a few rare ones where Luca and I were together, his features unmistakably similar to the boy in Santino’s photograph.

“He was never in the fire, Santino. My father told me everything. He went over there and killed his parents but couldn’t go through with it when he got to Luca’s bedroom. He took Luca out of the house that night and gave him to a relative to raise—one of my aunts with two other boys.”

Santino lowered the phone, his jaw slack. “He took my cousin?”

“Yeah, and brought him to Providence.”

“I don’t believe it,” he murmured, grabbing the photo in his wallet. “You’re saying this is the same kid?”

“Yes.”

His jaw clenched. “Are you fucking with me?”

“It’s him. He even still goes by Luca.”

Santino raked a hand through his hair. “Everybody knows this?”

“I’m not sure. I didn’t put it together until you showed me that picture in your wallet.” I sucked in a deep breath as Santino scrolled through the gallery. “Dad never told me anything about Luca, but he always stuck out like a sore thumb. Black hair and olive skin and speaking Russian.”

“He speaksRussian?”

“Yeah,” I whispered, heart hammering. “They must’ve taught him.”

Santino’s fist tightened on my phone as he got to an image of Luca at seventeen, looking cool and detached, flipping off the camera. “Your father confessed?”

I nodded. “That’s why I went to Providence without you. I had to ask him about Luca. I didn’t tell you because I didn’t want to give you false hope.”

Santino didn’t say anything. Then he put the phone back in my hands, clasping my shoulder with a biting grip. He looked at me, fire smoldering in his black eyes.

“Take me to him.”

“He works here?”

Santino turned in the car seat, casting a doubtful look at the Eastern European grocery store, an unassuming building sandwiched in between a divorce lawyer and a carpet cleaning service. The strip mall was innocuous.

I nodded. “It’s one of my dad’s money-laundering businesses.”

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