When Zahara spoke, she had tears in her eyes, and the pain in her face spoke to Kalinda. She knew that pain and understood what loss looked like. It had intimately changed her entire life. Recognizing it in Zahara made her move closer.
“She was family, wasn’t she, Zahara? Your daughter?”
Zahara’s answering cry and cringe away from the truth of it was answer enough. She fell to the floor, her sobs bursting through the room, her frame shaking with the force. Arturo was at her side, pulling her into his chest. It was the softest Kalinda had ever seen him be.
“Your … daughter?” Dominic repeated. He stumbled back, and Zoey was there, burying her face into his back and wrapping her arms around his waist. Her support steadied him.
It was Arturo who answered as Zahara wept. “The Trinity demanded one thing from Zahara in return for her freedom: the life of her line. She refused to let them have her family, and her daughter was all that was left, or so she thought. The Trinity attacked anyway, trying to force her hand, and Zahara had the power to save her daughter.”
“But my daughter hadn’t told me about you, Dominic. She was afraid I wouldn’t accept your father—a human mobster she’d met on the edge of the portal, an illegal affair. She loved him, and he cared for you the best he could. You had some mage blood, but not enough to pick up in a scan,” Zahara continued. “So I had to make a choice: save my daughter, or my grandson. For her, it was simple. It had to be you. I didn’t have enough power for both of you, and she knew it. I let her die and gave you to Arturo to care for.”
“Why?” Zoey asked for her husband, who still stood in a stupor.
“Because the Trinity would have killed Dominic too,” Zahara explained, her words punctuated with tears. “I put a spell on Arturo to forget who the boy was. He only remembered he had to protect him. Benedict facilitated it for us. If I had known he’d one day come back to go after Arturo— It doesn’t matter. He would have used what he knew about you against me to fight the Trinity.”
“With his death, I remembered why I took you under my wing and allowed you to be bitten by a wolf,” Arturo said grimly. “Your mage blood, diluted as it may have been, allowed you to be changed over. You were human enough to allow the change but mage enough to survive it. Mages, you see, can’t be changed into shifters. We have kept that from them for a very long time and hyped up the no-shift potion.”
Kalinda blinked. “I won’t turn into a wolf?”
Arturo shook his head. “No. But we had to have you think you would, or the Trinity would have read that in your mind. There are very few of us who know this secret, to keep it safe. But you, Dominic, were a bridge, something that shouldn’t have happened. They would have wanted to know why.”
“You’re my grandmother,” Dominic finally said.
With Arturo’s help, Zahara stood once more. “Yes.” Everything in her wilted, the relief on her face palpable. “I’ve wanted to say that for so long. The Trinity succeeded, though not in the way they’d hoped. They assumed I had to live with the guilt of losing my family by not choosing them, and when I didn’t run to them, they changed the rules for joining the Council. But they did take you away anyway. You were so close, and yet I couldn’t do a thing. Not one single thing. Every time I saw you, my heart broke. I worked for you and put away every penny you ever paid me. It seems your child is going to be very rich.”
The small joke broke the tension in the room, and finally Dominic stepped forward. It was hesitant, a child unsure of where to go, until he shook his head and moved purposefully, dragging Zahara into his arms.
“Ciao, nonna.”
Kalinda wasn’t sure what he said, but the heartfelt emotion behind the words made even her teary-eyed. Zahara let him hold her for a few minutes, clinging tightly to his lapels with a white-knuckled grip.
“Well, explains why you have a year-round tan, my man,” Romano joked.
Kalinda hit him, even as she laughed. “What is wrong with you?”
“What? It’s true though.”
“Oh, Romano. It seems we have some unfinished business.” Dominic’s eyes met Romano’s over Zahara’s head. “I seem to remember you trying to bite my grandmother.”
Romano put his hands up in the air. “Okay, in all fairness, that was before I knew she was your nonna. And, to be honest, she doesn’t look a day over thirty. You have to give me credit.”
“Actually, he did bite me. I just healed it,” Zahara added.
Romano grabbed his chest in mock surprise. “And you, Brutus?”
The room laughed, for a moment the levity of life filling the space instead of the death and fear of the last few weeks. Even Kalinda breathed a sigh of relief. Dominic had a grandmother, she wasn’t going to turn into a wolf, and Silva had a plan to get her out of the Trinity death sentence. Score!
Speaking of which …
“Didn’t you say you knew how we could win, Silva?”
The room turned to her. “Oh? Now we want to pay attention to royalty? It’s like I’ve been a wall for the last twenty minutes. Nope, I think I’ll make you wait until tomorrow for the answer.” She stuck out her tongue to punctuate her threat.
“How old are you again?”
“Three hundred and seventy years young, if you must know.”
Kalinda sputtered. If she’d been drinking, she would have choked. “Did you just say three hundred and seventy years old?”
