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EPILOGUE
Sasha
Tears were streaming down my face as my mother finished her story. I remembered standing in the mirror preparing myself to marry a man that I hated. But my story had a happy ending.
Looking at my mother was a reminder of how bad things could have gone.
“How can you just sit there as though none of that affected you?” I asked. Her expression had not changed, and I didn’t understand it. In some ways, I knew my mother better now, but in others, she was the same as she’d always been.
It was as though all of that happened to someone else.
“It happened a long time ago.”
I shook my head and wiped the tears away from my cheeks. “What happened to Leo?” I asked. “Did you ever hear from him again?”
My uncle had been my mother’s first and only love, and as much as I loved my father, I could understand why she hated him. If someone took Dom away from me, I would never stop until they were dead, and I was a lot softer than my mother.
“He sent me a letter every year for my birthday,” she said, a soft smile on her face. “I treasured those letters.”
I shifted slightly in my seat. I had been here for hours, and I could see that the place was starting to clear out. “But what happened to him? Where is he? And where are Matthew and Madeline?”
“I’m not going to tell you that.”
“Why?” I asked. “Andrea Blanchi is long dead, and no one in the Bratva cares.”
My mother’s lips turned down. “I sacrificed everything to protect them. I’m not going to tell anyone where they are. You might not care, but Matthew is a Blanchi.”
“Dom would never go after him.”
My mother snorted. “You might think that your husband is a saint, but he’s not.”
I bit my tongue. My mother opened up to me for the first time in my life, and I did not want to disparage her by reminding her that she was the one who married me off to Dom. “Why did you want the Blanchis to pay?” I asked. “The men who wronged you have been dead for years, and Dom and his brother know nothing about Madeline and their cousin.” Even if they did, I didn’t think that Dom would go after him. There was no reason for it. The Blanchi family was a great deal more secure than the Bratva.
“I didn’t tell you this, so that you could run off to your husband and tell him.”
I released a heavy sigh. “Then, why did you tell me? What was the point of knowing that you hated every second of your marriage to Papa? Did you think it would excuse what you did to me, or to him, or Nikolai? It doesn’t. It makes me even more confused. You told me that you wanted nothing more to be loved and accepted by your family, but you never felt that way about me.”
“Is that what you think?”
I snorted. “You told me as much.”
For the first time, there was emotion on my mother’s face. I could not read it, but it was not positive. Sometimes, I wondered if my mother had really shut off all her emotions. Now, I could understand why. She might have done it to survive.
“I loved you,” she said, her voice thick. There were tears in her eyes. “I know that you always thought Nikolai was my favorite, but the moment I learned that I would have a daughter, I loved you more than I ever loved anyone.”
“Do you want something from me?” I asked. I was sure that she was using me just as she always had. “Because there is nothing that I can do to get you out of here. I can’t get Nikolai out either, and I wouldn’t even if I even tried.”
“I was scared when you were born because I knew what it was like to be a Mafia Princess. It was hell.”
“Is that why you kept me from going to college, and why you told me that I was only good enough to marry.”
She looked away, and I could see the shame in her eyes. “I didn’t want you to want. Your father wanted to keep you under his thumb. He knew what I was like when I was your age, and I think that he feared that you would take over. I tried to keep you and Nikolai close. I wanted him to be like Leo—kind and caring, and I wanted you to be the opposite of me.”
My shoulders sagged slightly. I loved my mother, even now, and I understood her better, but it didn’t change things for me. She used me, and even though things turned out well, that was the opposite of what she wanted.
“Why did you tell me all this?” I asked.
She smiled, and she looked over at the guard before reaching out to take my hand. The touch was light, and her skin barely grazed mine, but it was probably the first affectionate touch I had from my mother since I was a baby.
