The Beginning (The Life 1)

SOFIA

I look around at my life, and I still can’t believe that it’s mine. When I stepped into this country for the first time all those many years ago, I could never have imagined that one day I would find love and family. That the dark cloud hanging over me would one day recede to let the light in again.

Back then, my heart had no room for anything but the vengeance that beat within it. I wanted only to bear a son, a son who would one day avenge me of the wrongs done to me.

Yes, papa had tried to make it right, but then I had to lose him as well. Too much loss while the one responsible walked free. It was a festering wound that had stayed with me every day.

I did not think I could ever love anyone. My heart was cold, dead even. I knew only a thirst for revenge. I did not know how I would get there, but I knew that someday I would see it.

But this man, this Draco Russo, even as I fought him, had worked his magic, and it wasn’t long before I learned to cling to him. He’d worked his way into the deepest recesses of my heart and soul until the flowering love I came to feel for him overshadowed the darkness inside.

His kindness, the hate I saw in him for my attacker when I told the story of my shame, was the first step in healing my wounded heart. I never planned to tell anyone what had happened to me; papa had said never to tell. But it was like an unburdening of my soul to share.

I still don’t know what it was that had made me open up to him the way I did on that long-ago night. Maybe it was his persistence; maybe I was just tired and afraid. Whatever the reason, I never once regretted it.

He’d kept me hidden away in his rooms for weeks before anyone knew I was there. When I worried that the others would think something ill had befallen me, he didn’t care. He cared only for me.

In the beginning, when he mentioned marriage, although I knew his name would offer me protection, for me and my son, I had come to care for him too much to cause him the loss of his family, but he persisted.

He was strong like my papa, a strong and honorable man who taught my heart to soften.

I did not understand the ways of love back then. The only love I’d ever known was the love of a daughter for her father and his love for me.

I knew nothing of what passed between a man and a woman other than the horror I’d endured at the hands of my destroyer.

With Draco’s care for me and the child in my womb, I had come to learn true love, a love that burns bright even to this day, but the other, the bitter darkness, had never left my heart.

It was no longer all that I had, but it was still there, always in the background like a hovering beast waiting to pounce. And I knew until I draw my last breath I will never get over this hate. I may go for long periods of time not thinking about it, but without fail, it showed up unannounced from time to time, especially when my guard was down.

When my son was thirteen, I knew the time was right. He was part of a powerful family now, a strong boy. And though he bore the look of the man who’d fathered him, he was all mine and Draco’s.

We taught him to be strong, his true father, and I. I had to be sure that there was none of the Ricci in him, none of the madness that runs in that blood.

Though my purpose for him would call for him to be ruthless, I did not want him to be a callous beast who had no care for others. No, I only wanted him to destroy one man.

So I went behind my husband’s back, something I am not ashamed of. I could not share this with Draco; he’s as sweet as he is strong, and he would’ve seen it as his failure.

I have no doubt that he would cross the waters to take care of Alonzo himself, but it was not his to do. I’ve always known what must be, how it works in the village where I was born. That place that now seems too far removed from my new home of nineteen years.

Where I come from, justice is carried out in the old ways if needs be, and yet it’s a place where the rich abuse the poor and the haves betray the have-nots. The disgrace of what had been done to me and so many others should not go unpunished just because the perpetrators had wealth. And now Draco had put me on even footing where wealth was concerned; in fact, his wealth would make the Ricci family look like paupers.