OK. Anything but that. ‘Ew. God. No.’ I reeled backwards, disgust warring against my rising freak-out.

‘OK, sorry, my bad,’ she said, raising her hand in placation. ‘But in my defence, these Mafia family trees are incredibly complicated and I really only concern myself with the hot members.’

‘I’m not related to Donata,’ I said, realizing the small mercy in that at least. ‘She married into the family.’

‘But isn’t she, like, the Marino boss now?’ Millie released a low whistle. ‘Damn, that lady is ambitious.’

‘Mil,’ I groaned as I stuck my head between my knees and shut my eyes. ‘My whole life is literally turning upside down, and I really just need you to talk about something else. Anything else. Please, just distract me. I need you to make it stop.’

‘OK.’ I heard her suck in a breath, and after a moment of consideration, she said, ‘Did you know a baby puffin is called a puffling?’

PART IV

‘A truth spoken before its

time is dangerous.’

Greek proverb

CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

THE KEY

I burst through my front door, half expecting my mother to be waiting for me. She was in the sitting room, a mug in one hand, her phone in the other.

‘There you are!’ She sprang to her feet, spilling tea across her shirt. ‘I’ve been calling you. You said you’d only be a couple of hours, Sophie. I was worried.’

Rage rumbled inside me. I took a deep, steadying breath.

‘Am I a Marino?’

The mug smashed at my feet. The pieces nicked at my ankle, drawing blood. I turned from her and marched upstairs.

‘Sweetheart,’ she spluttered, following me. ‘Hang on.’

‘You lied to me,’ I shouted over my shoulder. ‘All my life you’ve been lying to me.’

I crashed into her room and dragged the chair by her vanity table over to the wardrobe.

She stood in the doorway, alarm warping her voice. ‘What are you doing?’

I climbed on to the chair and started flinging my father’s old clothes out of the way, searching through his side of the wardrobe. I was looking for a half-forgotten memory from my childhood. A box I found once when I was trying to find my Santa presents two weeks before Christmas. I had come across a black box, frayed at the edges, that my father had yanked off me. A box he told me never to open.

Well, guess what? I was damn sure going to open it now.

‘Stop.’ My mother was beside me, tugging at my arm. ‘Can we just talk about this?’

I whirled on her, flinging another set of shirts on to the floor. ‘What do you want to talk about? How Dad is one of the missing Marinos? How his real name is Vince? How we’ve been part of the mob this entire time and no one thought it was a good idea to tell me? Is that what you want to talk about?’ I yelled. ‘Because I can’t imagine how you’re going to explain all that to me!’

Her eyes grew big in her pale face. ‘W-what?’

‘I know!’ I told her. ‘I know what I am.’

She stumbled backwards, collapsing in a heap on the bed. I kept rifling through my dad’s closet, shelf by shelf, searching for that box.

‘You were never supposed to find out,’ she said, her voice barely more than a whisper now. ‘Your father left that life behind a long time ago … He never thought it would catch up with him.’

I fisted a pair of jeans in my hand, turning to her. ‘But it did, didn’t it?’

She couldn’t look at me. ‘Jack didn’t get as far away from that world as your father did. He was drawing suspicion. And then … then Angelo Falcone started looking into them and—’

‘He murdered him.’ I rested my head on the top ledge of the wardrobe as the chair wobbled beneath me. ‘Dad killed him on purpose that night and you knew!’

‘Sophie …’

‘Don’t lie to me! Stop lying to me!’

‘He told me before they took him in,’ she admitted. ‘He said he had to do it, to keep you safe, Sophie. He couldn’t risk it getting out. He wanted you to live a happy life. Not the one he had. He lost his parents to that world.’

‘You knew he murdered him,’ I cried. ‘And you were OK with it!’

‘I’m not OK!’ She scrambled to her feet. I looked down at her tear-streaked face and saw the desperation in her eyes. ‘Why do you think I don’t visit him? Why do you think I don’t answer his letters? Why do you think I can’t stomach looking at him any more, Sophie? It terrifies me. I can’t stop thinking about it. I hate that world. I hate everything it stands for.’

Where was that damn box? I grabbed their wedding album from the top shelf and flung it to the floor. ‘Then why did you marry him?’

‘I didn’t know his past when I married him! He and Jack were taken away by their grandmother. They legally changed their identities. He was a Gracewell when I met him.’

‘OK,’ I said, forcing calmness into my body. ‘When did you find out he was the heir to a bloodthirsty crime family?’

‘After a few years.’

I fought the urge to take her by the shoulders and shake her. ‘Then why the hell did you stay with him?’

‘Because I was pregnant!’

The chair wobbled again. I shot my hand out and grabbed the shelf to steady myself.

‘I was pregnant and I was in love,’ she said. ‘I didn’t want to punish him for where he came from. He was making an honest name for himself. He hadn’t seen his family in years. Nobody was ever going to find out. Sophie,’ she added, her voice turning hard, ‘I fell in love with someone who wanted a destiny different to the one he was born with. A man who was kind and funny and loyal and protective. And when the truth came out, I was still in love with him, because my knowledge of who he was didn’t change anything about who he had become. I loved him, Sophie, in spite of his family. Do you find that so hard to believe?’