I didn't exactly choose to be stolen at four years old.
But the French underworld isn't big on consent.
One minute I was Donatella Acardi, Mafia royalty. The next? Just another stolen kid bleeding in someone else's basement.
That's where I met Ami...
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Donatella POV:
But even as Amir stood there behind me, warm and silent and grounding, even as the file with Dimitri’s name stared back from the dresser like it had every intention of haunting me until I bled out from the weight of it—
—I couldn’t stop thinking about the French.
Because that was the *reason*, wasn’t it?
The root of the madness. The blood. The fire.
The very first domino that set this whole twisted opera in motion.
But my brain wouldn't shut off.
Because every time I closed my eyes, I wasn't in this room.
I wasn't in this body.
I was four years old again.
And I was being dragged out of a car trunk with blood on my knees and a hand over my mouth so tight I almost choked on it. I remember screaming, but it was soundless. Screaming in my head. Because my voice didn't work. It stopped working the second my mother screamed my name in the garden and then disappeared forever.
I didn't remember her face.
I didn't remember her smell.
Just the scream. Just the garden. Just the hand that clamped down on my face and shoved me into the darkness like I was nothing but cargo.
The French did that.
I don't know which one of them. I never saw their faces in that moment. Just the cold concrete. The smell of gasoline. The feeling of zip ties cutting into my wrists while my chest hiccuped from crying so hard it stopped making noise.
And then-
Years.
Years of silence.
Years of being nothing.
They renamed me.
Tried to break me.
Tried to teach me that I wasn't a person anymore. That I was a weapon. That I was theirs.
But then Amir.
God, Amir.
The first face that didn't look at me like I was a tool.
We were just kids.
I don't even know how long he'd been in his cell before me. Long enough to look like a ghost. He barely spoke at first. Just stared at the wall like he was solving equations no one else could see. But he was warm. I remember that.
