Sold To Mr. Milano - Daniella Wright Page 0,49

he answered. He came to the door in a frenzy, as if he had spent every day storming around the house just waiting for this very moment...waiting for me to knock and be home with him again.

As the door flung open, Don Martino froze in disbelief. His mouth was gaping and his gray hair was disheveled, sticking up in every direction. The lines on his face seemed deeper, and he had dark circles under his eyes.

“Papa,” I whispered under my breath, still holding back tears.

“Alicia!” he cried, wrapping his arms around me.

As he sobbed, I let my own tears fall freely. There was no use holding it in. We laughed and cried as he pulled me into the house and quickly locked and shut the door behind us as if he didn’t plan on ever letting me leave again. We were both pretty speechless for a while, barely getting a word out here and there. Mostly we just marveled at the sight of each other. I wasn’t the only one who started to think I would never be coming home.

He knew well enough not to ask me too much right away. He threw another log on the fire and let me settle in before bringing me a tray of tea and crackers. Then he just sat across from me and waited for the story he knew was coming. It was the same way we spent many afternoons and nights, only usually we were talking about the crimes he was investigating or politics. It was strange to be back here after having such a huge adventure of my own.

“Was it the black market? The selling of pregnant women?” he asked in a knowing, fatherly tone.

“Yes,” I confessed. He let out a big sigh of disappointment that I went despite his warnings, but relief that I was sitting here in front of him to tell him about it. “Things didn’t exactly...go as planned. But that was how it all started.”

“I told you not to go, Alicia,” he scolded.

“It was okay, Papa. Someone saved me. Well, sort of. They took me away from the market, and...eventually returned me home to you.”

He was quiet for a moment as he took it in, then a strange smile crept across his mouth. “And I suppose whoever this man was...You have fallen in love with him?”

“What!? No!” I shrieked with wide eyes. “Papa, what on earth would make you think that!?”

“It’s the look in your eyes. The dreaminess in your voice. You look like a woman who is in love.”

My heart started pounding. “No, that’s not it at all. You see...it was Alberto Milano who saved me.”

His little grin was gone in a flash. A wave of emotions flashed over his eyes ranging from anger to fear to something else entirely...something much darker.

“Saved you?” he scoffed. “Ha! Why don’t you tell me what really happened!? Alberto Milano doesn’t save anything that doesn’t put more money into his pockets. Nevermind,” he decided out loud as he got up and stormed off into his bedroom. “You don’t have to tell me anything. I’m sending men out after him right now.”

I leaped up to chase him through the house, trying to calm him down. “Papa, don’t be ridiculous! You can’t send anyone after him when he was the one who delivered me home safely! He didn’t do anything wrong!” I defended him vehemently, but the words weren’t exactly true. He had done plenty wrong.

My father turned his attention to looking out the windows. “So, where is he!? Is he still out there!? I want to have a word with him!”

“No! He’s gone! Will you please just…”

“Of course he’s gone! He dropped you off and ran like a coward!”

It took forever to calm him down enough to sit across from me by the fire again. I hated insisting that Alberto wasn’t so bad and that there was no reason to go after him. He had treated me horribly at times. I remembered the way he chained me up and the cold buckets of water he nearly drowned me in. But somehow, all of that was overshadowed by everything that came after.

“I guess...I can see that you’re safe,” my father admitted after a while, but he did so with a pout. It wasn’t easy for him to put his grudge aside.

“I think, perhaps, Alberto is not entirely who we thought he was. There’s...more to him than that.”

At least I could say that much honestly. He wasn’t a good man, but he wasn’t