Unwrapping The Castelli Secret

Not an it. A boy. A small one.

“I told you to stay inside no matter what,” Lily told him sharply.

“Arlo is barely five,” the older woman said from somewhere off to the side where, Rafael was dimly aware, she’d managed to move all the dogs into a fenced-off pen. But he couldn’t look away from Lily. And the boy. “He doesn’t get ‘no matter what.’”

The little boy looked at the older woman, then angled his head back to look up at Lily, who still held him by the collar of his shirt.

“Sorry, Mama,” he said, angelically, and then he grinned up at her.

It was a mischievous grin. It was filled with light and laughter and the expectation that his sins would be forgiven in an instant, simply because he’d wielded it. Rafael knew that smile well. He’d seen a version of it on his brother’s face throughout Luca’s whole life. He’d seen it in his own mirror a thousand times more.

His heart stopped beating. Then started again with a deafening, terrible kick that should have knocked him to the ground. He couldn’t quite understand why it hadn’t.

“You don’t have the right to be here,” Lily said again, her cheeks flushed and her eyes glittering, and Rafael didn’t know how he could want her this badly. He’d never understood it. And it was back as if she’d never been gone, a yearning so deep it was like an ache inside him.

But it didn’t matter any longer. None of that mattered. The little boy didn’t resemble the fair woman he’d called Mama at all. He had Rafael’s dark curls and the Castelli dark eyes. He looked like every picture Rafael had ever seen of himself as a child, scattered all over the ancestral Castelli home in northern Italy.

“Are you so certain I don’t have the right to be here, Alison?” Rafael asked, amazed he could speak when everything inside him was a shout again, long and loud and drowning out the world. “Because unless I am very much mistaken, that appears to be my son.”

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