63

LORENA

Thank God I didn’t have a girl. She might have been kidnapped and auctioned off to the highest bidder.

From all the imaginable thoughts and worries, that was the one that mattered the most to me.

How could my family do this, to their own flesh and blood? The worst part was that my mother has been running it all and had no qualms sending me to pay our family’s generational debt.

Who even does that? It sounded like some bad movie.

“We have to run,” I muttered and my heart clenched. Two nights back was all it took for them to find us.

It would be hard to disappear again. But now that they knew about Matteo, we were running out of time. I wanted a happy life for him, not one on the run.

I swallowed hard, knowing what I needed to do but just not having the strength to follow through.

“Yes, we have to run. But it will be hard this time. We need new identities, everything.

It will take time, and I’m not sure if we have that kind of time.”