Page 12 of Thin Lives

And Affonso had known …

Swallowing hard, Calisto didn’t want to think it was related, but his heart wouldn’t let the nagging idea go.

There was nothing to know, his uncle had said.

Nothing.

Would Affonso kill a priest?

His own priest?

Was there something worth hiding—something more valuable than the life of a holy man?

Calisto didn’t want to even consider it.

But he already had.

Emma

Absentmindedly, Emma rubbed a hand over top her twenty-four week swell. Under her palm, she felt the gentle kicks and nudges from her baby boy as he tried to settle into a more comfortable position. Wincing when a particularly hard kick landed under her bottom rib, she shifted on the couch in an attempt to help the baby find what he was looking for.

“What are you fidgeting for over there?”

Emma’s attention flew to her husband across the room. Her hand stilled on her stomach as Affonso’s cold black eyes looked her over. She hated when he did that above most other things he did—and there was a lot about her husband to hate.

But when he looked at her, she knew he was searching for all sorts of things. Imperfections in her mask, unhappiness in her attitude, shame in her actions …

After all, he had already caught her in an affair.

He was simply waiting on the next time he could punish her for something else she did wrong, she believed.

“The baby,” Emma said in explanation.

Affonso’s lips pursed as his gaze lowered to her midsection. For the briefest moment, the coldness disappeared from his eyes, replaced by a softer glint. She swore it was the only time he did look at her with any sort of affection now—and it was always for the baby.

He protected the unborn child, and in turn, kept her safe. He made sure she was taken care of by the best doctors his money could buy, seeing as how her pregnancy was high-risk, due to her weakened cervix. He claimed to love the baby, despite it not being his.

But that was a secret she wasn’t allowed to tell.

Emma wished she could—she thought about Calisto Donati daily. She’d watched him struggle for months from afar. He fought with his lost memories, his unknown heartache, and the life he was still trying to catch up with.

She hated seeing him so dependent on Affonso for things like he now seemed to be. The two men were close, but it wasn’t such a surprise. Calisto lost his memories that would have given him the truth about Affonso and all the awful, terrible things he had done over the decades to his own family.

No, the man Calisto cared for was not that Affonso. He was the Affonso who had cared for him as a boy, taught him how to be a man, and raised him as if he were his son.

Calisto was Affonso’s son—a secret that had been hidden for years—but he didn’t even know that, anymore.

Emma drew in a slow breath, letting her hand still on her stomach again. Her one goal was to keep her child—Calisto’s boy—safe from any and all harm. He was an innocent baby, not yet born. His biggest threat was only a few feet away, just across the room from Emma at that very moment.

Affonso had been a threat to her child the very second he knew she was pregnant. There had been no hiding the fact he wasn’t the father. He hadn’t been around for a couple of months leading up to the time she got pregnant, and even before when he was, they hadn’t been intimate in a long while.

He knew immediately.

And the anger …

She had been terrified, wanting to hide the truth of the baby’s paternity to save not only him, but his father as well. It ended up being the exact opposite. She saved her own life, her child’s, and Calisto’s by simply telling the truth.

Why?