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“You’re going to be okay. We can talk about this once we get you out of here. To a hospital.” My breath caught. “I’ll—I’ll—”

“Isabella—”

“When we’re out of here, you can tell me.” I could barely get the words out. “About you. About Mamá. Everything.”

His fingers tightened around my wrist.

“I need you to hear me now.”

His expression was so gentle it hurt.

And I knew. I knew he was telling me now because there would be no later.

The truth of this horrible moment tore my heart open. I couldn’t escape the fact that there was no way to save him.

My hands went still against his shirt.

Rafael lifted his hand from my wrist and touched my cheek.

“There is no Delgado blood in you.”

For twenty-five years, that name had lived inside me like a sentence already passed.

His temper, his cruelty, his appetites—every ugly thing I had ever known about the man had come with the private fear that some piece of it might be waiting inside me too.

I’d spent years telling myself blood didn’t decide what kind of person I became.

Relief hit so hard it hurt.

Then guilt followed because Rafael was dying beneath my hands.

I wasn’t Ciro Delgado’s daughter.

I was—

I looked at Rafael.

“Yours?”

“Yes.”

The word came without hesitation.

I made a broken sound.

Rafael’s thumb brushed beneath my eye.

“Your mother loved you before you ever took your first breath.”

Tears streamed down my cheeks.

“She loved me too.” He smiled softly.

Rafael’s gaze drifted for one second, not toward the courtyard but somewhere much farther away.

“Ciro controlled where she slept. Where she went. What name she carried.” His breathing hitched. “He never owned her heart.”

I thought of my mother standing at the bedroom window. Of her stories about Eslovenya. And the way sadness sometimes came over her when she thought I wasn’t looking.