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“She loved you.”

Rafael nodded once. “We loved each other.”

Tears blurred him.

“Why didn’t she tell me?”

“Because Ciro would have killed you.”

I hated the truth of it.

“He would have killed your mother. Me. You. The moment he learned.”

I knew Ciro well enough not to doubt it.

Rafael’s hand slid from my cheek and closed over mine.

“The lie kept you alive. It was the only way, mi niña.”

I bent over him.

“All these years, you kept me safe.”

“All of them.” He swallowed hard. “Ciro thought I guarded what belonged to him. No—I was protecting my own daughter all along.”

A sob escaped me. Suddenly, memories I had spent my life filing under Rafael changed shape.

His hand on the back of my head when I was small.

The quiet mi niña he’d called me for as long as I could remember.

The way he’d looked at me after the guy I trusted forced himself on me. I had believed he was making an example for Ciro’s household.

Instead, he had been a father avenging his daughter.

Another memory hit harder.

I had been thirteen and locked in my new room over the dungeon after my mother died, crying so hard I could barely breathe. Ciro had ordered everyone to leave me alone because he was tired of hearing it.

Rafael hadn’t.

Sometime after dark, the back of my wardrobe had moved.

I still remembered staring at it through swollen eyes as he stepped through an opening I hadn’t known existed.

He’d put one finger to his lips.

“Quiet, mi niña.”

That was the night he showed me the hidden passage.

After that, it became our most guarded secret.

Rafael never came often enough to raise anyone’s suspicions, and when he did, he was careful. Always quiet. He would slip through the wardrobe with a book or something small he thought might make me smile, then sit with me while I read or would tell me stories until I forgot for a little while how empty my life felt without my mother.

There had been stories about him growing up, trouble he’d gotten into as a boy, and one ridiculous goat that had eaten half his mother’s washing from the line.

I’d thought he was keeping me company because he’d promised my mother he would take care of me.