The Mafia Boss’s Innocent Prisoner Chapter 10
Two years later, I worked in the emergency
department of a children’s hospital in Boston.
The job was loud. Hard. Messy.
I loved it.
Children did not care about the pale line on my cheek.
They cared that I knew where the stickers were and
that I did not lie when a needle would hurt.
I had a small apartment with yellow curtains, friends
who knew nothing about Mafia families, and a kitchen
table covered with plants I kept forgetting to water.
It was not a powerful life.
It was mine.
Theo wrote twice.
I returned both letters.
Bastian kept his distance.
He did not visit. His men did not follow me. No Kane car waited outside the hospital.
Each year, on my birthday, one plain envelope arrived without a return address.
I knew his handwriting.
I never opened the letters.
I never sent them back either.
One morning, a little girl touched the scar on my face while I changed the bandage on her knee.
“Did it hurt?” she asked.
“Yes.”
“Are you still sad?”
I thought about Theo.
I thought about Bastian.
Then I looked around the bright treatment room I had
once believed I would never enter again.
“Not anymore.”
For years, powerful people had told me who I was.
A mistake.
A whore.
A rat.
A prisoner.
They were wrong.
I was Tamsin Reed.
And my life belonged to me.