Chapter 78

And it hurt. I didn’t want to promise him things that I wasn’t sure I could keep; I could see the desperation in his eyes. The last confident words we had shared with Ivan reverberated in my mind, and I was convinced that he was right: Mirko was afraid that the same thing would happen to me as to his mother. I almost burst into tears right then and there. But if he wasn’t there, if he could get to Rex, maybe we would still have hope.

That little boy was intelligent and had a lot of willpower. Maybe he could…

I managed to convince him to leave.

“Please, just go…” I told him again, and I wiped the tears that ran down his hairy cheeks with my fingers. “Everything is going to be okay, I promise you, darling. I swear. Trust me, aren’t we friends? Hey?”

It was difficult for him to let go of me, and for me to let go of him.

But Álvaro pulled his arm again with a hiss and took him toward the stairs. As Mirko was leaving, he looked at me again with those big blu