Chapter 1

Leon came straight over and pulled me and Sofia apart.

He crouched down, an uneasy look crossing his handsome face for the first time.

"Sweetheart, she's my wife, she's your stepmother, understand? From now on you call her stepmother."

I nodded, then shook my head.

I knew what he was worried about.

My birth mother Selena was about to come back to Bay City.

Leon was afraid that if she heard me call Sofia mommy, she'd be displeased.

But he was wrong.

Having lived eighteen years in my last life and watched the three of them tangled together for all eighteen, I understood it better than anyone.

Selena was cold by nature. She loved no one.

Even if I called the woman who owned the corner bar my mommy, she wouldn't have raised an eyebrow.

Just then, Sofia gave a soft huff.

She bent down, picked up the little backpack I'd dropped, straightened up, and said to Leon,

"The child is always innocent. I won't make things hard for her, but the old Moreno house is no place for her to grow up. It's all liquor and guns and old debts here. What she needs is somewhere loving and safe."

At that, Leon's eyes went red in an instant.

He looked up and glared at her.

"If it weren't for you, she'd have had a whole family!"

I smiled.

I shook off his arm, turned, and wrapped myself around Sofia's leg again.

"Daddy, why don't you split up with mommy?"

Something like pity actually came into Leon's eyes.

He ruffled my hair, his voice turning gentle.

"I know you want me to be with Selena, but daddy can't leave this woman right now."

Inwardly I sneered.

Couldn't leave her, my foot.

The truth was the Belmonte family's port ledgers were still in Sofia's hands. He couldn't bear to give up that shipping route, and he enjoyed the thrill of keeping her trapped in the Moreno house.

So I tugged at Sofia's hand and said brightly,

"Then from now on I'm sleeping with mommy."

Leon was about to correct what I called her again.

But his advisor called to say there was a problem with the containers at East Harbor, and he had to leave.

Before he left, he tossed Sofia a black account card.

Any fool could see it was meant to pay for taking care of me.

The front door closed, and the house fell silent.

Sofia let out a breath and tossed the card into the very bottom of a drawer.

Then she crouched down and studied my face carefully.

"You really look like your mother, though your eyes are a bit like your father's. Come on, little one, where do you want to go? I'm breaking you out of this old house today."

Her gentle eyes warmed my whole heart at once.

In my last life, she was exactly like this.

Nothing like the wicked stepmother from the stories.

When she first met me, she was only twenty-seven, with no children and no experience raising one.

Suddenly she was the wife of the Moreno heir, saddled with a five-year-old daughter on top of it. She was so nervous she called in a family doctor and a child tutor overnight and sat through parenting lessons several times over.

She and Leon were an arranged marriage between families.

In the first year of the marriage, the Belmonte family was nearly driven into bankruptcy by a rival gang.

And my birth mother Selena was Leon's childhood love, the one he could never let go of.

In the second year of Leon's marriage, the two of them rekindled things one drunken night.

He thought he finally had a reason to cut Sofia out.

Then Selena got pregnant.

Leon was ready to break the family marriage contract to be with her.

But Selena turned him down on the spot, saying casually that to her it was nothing more than an inconvenient accident.

She gave birth to me, recovered, and went right back to chasing her freedom.

Until five years later, when she fell for a musician from southern Europe, dropped me off at the Moreno family's shipping building, and flew off without a word.

By the time I came back to myself, Sofia had already brought me into her bedroom.

"My room isn't big, but it's enough for you to play in. Don't touch that old bear. It's ancient, and its ear is about to fall off."

I turned my head and caught sight of the white plush bear in the corner.

One of its ears had a loose thread, but it had been washed spotless and set neatly on the armchair.

A sharp ache shot through my heart.

In my last life, this white bear had always stayed by her side.

Only later did I learn it was a gift Uncle Simon gave her for her eighteenth birthday.

The day she married into the Moreno family, she brought nothing but it.

I still remember Sofia's funeral in my last life.

Leon held this white bear and cried until they took him to the family hospital.

When he woke, he gripped my arm and said the same thing over and over,

"I'm sorry, I shouldn't have neglected her, I shouldn't have let her lose faith in me bit by bit..."

Expressionless, I pulled my hand back.

"Dad, you're not even old yet. How are you already this confused? Sofia is dead."