Chapter 1

Nine months pregnant, I caught my husband at the Moretti Family clinic with his mistress—his hand on her belly, his eyes full of tenderness he had never once given me.

When she warned him I might be upset, Dominic laughed and said, “If Adriana makes a scene, I’ll have the annulment papers drawn up by morning.”

So I made my choice.

I called my father in Palermo, took my unborn child, and prepared to leave the Moretti empire behind. Dominic thought I was just his unwanted wife.

He had no idea I was Adriana Valente.

He had no idea I was sick.

And he had no idea that once I walked away, his entire world would burn.

Then why did the man who destroyed me appear at my wedding months later, red-eyed and desperate, begging for another chance?

--

Nine months pregnant, I crossed paths with my husband and his mistress at the private clinic the Family kept on retainer.

The moment I collected my prenatal report from the nurse's station, I saw the two of them through the frosted glass partition, celebrating the impending arrival of their own child.

Serafina arranged her face into something resembling concern. "Dominic, you really shouldn't be here with me. If Adriana finds out, she'll be upset. She's carrying your child too. Aren't you worried about what that might do to her?"

Dominic let out a low, cold laugh. The kind of laugh that could freeze the blood in a dead man's veins. "If she causes a scene, I'll have the annulment papers drawn up by morning."

Since Dominic had decided he no longer wanted us, I would rather raise this child fatherless than spend another day trapped inside the gilded cage of this blood-bound union.

I stepped into the corridor, pressed my back against the cold marble wall, and called my father in Palermo.

"Papa, I've made up my mind. I'm dissolving this marriage. I'm taking the baby and coming home to you."

After I hung up, I booked the earliest charter flight I could find. Two weeks. That was all I needed. Two weeks and I would vanish from Dominic Moretti's life like smoke through an open window.

But then why, months later, did that man appear at my wedding with bloodshot eyes, begging me to take him back?

Nine months pregnant, and the moment I received my prenatal report from the attending physician at the Moretti Family's private medical facility, I saw my husband walking down the opposite corridor, his hand resting on the small of another woman's back. He was attending a prenatal appointment with his first love, Serafina Greco.

"Dominic, you coming with me to this appointment... if Adriana finds out, she'll be really upset. She's due soon too. Aren't you worried?" Serafina's voice carried that practiced tremor of concern, soft as poisoned honey. But I caught the smugness in her eyes. The quiet, predatory satisfaction of a woman who knew she had already won.

Dominic leaned down and pressed his lips against the curve of her belly with a tenderness I had not seen from him in months. When he straightened, his voice carried the same chilling indifference he reserved for soldiers who had outlived their usefulness.

"She doesn't know about this, and I'm not planning on telling her. Maybe it's the hormones, but her mood's been impossible lately. I don't need her making things difficult for you."

"But we can't keep sneaking around like this." Serafina placed a delicate hand on his chest. "Adriana's heavily pregnant too. If she finds out, I'm afraid she'll..."

"There's nothing to be afraid of." Dominic's jaw tightened. The overhead fluorescent light caught the edge of his profile, all sharp angles and barely restrained authority. He was the Don of the Moretti Crime Family, one of the most feared syndicates on the Eastern Seaboard, and he spoke about me the way he might speak about a liability on a balance sheet. "It's my duty to be here with you for this appointment. The child is mine too. If Adriana wants to cause trouble over it, I'll have the annulment drawn up before the ink dries."

The coldness in his voice when he spoke about me, about the woman carrying his legitimate heir, made something inside my chest crack open and go still.

If Dominic had already decided to cast us aside, then I would beat him to it. I would leave before he could discard me. I would raise this child alone, far from the shadow of the Moretti name.

A bitter smile twisted across my lips as my heart, at last, surrendered. I pulled out my phone and dialed the private line to Palermo. The line that connected directly to the study of Don Salvatore Valente, my father.

"Papa, I've made up my mind. I'm dissolving this marriage. I'll bring the baby and come home to live with you."

A long pause. Then my father's voice came through, low and steady as stone. "I'm glad you finally came to your senses, figlia mia." The words were measured, but I could hear the iron beneath them. The barely contained fury of a man whose daughter had been humiliated. "The Morettis may run the Eastern Seaboard, but the Valente name carries weight that stretches back centuries. If staying in that house brings you nothing but pain, then leave him. Come home. Raise the child as a Valente."

"You're right, Papa."

After hanging up, I booked the next available charter out of the private airstrip. My hands were steady. My eyes were dry.

I thought back to that morning, when I had asked Dominic to accompany me to my appointment. He told me he had Family business to attend to. A sit-down with one of the capos, he said. Something that couldn't wait.

It turned out the only appointment he was keeping was with Serafina Greco.

Nine months I had carried his child. Nine months of swollen ankles and sleepless nights and the dull, persistent ache in my lower back that never fully subsided. And not once, in all those months, had Dominic Moretti set foot inside a doctor's office for me.

Serafina had returned to the country three months ago, after her so-called betrothal fell apart overseas. From the moment she stepped back onto American soil, Dominic had been meeting with her constantly. Dinners. Phone calls at midnight. Drives to the waterfront that lasted hours. From the day she reappeared, Dominic and I had barely shared a meal alone, let alone a conversation that lasted longer than his patience.

Whenever Serafina called, even if it was nothing more than a single text message glowing on his phone screen, Dominic would drop everything and go to her. He would leave the compound. Leave the dinner table. Leave our bed.

He even held her in his arms right in front of me once, in the main hall of the Moretti estate, with the portraits of his ancestors watching from the walls.

It wasn't as though I hadn't confronted him. I had. More than once. But every time I raised my voice, he shut me down with the same excuse, delivered with the same impatient wave of his hand. Serafina was going through a difficult time. Her engagement had collapsed. She had no family left, no one to turn to. She needed support.

According to Dominic, everything he did was simply repaying a debt. Serafina had saved his life once, he said. Pulled him from the wreckage of the arson hit that nearly killed him years ago. He owed her everything. She was pregnant now, vulnerable, and he had a moral obligation to stand beside her.

But Dominic seemed to forget one crucial fact. Serafina was not the only pregnant woman in his life. I was too. And I was further along than she was. If anyone in that house needed care, needed protection, needed the presence of the man who had sworn a blood oath before God and the Family, it was me.

For the longest time, I believed the child Serafina carried belonged to someone else. The failed betrothed, perhaps. Some nameless man from her time overseas.

I tried to ask indirectly. I circled the question the way a consigliere circles a negotiation, careful, measured, never showing my hand too early. I even told Dominic plainly that if he no longer loved me, he needed to say so to my face.

But every single time, he shut me down. Impatient. Dismissive. Evasive. And the one time I dared question outright whose child Serafina was really carrying, his expression turned to ice. The kind of cold, absolute fury that made soldiers twice my size lower their eyes and step back.

He kept reassuring me. Over and over again, with words that meant nothing and eyes that looked through me. And eventually, because I was tired, because I was pregnant, because I wanted so desperately to believe that the man I had married was still the man I had loved, I chose to trust him.

I told myself he was simply being honorable. That he was repaying a debt, nothing more. That he had not fallen out of love with me.

But now, standing in this sterile corridor with the prenatal report crumpling in my fist, everything was painfully, brutally clear. Serafina's baby had always been his.

They had been carrying on behind my back for God knew how long, and I was nothing more than their cover story. The legitimate wife. The convenient shield. The woman whose presence in the Moretti compound kept the other families from asking questions.

When Dominic mentioned the annulment, I caught the way Serafina's eyes narrowed. Just slightly. A flicker of satisfaction slipping through her carefully composed mask, quick as a blade drawn and sheathed.

"I never meant to take you from Adriana," she whispered, her voice trembling with practiced fragility. "It's just... if my betrothed hadn't broken things off, none of this would have happened. I needed to protect what little dignity I had left. And thank God you were there, Dominic." She pressed closer to him, her fingers curling into the lapel of his charcoal suit. "I honestly don't know what I would have done. Where I would have gone. Coming back to this country with nothing, with no one, if you hadn't been there for me..."

Her eyes filled with tears. Perfectly timed. Perfectly placed. And Dominic, full of tenderness and concern that should have been mine, gathered her gently into his arms the way one might cradle something precious and breakable.

"I told you." His voice dropped low, rough with emotion. "I'll take care of you, Serafina. If it weren't for you back then, I would've..." He trailed off. His jaw worked. The old wound, the debt he believed he owed, tightened its grip on him like a noose.

"Anyway, it's only right that I look after you," he continued, his thumb tracing slow circles on her shoulder. "Adriana is my wife. She should understand why I'm doing this. And so what if she finds out? I'll still be here for you. No matter what."

He patted Serafina's back gently, soothing her the way he had never once soothed me through nine months of carrying his heir.

The examination room door opened and the attending physician stepped out, clipboard in hand. She glanced at the two of them, at the way Dominic's arm encircled Serafina's body, at the protective angle of his body, and a warm smile crossed her face.

"You're one lucky woman, Donna Moretti. Your husband hasn't missed a single checkup, and he treats you with such care and devotion."

Serafina blushed, a demure smile playing at the corners of her lips. Dominic nodded as though the title, the assumption, the theft of everything that belonged to me, was the most natural thing in the world.

I stood in the corridor's shadow, watching the scene unfold like a woman watching her own house burn from across the street. My nails dug into my palms until I felt the sharp sting of broken skin, until the pain in my hands almost matched the one tearing through my chest.

Two more weeks.

Two more weeks and I would be gone from Dominic Moretti's life forever.

Chapter 2

Dominic followed the doctor into the private office to collect the prenatal report. Serafina, however, murmured something about needing the restroom and lingered in the corridor.

Once both of them had disappeared behind the door, she finally spoke, her voice a slow, venomous drawl. "You can come out now. You've been standing there watching long enough. Haven't had your fill?"

I stepped from the shadow of the alcove without a word. My face betrayed nothing.

My silence seemed to irritate her. Her gaze sharpened, glittering with open mockery beneath the sterile fluorescent light.

"What, no shame left at all? You knew Dominic never loved you, yet you still insist on holding on to the title of Donna Moretti?"

I let out a cold laugh, the sound barely reaching my own ears. "And you don't find it shameful to be the other woman, fully aware he's blood-bound to someone else?"

Serafina's lips curled into a slow, deliberate smile. The kind a snake might wear before it struck. "I knew Dominic long before you did. If I hadn't gone overseas, you'd never have had the chance to stand at that altar with him."

She rested one hand lightly against her belly, her fingers splayed in a gesture that was equal parts possessive and theatrical. "But I'm back now. And I'm carrying his child. So I'd say it's time for you to step aside."

From the moment I had entered this blood-bound union with Dominic Moretti, I knew there was a woman who occupied a sacred chamber in his heart. The woman he believed had dragged him from the flames of the arson hit that nearly ended his life. His savior. His obsession. But I had never truly understood the depth of that fixation, the absolute permanence of the altar he had built to her memory, until I stood face to face with her in this corridor and saw the certainty in her eyes.

The pain that tore through my chest nearly buckled my knees. My fingers tightened instinctively around the folded report in my hand, the paper crinkling under the pressure.

Serafina noticed. Her eyes dropped to it. Before I could react, she snatched it from my grip with the quick, practiced hands of a pickpocket.

She scanned the conclusion. Her lips parted. And then she laughed. Wild, gleeful, utterly unrestrained laughter that bounced off the clinic walls like something feral.

"Cancer." She said the word like she was tasting it. Savoring it. "So tell me, what do you think? Will you live long enough to push out that outsider child, or will you both die together?"

Her laughter drilled into my skull, shrill and relentless, and something inside me fractured. A wire pulled taut for months, for years, finally snapping clean. I stepped forward and struck her across the face. Hard. The crack of my palm against her cheek echoed down the empty corridor.

Serafina staggered backward with exaggerated theatricality, then crumpled to the ground in a heap. The wail that tore from her throat was pitch-perfect, the cry of a wounded dove.

"Adriana, I didn't mean to keep this from you! But I'm pregnant! How could you hit me like that?"

Enormous tears rolled down her cheeks, catching the light. Her performance was flawless. And before I could even draw my next breath, before I could process the grotesque theater unfolding in front of me, a violent force slammed into my back. My balance vanished. My body pitched forward and my swollen belly struck the cold tile floor with a sickening impact that sent white light exploding behind my eyes.

Dominic's hand closed around my arm like a vice and hauled me upright. I was still reeling, still trying to pull air into lungs that had forgotten how to work, when his voice hit me like a fist.

"Are you out of your mind?!" His face was inches from mine, contorted with a fury I had never seen directed at me with such bared contempt. "How could you push Serafina? She's pregnant!"

I stared at him. My lips parted, but no sound came.

From the floor, Serafina's voice rose, trembling and fragile as spun glass. "Dominic, please don't fight with Adriana because of me. I shouldn't have asked you to come to the appointment. This is my fault." She pressed a hand to her stomach and looked up at him with glassy, brimming eyes. "As long as the baby's okay, she can slap me. I can take it."

She was a portrait of tragic martyrdom. The wronged woman. The innocent. Her lower lip quivered with a precision that belonged on a stage.

Dominic's jaw tightened until the muscle beneath his ear twitched. He turned back to me, and his voice dropped to something low and lethal, the tone he reserved for men who had broken the code.

"You've crossed the line, Adriana." The words fell like stones into still water. "Apologize to Serafina."

The absurdity of it struck me with such force that I laughed. The sound was bitter and broken, scraping against my own throat.

"You want me to apologize?" My voice came out raspy, barely above a whisper. "Dominic, do you know what this is?"

I shoved the cancer report into his chest with both hands. My fingers were shaking so violently I could barely control them. My throat constricted around the words I couldn't say, the ones that would have sounded like begging.

He didn't look at it.

He took the paper, tore it cleanly in half, and let the pieces flutter to the floor between us. His eyes never left mine, and in them there was nothing. No curiosity. No concern. Only cold, unforgiving rage.

"I don't care what that says. All I know is you've gone too far." His voice rose, sharp enough to cut. "God, you're nine months pregnant, Adriana. How could you be this cruel to another woman?"

Tears slid down my cheeks. Hot. Silent. Tracing paths along skin that had gone numb. My entire body trembled, not from the pain still radiating through my abdomen where I had struck the floor, but from a fury so vast and so pure it left no room for anything else.

Dominic saw the tears. For the briefest instant, something flickered across his face. A crack in the granite. His tone softened, shifting to something that might have passed for tenderness in a world where tenderness still meant something.

"Alright. Can you just apologize? I know I haven't been giving you attention these past few months. But I promise, once the baby's born, I'll make it up to you."

Then, without a trace of shame, he placed his hand against my back and pushed me toward Serafina.

She looked up at me from where she still knelt on the floor. Her eyes, still wet with manufactured tears, glinted with the cold, unmistakable light of triumph.

I looked at Dominic. I searched his face, the face of the man who had once stood before me and sworn a blood oath. The man who had slid the Moretti ring onto my finger and promised me his name, his protection, his life. I searched for any trace of that man and found nothing. Only a stranger, hollowed out and rebuilt around the myth of a woman who had never saved him from anything.

I drew in a long, steadying breath. The air tasted like antiseptic and something final.

"No." My voice was quiet. Absolute. "I won't apologize."

I held his gaze for one last, unflinching moment.

"And Dominic, you've truly disappointed me."

Then I turned and walked away. My heels struck the tile in a steady, measured rhythm, and I did not look back.

Chapter 3

As I walked away, Dominic's expression darkened like a sky before a storm. For a fraction of a second, something raw and unguarded flickered behind his eyes. Panic. His body shifted forward, one step already forming toward me.

Then Serafina clutched her stomach and let out a low, pitiful whimper.

"Dominic, it hurts." Her voice cracked with practiced precision, tears pooling at her lash line before she forced out the rest. "But Adriana's more important. Go after her."

Dominic hesitated. One second. The muscles in his jaw worked beneath the skin, and then he shook his head.

"No. Forget about her. Right now, your condition is what matters most."

He glanced down the corridor where I had disappeared, and I heard his voice, low and dismissive, carrying through the sterile hallway of the private family clinic like the final nail in a coffin.

"Adriana's just throwing a tantrum. She's eight months pregnant. She'll be terrified once she realizes I'm serious about the annulment. I'll deal with her later."

Then he gathered Serafina into his arms and carried her through the clinic doors as though she were something sacred.

As though she were the Donna.

I drove back to the compound alone. The guards at the gate let me through without a word, their eyes trained forward, their silence a courtesy I no longer deserved or wanted. I parked and sat in the car for a long moment, staring through the windshield at the house that was supposed to be ours.

The Moretti estate loomed against the dark sky, all wrought iron and Venetian stone, every window black. Since Serafina had returned to the country, Dominic had barely set foot inside these walls. The warmth that had once lived in the rooms, faint as it had been, was gone. Bled out like a body left on cold tile.

I walked inside.

The foyer smelled of cold marble and dying gardenias in the crystal vase no one had bothered to replace. My heels echoed against the obsidian floors as I crossed to the far wall of the sitting room, where a single photograph hung in an ornate gilded frame.

Our wedding portrait.

Dominic in a black three-piece suit, his hand resting at the small of my back. Me in ivory lace, a strand of pearls at my throat that had belonged to his mother. We looked like a dynasty. We looked like a lie.

I lifted the frame off the wall, studied it for one breath, and dropped it into the wastebasket. The glass cracked against the rim with a sound like a bone breaking.

I didn't want to leave a single trace of myself in this house. Not one thread. Not one ghost.

I moved through the rooms with the efficiency of someone dismantling a crime scene. Every photograph, every matched set of crystal tumblers, every small artifact of a marriage that had once pretended to breathe. I packed it all into a black garbage bag, the plastic crinkling in the silence like something burning.

I was halfway down the staircase, the bag slung over my shoulder, when the front door swung open.

Dominic walked in carrying Serafina in his arms.

The foyer light caught the sharp planes of his face. When he saw me standing on the bottom step, motionless, the bag clutched in my fist, a flicker of guilt passed across his features. Brief. Almost imperceptible. The kind of guilt a man like him would sooner cut out of his own chest than acknowledge.

"She's not feeling well after what you did." He said it flatly, as though the statement alone settled every debt between us.

"Not feeling well." I let the words sit in the air, tasting their absurdity. "Then why isn't she at the clinic? Why the heck would you bring her here?" My voice dropped, each word deliberate and sharp as a stiletto. "Do you think this compound is some kind of recovery ward for your mistress?"

"Watch your mouth, Adriana." His tone hardened, the Don surfacing beneath the husband. "I'm trying to keep the peace here. Whether you like it or not, Serafina is staying in this house."

Serafina lifted her head from his shoulder, her hand drifting to rest on her belly with a tenderness so perfectly staged it could have been choreographed.

"It's true, Adriana." Her voice was soft as silk drawn over a blade. "There's nothing going on between Dominic and me. I'm only staying for the baby."

She said it to provoke me. Every syllable was a needle slipped beneath the skin, designed to draw blood without leaving a visible wound.

The anger rose through my chest like something molten, thick and suffocating. I looked past Serafina, directly into Dominic's eyes, and spoke with a clarity that came from somewhere deeper than rage.

"This is our house, Dominic. I don't want her living under this roof."

Dominic paused. Something shifted behind his expression, a brief war between the man he might have been and the man Serafina had made him. His brow creased. His mouth opened.

Then Serafina reached for his hand and pressed it gently against her stomach.

The conflict in his face dissolved like smoke. When he turned back to me, his voice carried nothing but cold irritation.

"That's enough. You're pregnant too. How can you have zero compassion?"

He took a step closer, his shadow falling over me on the staircase.

"You pushed Serafina. I'm bringing her here so I can look after her properly. If you can't tolerate her presence in this house, then maybe you're the one who should leave."

The words landed like a backhand across the face.

I stared at him. The blood drained from my cheeks in a slow, sickening tide. My hands trembled at my sides, and the weight of the bag in my grip felt suddenly unbearable, as though I were carrying the corpse of everything I had ever believed about this man.

The baby shifted inside me. A small, insistent reminder that I was not alone, even now.

I drew one breath. Then another.

"As you wish."

My voice did not waver. It was the steadiest sound I had ever produced, and it would be the last thing I gave him for free.

Tonight would be my final night under the Moretti roof. After this, I would be gone. Dominic Moretti would be a closed chapter, a name sealed behind a door I would never open again.

With my decision carved into the silence between us, I tightened my grip on the trash bag and walked past him, through the open door, into the night.

Serafina's voice floated after me, threaded with the precise pitch of counterfeit sympathy.

"Don't fight because of me, Dominic. Look. She's so upset she even took down your wedding portrait."

Dominic's response was a low rumble of frustration, the sound of a man who had already decided the ending of this story and resented being made to watch it play out.

"She's being dramatic. Once she realizes I'm not playing her game, she'll come crawling back."

A single tear traced a line down my cheek. It caught the cold air and turned to ice against my skin.

I walked through the compound gates and into the darkness beyond. The trash bag hit the bottom of the bin with a dull, final thud. I stood there for a moment, my hand still resting on the lid, the winter air burning in my lungs.

Then I let go.

Of the bag. Of the photographs. Of the crystal and the lace and the years of silence and the very last shred of love I had ever carried for him.

The lid fell shut, and the sound echoed across the empty courtyard like a thunderclap.

Chapter 4

The moment I pushed through the heavy oak door of the compound, I heard it. A sound drifting from the nursery wing, faint but unmistakable, and every nerve in my body caught fire.

Dominic had commissioned that room the day the doctor confirmed I was carrying his child. He'd overseen every detail himself, a thing so unlike him that even Marco Santini had raised an eyebrow. The hand-carved Florentine crib, imported from a workshop outside Siena. The cashmere blankets monogrammed with the Moretti crest. The stuffed animals lined along the windowsill like tiny sentinels, each one chosen by a man whose hands had ended lives selecting softness for the life he'd helped create.

That room was sacred. It belonged to our child.

And now he wanted to hand it to Serafina Greco.

Fury tore through me like a blade drawn across silk. I moved down the corridor, my swollen body protesting every rapid step, and threw the nursery door open so hard it cracked against the wall.

Serafina lay curled inside the crib. Inside the crib. Like a cat that had found the warmest spot in the house and claimed it. Her dark hair fanned across the pillow meant for my baby's head, her lips curved in a half-smile even in rest, as though she could feel the destruction she was causing and it pleased her.

I grabbed her arm and hauled her upright before my mind caught up with my body. Rage burned white-hot behind my ribs, and I opened my mouth to say something, anything, but Dominic's hand clamped around my wrist first.

He wrenched me back from her with the kind of force he usually reserved for men who owed him money.

"What the heck is wrong with you?" His voice was low and dangerous, the voice he used in sit-downs when someone had crossed a line. "You walk through the door and immediately start acting like a lunatic."

But then he saw the tears. They must have been falling without my permission, because his jaw tightened and his grip on my wrist loosened. Just barely. Just enough for me to feel the hesitation before he buried it.

"Are you really giving her this room?" My voice came out shredded. Raw. Like something had reached into my throat and torn pieces from it.

Dominic's brow furrowed, and he glanced back at Serafina, who had sunk onto the edge of the crib with wide, wounded eyes. The performance of a woman who had perfected the art of looking fragile.

"Serafina said she liked it." He turned back to me, his expression already hardening. "It's not a big deal if she stays here for a while."

"Do you remember what you said when you—"

"Enough, Adriana." The words cut through the air like the snap of a round being chambered. His irritation was a living thing, filling the room, pressing against the walls. "Everything you've done these past few days has been a disappointment. Every single thing. If you keep this up, I'll have to reconsider whether this union should continue at all."

He paused. Let the silence do its work. Then his eyes dropped to my stomach, and when they rose again, they were cold as the marble floors beneath our feet.

"You don't want the child inside you to be born without a father's name, do you?"

There it was. The threat. Not a firearm, not a blade, but something far more precise. Annulment. Dissolution of the blood-bound union that tied the Moretti name to the Valente line. He wielded it like a stiletto, sliding it between my ribs where it would do the most damage.

I stared at his face. At the sharp angle of his jaw as he turned away, the way he always turned away once he'd decided a conversation was over. As though I were a soldier dismissed from his study. As though I were nothing.

The memories came apart like wet paper. Every promise. Every whispered word in the dark of our bedroom, his mouth against my temple, his hand spread wide across my belly. This room will always belong to our child, Adriana. Always. And later, quieter, as though confessing something that cost him: I'll treasure you both for the rest of my life.

Ash. All of it. Reduced to ash in a matter of months, and the woman lying in our baby's crib was the match.

I said nothing else. There was nothing left to say to a man who had already stopped listening. I turned and walked out of the nursery, my spine straight, my face a mask carved from the same stone the Valente women had been carved from for generations. My hand found the curve of my belly instinctively, and I felt it. That faint, stubborn flutter. A kick. A pulse. Life insisting on itself despite everything.

"Don't worry, little one," I murmured, so quietly the words barely existed outside my own breath. "We don't need that room. I'll build you a better one. One that's truly ours."

Behind me, I felt Dominic's gaze. He stood in the nursery doorway, watching me walk down the corridor, and for the second time since the hospital, something crossed his face. Guilt. Sharp and involuntary, like a flinch. It surfaced for half a heartbeat before he drowned it.

Then Serafina's voice floated from behind him, soft and plaintive, calling his name the way a child calls for comfort.

He turned. He walked back to her. He always walked back to her.

Later, alone in the master bedroom suite, I sat on the edge of the bed that still smelled faintly of his cologne. My phone buzzed against the nightstand. Then again. Then again.

A string of voice messages from Serafina Greco.

I should not have opened them. I knew that even as my thumb pressed play on the first one. But the wounded animal inside me needed to see the wound clearly, needed to understand the full shape of its destruction, and so I listened.

Dominic's voice filled the room. Warm. Tender. The low, careful tone of a man discussing nursery colors, feeding schedules, the proper way to swaddle an infant. He laughed in one of the recordings. Laughed. The sound was so foreign to me now that it might as well have belonged to a stranger.

And then I understood.

Every moment of supposed devotion over the past nine months had been a rehearsal. Every cup of bone broth he'd insisted I drink. Every gift that arrived at the compound with a card in his handwriting. Every late-night conversation where he'd sat beside me and talked about what kind of father he wanted to be. All of it. Practice. A dry run performed on me and my child so that when it mattered, when it was Serafina's turn, he would already know exactly what to do.

The nourishing soups. The imported blankets. The parenting books stacked on his desk that I'd thought were so endearing. He hadn't been learning for our baby. He'd been learning for hers.

Even the nursery. That beautiful, sacred room he'd built with such care. It had never been for the child growing inside me. It had been prepared, from the very beginning, for the child in Serafina Greco's body.

I was the rehearsal. My baby was the prop. We were tools used to smooth out his learning curve so that Serafina would never have to suffer through a single imperfect moment of his care.

I listened to the messages again. And again. The pain swelled inside my chest like a tide with nowhere to go, pressing against my lungs, my throat, the backs of my eyes, until something broke and I laughed. Not because any part of this was amusing. Because the agony had reached a pitch so absolute that my body could no longer tell the difference between grief and madness. Everything I had clung to since the day I learned I was pregnant, every scrap of warmth I had hoarded and protected and replayed in the dark to keep myself sane, had been counterfeit.

Dominic's tenderness toward my child did not even cast a shadow next to what he gave Serafina and hers.

I clenched the phone until my knuckles went white and my hand trembled against the cold metal. Breathing hurt. Each inhale felt like swallowing broken glass. All I could do was whisper it to myself, over and over, a prayer to whatever saint still bothered to listen to a Valente woman bleeding out in a Moretti bedroom.

It's okay. It's okay. It's okay.

It was okay. Because soon we would be free of him. Soon there would be no more compound, no more corridors that smelled of his cigars and her perfume, no more nursery that belonged to someone else's child. Just me and my baby. And we would be fine. We would be more than fine. We would be Valente.

The baby kicked. Hard. As though he could hear me through skin and blood and bone. As though he understood every word and was answering the only way he knew how.

I wrapped both arms around my belly and held on.

I stayed that way for a long time. The light shifted across the bedroom floor, moving from gold to amber to the deep bruised violet of evening. The compound settled around me, its old bones creaking, its silence thick with secrets and surveillance and the distant murmur of soldiers changing shifts at the gate.

I held my child, and I breathed, and eventually the shaking stopped.

Eventually, I could breathe again.

Chapter 5

After Serafina moved into the compound, Dominic practically welded himself to her side. He orbited her like a man bewitched, trailing the scent of her perfume through hallways that had once belonged to me.

And me? I stopped expecting anything from him the moment I saw the truth carved into the lines of his face when he looked at her. Whatever remnants of loyalty our blood-bound union had once commanded were gone, burned away like old debts settled in gasoline.

One night, heavy with the child pressing against my ribs, I descended the staircase to fetch a glass of water. The compound was quiet at that hour, the marble floors cold beneath my bare feet, the only sound the distant ticking of the grandfather clock in the foyer. But as I passed the guest suite on the second floor, I heard her voice slipping through the door she had left carelessly ajar.

"Dominic," she cooed, her tone honeyed and deliberate, "I heard the Moretti Family signet ring has real power behind it. Old-world protection. The baby's been keeping me up at night. Could I borrow it for a while?"

I stopped walking. My hand found the wall for balance.

The signet ring was not a piece of jewelry. It was the blood and bone of the Moretti legacy, a relic forged in the old country and carried across the Atlantic by the first Don to plant the family's flag on American soil. Whoever wore it was recognized as the rightful Donna Moretti, the matriarch, the woman whose word carried the weight of the Family's name. Dominic had placed it on my finger the night of our wedding, his hands steady and his eyes locked on mine. He had closed my fingers around it and spoken with a gravity I had never heard from him before or since.

This is yours. Forever. Because there will never be another Donna Moretti.

His voice pulled me out of the memory. Not the voice from that night, warm and certain, but the voice he used now. Softer. Careful. The voice of a man already surrendering.

Through the gap in the door, I watched him press a gentle kiss to Serafina's cheek, his lips lingering against her skin. He smiled at her the way he had once smiled at me, in a life that felt like it belonged to someone else.

"Of course. I'll ask her for it. You can wear it as long as you want. At least until the baby's born."

A sharp, clean pain drove through the center of my chest, precise as a stiletto between the ribs.

I could no longer recall the exact words of his promise. The syllables had eroded, worn smooth by months of silence and cruelty. But it didn't matter. Because clearly, neither could he.

I took a step back. The hardwood beneath my foot screeched, a single traitorous creak that split the quiet like a thunderclap.

Dominic opened the door. He found me standing in the dim corridor, one hand braced against the wall, the other resting on my swollen belly. Something flickered across his face. Surprise. Then guilt, brief and bright as a struck match before he smothered it. He stepped out, pulled the door shut behind him, and guided me to a shadowed alcove at the far end of the hallway, away from Serafina's hearing.

"Adriana. You heard that, didn't you?" His voice was low, careful, the way a man speaks when he knows he is standing on thin ice but cannot bring himself to step back.

I said nothing.

He shifted his weight. Ran a hand along his jaw. Then he spoke again, and each word landed like a stone dropped into still water.

"Serafina's been having trouble sleeping. Do you think you could let her borrow the ring for a bit?"

I nodded slowly. At that same moment, a vicious cramp twisted through my side, deep and hot, and I pressed my teeth together until the pain dulled to something I could swallow.

"I'll give it to her. But on one condition."

Dominic's face transformed. Relief broke across his features like dawn over the harbor, open and unguarded in a way I had not seen in months. He stepped toward me, arms already rising to pull me close, but I retreated before his hands could find me.

Serafina's perfume clung to his shirt, his collar, his skin. The cloying sweetness of it crawled into my throat and settled there like bile.

"I'm glad you're finally coming around," he said, and the smile he offered was genuine, almost boyish. The smile of a man who believed the difficult part was over. "Once Serafina has the baby, I'll return it. Don't worry. Your place in this Family isn't going anywhere."

So he did remember what the ring stood for. He simply didn't care enough to honor it.

"I don't care if she never gives it back," I said quietly. "I just need you to sign something."

I turned and climbed the staircase. Each step cost me, the weight of the child and the weight of everything else pressing down on my spine. But I kept my back straight. A Valente does not bend where others can see.

A minute later, I returned with the annulment papers in hand, already folded open to the page that required his signature. I held them out to him under the amber glow of the hallway sconce.

"There's no need to be upset," he murmured, his tone the practiced gentleness of a man who believed he was managing a woman's emotions. "Serafina's not going to keep it forever. Like I said, I'll return it once she has the baby."

He took the pen I offered. He signed without reading a single line, his signature a careless slash of ink across the bottom of the page. He did not look at the heading. He did not scan the clauses. He signed the dissolution of our blood-bound union the way he might sign a receipt for a case of wine.

The moment the papers were back in my hands, the storm inside me went still. Not peace, exactly. Something colder. Something final. I had never expected it would be this easy. That the end of everything could fit so neatly into the space between one heartbeat and the next.

Dominic gave me a small, indulgent smile. "I know I haven't been there for you these past few months. Go ahead and buy whatever you want. I'll have Marco handle the accounts."

So that was why he had signed so readily. He thought this was a tantrum. A pregnant woman's bid for attention, soothed by the promise of an open line of credit. He believed I was bargaining for jewelry and designer bags, not my freedom.

I twisted the signet ring from my finger. The metal resisted for a moment, warm from my skin, reluctant to leave. Then it slid free, and I held it out to him, my face betraying nothing.

For a moment, he hesitated. His eyes dropped to the ring in my open palm, and something passed behind them. A flicker of recognition. A whisper of what this meant. But the whisper died before it could become a thought, drowned by the pull of the woman waiting for him on the other side of that door.

He took the ring. His fingers closed around it, tight, possessive.

"Don't worry. Once the baby's born, it'll be yours again," he repeated. The words sounded rehearsed now, hollow, as though he needed to speak them aloud not to reassure me but to convince himself.

I felt nothing.

"She can wear it for as long as she wants," I said.

Something in my voice, or perhaps in the flatness of my expression, overwhelmed him with emotion he mistook for gratitude. He pulled me into an embrace. I shoved him off immediately, both palms flat against his chest, and he stumbled back half a step. But he didn't seem to mind. He didn't even seem to notice. He was already turning, already reaching for the guest suite door, already gone.

A second later, I heard Serafina's voice rise in a scream of delight, bright and sharp as breaking glass.

I stood alone in the corridor, staring out the tall window at the end of the hall. Beyond the iron gates of the compound, the city lights shimmered against the black water of the harbor. Somewhere out there, past the docks and the warehouses and the territories carved up by men who thought they owned the world, a plane would be waiting.

Tomorrow was the day I would leave. And this time, I would not hesitate.