After Giving Him an Heir, I Left the Mafia Don Forever

Five years bound to Dante Falcone, and fifty-two times he betrayed the vows sworn under Omertà.

I endured it all in silence.

Until I was nine months heavy with his child.

It began with one of his kept women insulting a capo whose alliance the Family could not afford to lose. To hold the pact together, Dante Falcone — the man I called husband — demanded I make peace on his behalf by sitting down and drinking with them.

I stared at him, unable to believe it. "I'm carrying your child. You want me to drink? What if something happens—"

He cut me off, impatient. "It's a glass of wine, not a bullet."

My hesitation only annoyed him. He gave the smallest nod, and the men around that table kept filling my glass, pouring it down my throat while he watched.

The wine burned like fire going down, and the fire tore something loose inside me. The labor came early.

While I fought for my life on the surgeon's table, he spent the night with that woman in a villa out past the edge of the territory.

When I woke after delivering the child, I turned to the woman I called Nonna. "Nonna, you gave me your word. Bear him an heir of the blood, and I could go. Can I go now?"

Her face twisted, conflict and guilt at war beneath the powder and the pearls. "Serafina, won't you give him one last chance? He—"

……

Before she could finish, the television bolted to the hospital wall blared with breaking news.

The screen showed Dante stepping from a car, a woman wrapped in his jacket pressed against him. She leaned into his chest, her face flushed with something warmer than wine.

Though the jacket covered most of her, the camera caught the bare line of her thigh, marked with red that told its own story.

No explanation was needed. Anyone with eyes could read what the two of them had done in the back of that car.

A reporter's voice filled the room. "Dante Falcone, seen tonight with an unidentified woman outside the Family's own hotel…"

When Nonna saw it, fury rose in her chest, her breathing quick and hard, her whole body trembling with rage. Anger contorted her face. But when her gaze fell on me, it softened into guilt and sorrow.

Tears stood in her eyes. She struggled to speak, then choked it out. "Fine. I'll grant you release from the bond."

Watching her choke on the words, wiping at her tears, my heart felt like something had lodged in it, pain pricking my chest, sharp and relentless. Still, I held firm. "Thank you, Nonna."

I hadn't even looked at the child I'd just brought into the world. All I knew was that he weighed four pounds and five ounces, his skin pale and delicate, and that he looked like me.

A nurse came near. I was told to go and see him, to see the son I had fought so hard to give.

I shook my head. "No. As long as he's healthy, that's all that matters."

If I didn't see him, there would be no thoughts of him.

Because if I did, I'd never be able to let him go.

But there was no way I could stay bound to the Falcone Family.

Better that than to leave at my side and live a life with no ground under our feet.

It would be best for him to stay under the Family's roof, an heir of Falcone blood.

I lay on the hospital bed and looked out the window.

Thinking about leaving this place, and where in the world I could go.

I was abandoned from birth, raised in an orphanage until Nonna took me in at five to honor a debt owed to a dead man.

No blood kin closer than a stranger, no friend I could lean on when the ground gave way.

I was like a tiny sailboat adrift on a vast ocean, with no port to call home.

Nonna pitied me, and her fury at Dante's silence only grew. She took out her phone and called him again and again, trying to make him come and see us.

Finally, on the last attempt, someone answered. What she got was a cold, mechanical woman's voice. It was not Dante.

"Signora, the Don is in the middle of business right now. You may call back later…"

Before the voice could finish, a faint, unmistakable moan bled through the line.

Nonna was no fool. She knew exactly what she was hearing. Her face went white with rage.

Her hand drifted to the rosary in her lap, and the beads went still.

"Tell Dante this. If he still calls me his mother, if he still recognizes me as the woman who raised him, he will come to this hospital now. Otherwise I will pretend I never brought him into this world at all."