I stared at those lines of text until the screen dimmed and went black.

I sent nothing back.

When the darkness swallowed the last pale glow of the phone, I felt nothing shift inside me. Not a tremor. Not a crack. Nothing.

Zeno had always been like this. He liked to watch me unravel. Liked to see the jealousy claw its way up my throat, liked to watch me lose control, shatter into something desperate and small because of him, and then be forced to bow my head and surrender because I loved him.

But I was truly worn out.

So drained that I didn't even have the energy to fight him anymore.

The Matriarch had told me to give her a week. She would settle everything. The dissolution documents, the arrangements, the quiet severing of the blood pact that had bound the Morani name to the Valente name for years. I didn't have to do anything. Just wait. Just survive seven more days, and I would finally be free.

The next morning, when I woke, there was a familiar presence beside me.

I didn't know when Zeno had come back. He leaned against the carved mahogany headboard, his fingertips playing absently with a loose strand of my hair, winding it, releasing it, winding it again. A distracted, possessive gesture, the way a man might turn a rosary bead without thinking.

His other hand rested on my swollen belly. His head was lowered, dark lashes fanned against his cheekbones, as if he were truly listening for something beneath the skin.

"The baby is moving."

He smiled at me. "Wife, he's scratching me."

As if answering his father's voice, a clear, small movement pressed against his palm. Tiny but sure.

My heart ached so sharply I almost gasped. But I didn't move away.

Zeno had always been like this.

No matter how recklessly he carried on outside these walls, no matter whose bed he crawled from or whose perfume still clung to his collar, whenever he returned to me, he wore the same face. The gentle husband. The patient father waiting for his child to arrive. He would soothe me softly, pull the silk covers up over my shoulders, and when my composure cracked, he would murmur the same hollow liturgy over and over. "Wife, I'll fix myself." "Don't cry, alright?"

As long as I closed my eyes to the filth he dragged in from outside, we could keep a marriage that looked warm and proper. A beautiful lie displayed behind bulletproof glass.

But I couldn't keep doing that. And that was why I chose to walk away.

"Sit up and eat a little."

Zeno leaned down and pressed his lips to my forehead. The kiss was warm. It meant nothing.

"After we eat, I'll drive you to the hospital for the checkup. Your appointment is today, isn't it?"

At the dining table, while he watched me drink milk, Zeno suddenly chuckled. There was a testing edge beneath the sound, a blade wrapped in velvet.

"Wife, I thought you would call me last night crying. Just like when you used to catch me with someone, calling nonstop until I picked up."

He tilted his head, studying me the way he studied men across the table at a sit-down. Measuring. Calculating.

"What happened? My little crybaby suddenly switched personalities? You really don't care anymore?"

I held the cup without raising my head.

"Isn't this exactly what you've been hoping for?"

My voice stayed even. Flat as still water. "A quiet, obedient Mrs. Valente who acts like nothing ever happened."

Zeno clearly stopped. His hand paused halfway to his espresso, as if my words had caught him somewhere he hadn't armored.

Then he reached out and brushed the hair from my face, slow and deliberate, like calming a small animal that had finally stopped resisting.

"It's good you understand now. Men in our position, how could we not have obligations to manage? People to entertain?"

His thumb traced the curve of my ear. His voice dropped, intimate and sure.

"Wife, relax. No matter what, you will always be the only woman I marry. The ones outside are just passing shadows."

Passing shadows.

Those simple words landed lightly, soft and weightless, yet hard to breathe through. Like silk drawn slowly across the throat.

I suddenly thought back to many years ago.

When Zeno had first come to me, when the alliance between our families was still fresh ink on a contract and he had chosen to make it something more, he had promised that in this life, he would only love me. Stay true to me. Never turn his back on me. He had said it with the same mouth that now called other women shadows, the same hands that now touched me like an afterthought.

So promises really did wear away. To the point where even the man who made them no longer trusted his own words.

My nails pressed into my palm beneath the table. The small, sharp pain spread slowly through my hand, barely enough to keep me alert.

"Let's go."

I stood, cutting Zeno off before he could say anything else.

During the drive to the hospital, the car stayed quiet.

In the past, I would have spoken happily at times like this, chattering about the baby. What the doctor might say. Whether the heartbeat sounded strong. Only when the topic was the baby did I feel that Zeno still cared about me, still cared about this family we had built on blood and vows.

But now, I didn't want to keep pretending anymore.

And even though Zeno glanced at me several times through the rearview mirror, his dark eyes searching, he didn't say a word.

Right before we reached the hospital, Zeno's phone rang.

The voice on the other end sounded frantic, words tumbling over one another. Something about "causing trouble at the house." "Pulling someone away." "Forcing her to marry some old man from the Calabrese family."

Zeno's face didn't change at all. Not a flicker. Not a twitch.

"That's her family's issue. What does that have to do with me?" His tone was flat, bored, the voice he used when dismissing a low-level associate who had overstepped. "Didn't I tell you? When I'm with my wife, don't bring me anything else."

He ended the call and slipped the phone into his breast pocket.

A moment later, Zeno parked the black sedan at the hospital entrance, placed his hand on my belly, and spoke softly. "Baby, we're at the hospital."

I thought Zeno might still have a fragment of conscience left. Some small, stubborn piece of the man who had once promised me the world.

But after I took my number at the reception desk and turned back around, the seat beside me was already empty.

Zeno's message arrived quickly.

Something came up.

The day after tomorrow is your mother's death anniversary. I will come back for you and the baby.

Do your checkup alone today.

I laughed. A single, quiet sound, sharp enough to cut glass.

I finished every examination by myself. Blood drawn from my arm by a nurse who didn't meet my eyes. The cold gel on my belly. The ultrasound wand pressing down while I stared at the ceiling and counted the tiles. When it was done, I sat in the hallway and waited for the results, my hands folded over the swell of my stomach.

On the grapevine, word traveled fast. It always did.

That nightclub singer had posted a new photograph for the world to see.

The restaurant lighting was soft and golden, intimate as candlelight. The Zeno who should have been sitting beside me in that sterile hospital corridor was sitting across from her, his attention fixed on her face, focused and intent in a way I hadn't seen directed at me in months.

The caption beneath it read: Thanks to Zeno, I wasn't dragged off by my own mother to marry some old man from another family. I'll love him forever and stay with him.

My throat tightened. I bit the inside of my cheek until I tasted copper, placed a hand on my belly, and rubbed it slowly. Gently. The way I wished someone would hold me.

"Baby."

I asked calmly, my voice barely above a whisper in that empty hallway.

"If one day Daddy and Mommy dissolve their pact... will you blame Mommy?"

The baby inside me shifted, very lightly.

I already knew my own answer.

After leaving the hospital, I headed to the compound by myself.

I started going through the holdings. Sorting the operations, splitting the territories and resources under my control. Anything I could settle clearly, I handled right away. Anything I couldn't finish yet, I placed into lists, noted with risks, figures, and plans for division, packed together, and sent to the consigliere that Nonna Ravenna had quietly retained on my behalf.

As for the Valente Family assets, I could not take a single part of them.

But this operation was something Zeno and I built from nothing, and I had to take what belonged to me.

Not for my own sake, but for the child inside me.

Since I had already decided she would not be born into the Valente Family, I needed to lay out every step for her myself. Her name, her assets, her future. I would arrange them one by one.

Even if she no longer carried the Valente name under their roof, she still had to grow up secure and free, never having to rely on anyone's pity.

After I confirmed the last file, my trusted courier lowered his voice and asked, "Signora Morani, for 'La Confessione,' do you want the payout or the operation itself?"

I didn't reply right away.

Instead, I walked into the back office and opened the leather-bound ledger for La Confessione again.

When the familiar columns of figures and floor plans spread before me, my fingers stopped for a moment.

This underground casino and speakeasy, from the concept to the interior design to every rotation of dealers and performers and the private rooms reserved for the highest-ranking guests, was almost completely built during the best years between Zeno and me.

Many nights staying awake, many times tearing everything down to redo it. Those busy, focused, working-together days had truly existed.

I thought I had already settled my feelings, but right then, I still felt a small bit of hesitation.

I naturally turned to the private suite that Zeno and I had designed together. The one tucked behind the velvet curtain on the top floor, accessible only by a key we both carried. But when I reached the door, the lock had already been changed.

The woman whose name was etched into the reservation ledger for that suite had already been switched, at some unknown time, to "Maeva Lazzari."

Zeno clearly knew I had come.

He didn't give a single word of explanation.

The next moment, a note arrived through one of his runners, requesting a two-million-dollar wire.

One of the lounge girls performing at La Confessione needs a proper stage setup for her residency.

The private suite. Let me borrow it for now.

He really knew how to "borrow" things. He took over the secret place we spent more than half a year building in a single second.

I turned and walked out without another word.

Then I looked toward my courier and said, "I want the La Confessione operation itself."

And I wanted full say over it. I didn't want Zeno and another woman ruining what we had built.

During the next two days, I fully moved my attention away from Zeno.

But he showed up everywhere.

Inside La Confessione, Zeno and the singer Maeva were always together.

Her lounge act ran nearly every night, the billing growing more provocative each time, the crowds swelling. Word on the street traveled fast.

I never set foot inside, but people kept "accidentally" passing me photographs.

The latest one showed Zeno ordering a cascade of imported fireworks launched from the rooftop terrace of La Confessione. He kept them burning for a full hour and a half just to celebrate Maeva winning some petty wager against a rival performer.

I curved my mouth slightly and told the man who delivered it never to bring me another. Then I lowered my head again to sort the arrangements for my mother's memorial.

Everyone kept talking about how Maeva was the woman Zeno kept beside him the longest. They guessed whether she might one day take my place.

But no one noticed that I no longer wished to fight anyone for the title of "Donna Valente."

On my mother's death anniversary, I dressed in all black, a single white lily pinned to my chest, standing in the center of the great room of the Valente estate.

The guests all wore somber expressions, lowering their voices while speaking. After offering their respects, they nodded at me one after another. Capos. Associates. Old friends of my mother's family. They filed past the shrine with its flickering candles and bowed their heads.

Everything should have ended calmly and with dignity.

Until just as I was telling the staff to guide the guests to their seats, a purposely softened but still pointed voice came from beyond the doorway.

"Ya… why is everyone wearing black?"

I lifted my head and saw Zeno standing at the entrance.

Behind him stood a woman dressed in bright red with heavy makeup, dark curls spilling over her shoulders.

She carefully leaned half her body forward, her eyes moving across the room, finally stopping on the framed photograph of my mother at the center of the shrine, the votive candles casting her face in warm, trembling light. As if she only just understood.

"Ah… today… Someone passed away?"

Then she seemed to realize she had spoken out of place, quickly pulling a red flower from her hair, holding it between her fingers as she walked toward my mother's memorial.

"Sorry, sorry, I didn't know… can I put this flower here?"

Seeing her reach toward my mother's shrine, the blood in my body went cold. I almost acted on instinct and pushed her away.

"Leave! Who told you that you could come in!"

The woman stumbled back, almost losing her balance, but Zeno caught her with his hand.

I stared at Zeno, my voice shaking from trying to hold myself together. "Zeno, didn't I tell you not to bring those cheap women from outside into this house, disrespecting everything under this roof!"

"And today is my mother's death anniversary!"

All the guests went still, their eyes turning toward that woman.

Maeva clearly hadn't expected me to actually push her. She stared at me for a few seconds, looking lost, then her eyes turned wet right away, tears dropping as if on command.

"I… I didn't try to cause trouble. It's my birthday today, so I wore red… just hoping for a bit of luck…"

"I really didn't know today was your mother's death anniversary. I just… I just came home with Zeno because he told me to…"

Her voice got weaker and weaker, and in the end, she leaned straight into Zeno's arms, acting like she'd been hurt badly.

Zeno's face had already darkened completely.

He lowered his head first, checking her carefully, then eased his voice. "Were you scared?"

Maeva shook her head, then nodded, tears falling even faster, but she still held onto him as she whispered, "I'm okay."

Only then did Zeno lift his head and stare at me, his eyes cold and empty.

"Natalia, I assumed you had finally matured and learned to think. I didn't expect you to still act like this."

"Your mother has been gone for so long. I only learned today that her death anniversary falls on the same date as Maeva's birthday."

"I brought her in because I thought adding a bit of warmth might lighten the day for your mother's memorial. It's not like I did anything wrong. And even that bothers you?"

"So childish."

A laugh tore itself from my throat, ugly and raw.

When my mother had still been alive, she had treated Zeno as if he were her own blood. She had fed him at her table, pressed her hand to his cheek, whispered blessings over him in the old language. And now he had walked through her shrine room with another woman draped in red silk at his side, stood before the candles I had lit for her memory, and still had the nerve to call me narrow-minded.

I lifted my chin. I looked Zeno Valente directly in the eye, and when I spoke, my voice did not waver.

"Zeno. On the anniversary of my mother's death, you brought your mistress into this house. Into her shrine. Tell me, is that what you call being broad-hearted?"

The words landed like a slap across polished marble.

His face darkened. The candlelight caught the hard edge of his jaw, the dangerous stillness that settled over him the way it always did before something inside him turned cruel. He stared at me for several long, silent seconds. Then he let out a short, cold laugh, the kind that carried no warmth at all.

"Natalia. You're unbelievable." His voice dropped to something low and dismissive. "You wouldn't recognize kindness if it kissed your hand."

He reached for Maeva Lazzari without looking at her, pulling her into the shelter of his arm, his palm spread possessively across the small of her back. He turned them both toward the door, shielding her with his body as though she were the one who had been wronged, as though saying even one more word to me was beneath him.

I drew in a breath so deep it burned.

Then I turned around. I forced a proper smile onto my face, the kind the Matriarch herself had taught me to wear. I walked through the remaining guests, the old associates, the wives and cousins and distant allies who had come to pay their respects, and I offered each one a gracious farewell, a warm clasp of the hand, a murmured thank-you.

No one would say Natalia Morani had disgraced herself at her own mother's memorial.

After the last guest left, after the heavy front door of the Valente compound closed behind them and the house fell into that particular silence that only old money and old grief can produce, I walked slowly back to my mother's shrine.

I knelt before the small altar. The photograph. The candles. The single white lily I had placed there that morning.

And I let every wall I had built that evening collapse.

"I'm sorry, Mama."

My whisper barely stirred the candle flames.

"Today was your day, and I ended up making a scene. I'm sorry. Let's not talk about things that hurt anymore." I pressed my fingers to the cool edge of the frame that held her face. "Mama, I set up a room for the baby. Will you come see it?"

I lifted the framed photograph gently and carried it with me down the corridor toward the small room at the end of the hall, the one I had spent weeks preparing.

But the moment I pushed the door open, I went still.

The room was destroyed.

Not violently. Worse. It had been emptied with precision. The baby clothes I had folded and arranged in the dresser drawers were gone. The small toys I had lined up on the shelf, each one placed with care, had vanished. The crib linens I had washed and pressed three times to get them soft enough. Gone. All of it.

My first thought was that someone had broken in. A rival family sending a message. A threat.

I called the compound's security detail, my fingers barely steady enough to hold the phone.

The guard's voice came back hesitant, strained with the particular discomfort of a man who knew he was delivering bad news to the wrong person.

"Signora... this... it wasn't anyone from outside."

A pause. I heard him swallow.

"It was the Don. He had his men come and take everything."

I stood in the center of that empty room, and the world reduced itself to a single high-pitched ringing in my ears.

After I hung up, I opened the grapevine. Maeva Lazzari's social feeds, the ones she maintained with the careful vanity of a woman who wanted to be seen. I scrolled through her posts one by one, my thumb moving with mechanical precision.

It did not take long.

In a series of photographs styled to look casual, artlessly arranged, I found what I was looking for.

The dog in Maeva's apartment was wearing the tiny outfit I had prepared for my baby.

The soft cotton, which I had washed by hand and pressed with a warm iron, had been chewed shapeless. It hung from the animal's body, dark with saliva, stretched beyond recognition.

On the carpet behind the dog, torn into bright, unrecognizable pieces, were the toys.

My baby's toys.

I clenched my jaw so hard that a sharp ache bloomed through my chest, stealing my breath.

If these had been things I had picked up at random from some shop, perhaps the pain would have been bearable.

But they were not.

Those clothes had been gathered through quiet, careful asking. Favors called in. Borrowed from the children of respected people across different families and allied circles. Hand-me-downs passed along with warm hands and warmer words. I had mended each piece stitch by stitch, washed them, dried them in sunlight, pressed them flat, pouring into every fold my hopes and prayers for the child growing inside me.

The toys had come from old friends. From family. Each one a heartfelt gift placed into my hands the moment they learned I was carrying an heir. Each one chosen with thought and love.

And Zeno had personally ordered them taken.

To give to his mistress's dog.

Every last thread of composure I possessed snapped.

I held my belly with one hand and left the compound.

The social club occupied the top three floors of a building in the financial district, its legitimate front so polished that the uninitiated would never guess what moved through its back rooms. I pushed through the entrance. The courier stationed at the front desk, a young man in a fitted dark suit, startled when he saw me. He rose from his chair so fast it rolled back and struck the wall.

"Signora, the Don can't see anyone right now."

I walked past him as though he were furniture.

He rushed after me, stepping into my path, his voice dropping low with unmistakable urgency.

"You really can't go in right now."

I did not answer him. I did not need to.

From the far end of the corridor, through the office door that had been left carelessly ajar, the sounds reached me on their own.

A woman's strained, breathless gasps. A man's low, suggestive laughter, dark and unhurried. The muffled thud of heavy furniture shifting against the floor.

All of it tangled together and poured down that hallway like poison.

The blood rushed to my head in a scalding wave, then drained away just as fast, leaving my hands and feet ice-cold.

I did not look at the courier again.

I lifted my hand and pushed the door wide open.

It struck the wall with a sound like a gunshot.

The scene inside the office presented itself without mercy, without a single shadow to hide behind.

The desk in disarray. Documents scattered across the floor like shed skin. The leather chair shoved aside. Zeno leaning back against the edge of his desk, his shirt pulled loose from his trousers, his collar undone. Maeva half-draped against him, her skirt creased and bunched, her face flushed a deep, damning rose.

The air in the room carried a sickening, unmistakable scent.

Maeva flinched at the sound of the door. In the next instant, her eyes filled with tears as if by reflex, and she curled herself into Zeno's arms, pressing her face against his chest like a wounded thing seeking shelter.

I stood in the doorway. My fingers dug into the frame until the wood bit into my skin. A tight, pulling pain spread low across my belly.

"Zeno." My voice shook. I could not stop it from shaking.

"Why did you take the clothes I prepared for my baby and give them to this woman's dog?"

The moment those words left my mouth, Maeva's tears spilled over.

"Sorella... Sorella..." Her tone was feather-soft, wounded, perfectly calibrated. "I just... I saw those little outfits on Zeno's phone a few days ago, and I thought they were so adorable... so I said, just casually, how sweet it would be if my little dog could try one on..."

She pressed closer to him, her lashes wet and trembling.

"And Zeno brought me the clothes and the toys the very next day. I honestly had no idea they were meant for your baby. If I had known, how could I possibly have taken them?"

A sharp, throbbing pain lanced through my temples. I had barely opened my mouth to respond when Zeno let out a quiet, dismissive laugh.

He lowered his head to look at Maeva. His tone turned gentle. Indulgent. The voice of a man soothing something precious.

"Why bother explaining yourself to her?"

Then he glanced at me, and the gentleness evaporated like steam off a barrel.

"How could she not take them?" His tone was careless, almost bored. "Those worn-out old hand-me-downs. Letting a dog have them is about right."

A roar of white noise flooded my skull.

Worn out.

Good enough for a dog.

My voice scraped out of my throat like a blade dragged across stone. "Zeno, those clothes were things I begged for. I called in favors. I mended every single—"

"Enough." He cut me off, his impatience sharp as a backhand.

"Can you stop making everything into a spectacle?"

His hand moved in a slow, soothing circle against Maeva's back, and his voice carried the flat dismissal of a man discussing an inconvenience already forgotten.

"What you pulled at your mother's memorial upset Maeva. I took a few old outfits and some toys to make it up to her. What exactly is the problem?"

He looked at me then. Directly. His expression was cold, his eyes the color of a winter sea.

"And now you come storming into the social club to scream at me in front of my people?"

Make it up to her.

Using our baby's clothes. Our baby's toys. To compensate his mistress.