I leaned against the kitchen counter and closed my eyes. The exhaustion wasn't physical anymore. It lived somewhere deeper, in the marrow.

"Giordano, how many times have you actually come for me? Do you even remember? It takes me ten minutes to get home on my own, but I've waited until ten at night because you said you were on your way, only for you to cancel at the last moment. Some emergency. Some crisis on the territory that couldn't wait. So is it really so strange that I forgot you offered this time?"

Silence on the other end. Not the silence of a man reflecting. The silence of a man deciding whether to escalate or retreat.

He hung up.

I set the phone down on the marble countertop and shrugged. This was who he was. Promises made with the same casual authority he used to issue orders to his crew, and broken with the same indifference.

I boiled water, made myself a plate of pasta with a simple sauce, and a small dish of roasted vegetables on the side. I ate slowly, savoring each bite, the warmth of the food settling into the hollow places inside me.

It struck me how long it had been since I'd eaten a hot meal right after preparing it. In the early days of our marriage, even after I'd gotten pregnant, I always came home early to cook. I'd set the long dining table in our brownstone as if it mattered, as if the act of preparing a meal for my husband carried the same sacred weight as the Sunday dinners his mother used to host. But Giordano rarely made it home. There was always another meeting, another problem on the turf, another late-night sit-down at the social club that couldn't be rescheduled.

I usually ended up reheating cold food and eating alone at that long table, the empty chair across from me a monument to his absence.

Whenever I'd tried to tell Giordano how it made me feel, he'd snap. "I'm running a territory, Carolina. I'm busy. If you don't like it, don't cook. But don't complain after you've gone through the trouble. I can't build my life around your schedule."

Back then, I'd felt sorry for him. I told myself the life was hard, that the pressure of keeping the Don's favor while managing soldiers and operations and rivals would break a lesser man. After he'd lash out, I stopped asking for anything. I just waited. Quietly. Patiently. Like a good wife in this world was supposed to.

But soon, I began to realize things weren't as simple as they seemed.

When Giordano came through the front door, I was finishing the last of my meal. The plates were nearly empty, the side dish scraped clean.

He stood in the kitchen doorway, his coat still on, his jaw tight. He looked at the empty plates and the irritation rolled off him like heat from a furnace.

"Carolina. Where's my dinner?"

"You can make something yourself. There are leftovers in the fridge," I said without looking up, scraping the remnants of my plate into the trash.

Something in him snapped. He crossed the kitchen in two strides, his hand closing around my arm, spinning me to face him. His grip was firm, not enough to bruise, but enough to remind me that Giordano Valente was a man who held power in his hands every single day.

"What has gotten into you these last few days?" His voice was low, controlled, but the anger simmered just beneath the surface like something alive. "I've been trying to make things right. What more do you want from me? Why do you insist on making everything difficult?"

I met his eyes. Dark, furious, searching for the woman who used to fold under his displeasure. She wasn't there anymore.

"Giordano, if I tell you I'm not making things difficult and you still don't believe me, then call it whatever you want. I've been working all day and I'm exhausted. I'm going to bed. Please try to keep it quiet."

I pulled my arm free and turned to walk away.

Then I stopped. Turned back. Let the words land with the same deliberate calm he used when issuing orders to his men.

"Oh, and since I'm pregnant and you keep disturbing my rest, we'll be sleeping in separate rooms. I've already moved your things to the guest room."

His face darkened. The stillness that came over him was the kind I'd seen before sit-downs turned violent, that terrible pause before a table gets flipped and someone reaches for a weapon. His hand found his car keys on the counter. He grabbed them, turned without a word, and stormed out of the brownstone, slamming the heavy oak door so hard the framed photographs on the hallway wall shuddered on their hooks.

I stood in the quiet that followed, listening to the engine of his car roar to life and tear down the street.

I shook my head. For a man who commanded fear and respect across an entire territory, Giordano Valente could be remarkably childish.

He was gone for several days without coming home.

The estate settled into a familiar silence, the kind that crept through the hallways like fog off the harbor. Another cold war. If this had been before, I would have been a wreck. I would have paced the marble floors of our bedroom at three in the morning, replaying every insignificant detail with surgical precision. Had I raised my voice when he came in late? Had I stirred in bed and disturbed his few hours of sleep? Had the dinner I'd asked the kitchen to prepare not been to his liking? Had I pushed too hard about the hours he kept, the calls he took in the other room with the door locked?

I would have drowned in it. The self-doubt. The endless second-guessing. Turning myself inside out to find whatever flaw had driven him away again.

But now, I actually enjoyed the peace while Giordano was away.

The house breathed differently without him in it. The guards at the gate relaxed their posture by a fraction. The housekeeper hummed while she worked. Even the light seemed to fall more gently through the tall windows of the sitting room, as though the walls themselves were grateful for the reprieve.

Seeing him from outside that toxic loop, with the clarity that distance and heartbreak had purchased at a price I was still paying, Giordano seemed like a man with serious problems he refused to name. Quick to anger. Quicker to diminish. He carried himself like a sermon waiting to be delivered, always correcting, always positioning himself above, always certain that his way was the only way the world could turn.

I used to rush back from every errand, every outing, terrified that Gio would return to the estate and find me missing. That he would read absence as disloyalty. That his jaw would set in that particular way, and the evening would curdle into silence so thick it pressed against my chest like a hand.

All that fear and worry now felt pointless. Every anxious concession, every swallowed word, every time I had rearranged myself to fit the shape of his expectations. All it ever did was make me feel marginally better in the moment, while Gio grew more annoyed, as though my effort itself was an irritation, a reminder that he owed me something he had no intention of giving.

Without his constraints, I threw myself into something that was entirely mine.

I had been building a legitimate venture for months. A high-end Italian restaurant concept, the kind of place where old-world recipes met modern elegance, where the wine list told a story and every table felt like a private room. My contact in Chicago real estate had brought me a promising opportunity: a historic brownstone in a prime neighborhood, the kind of property that came along once in a decade. If I handled the acquisition and the buildout well, my partner said the returns would double our initial projections, and there would be significant opportunities to expand into a second and third location.

For the first time in longer than I could remember, I felt something close to excitement that had nothing to do with the Valente name.

I stayed up late at the kitchen table with my laptop open, running market research, comparing comparable properties, studying the dining landscape in every neighborhood within a twenty-block radius. I made calls during the day and refined projections at night. The work consumed me in the best possible way, filling the hours that used to be hollowed out by waiting.

By the time the initial phase was wrapped up, the proposal polished and the offer submitted, I realized I hadn't contacted Giordano at all.

Not once. Not a single call, not a single message on the burner phone he kept for family use.

I didn't even have to guess where he was.

I found Chiara Soriano's social media. She still maintained one, which was either reckless or deliberate, and I suspected the latter. Her posts were artfully composed, dripping with melancholy and literary pretension. Moody photographs of rain-streaked windows and half-empty wine glasses, accompanied by lines that read like the poetry of a woman who wanted desperately to be perceived as deep.

It struck me as embarrassingly affected. We were long past that stage of life, the stage where longing was romantic instead of just destructive.

But Giordano seemed to eat it up.

I saw a post from her that read: I really envy her for meeting someone as amazing as you are so early. If, and I mean if, you'd met me even a minute sooner, would you have chosen to love me?

No surprise. Giordano had replied.

Yes.

The word sat on the screen like a bullet casing on a clean floor. Small. Final. Evidence of something that could not be taken back.

I stared at it for a long time. Then I closed the phone, set it face down on the table, and went back to my projections for Chicago.