The slap snapped my head to the side. My cheek burned, but it was nothing compared to the tearing emptiness in my chest. This was the same man who once held me like I was breakable. Now he broke me with no hesitation.

“Floryn, stop pretending. I know exactly what you want!”

My voice shook. “What am I trying to get? A man who shoved his pregnant wife down the stairs? A killer I stupidly loved?”

‘I am not crawling back to you, Stefano. I am done being pathetic.’ I wanted to shout that.

His jaw tightened. He pulled Vexanna close and nodded toward the door. “We are leaving.”

They walked out together. And me, I crawled back to the storage room that used to be a closet and cried until I could not breathe. No screams. No sobs. Just quiet shaking, like a ghost grieving itself.

…

Three days passed. Every attempt I made to step outside the villa, Stefano’s voice came through my phone like a sentence.

“You are not leaving. You will stay in the cooling off period without stepping outside. Try it and I will handle you myself.”

I curled up on the narrow bed when my phone rang.

“Ms. Stewart,” a woman said. “This is Horizon Hospital. Your parents were caught in a residential fire. Both sustained critical burns and need immediate surgical intervention. You must come and sign the consent forms now.”

My blood froze. I could barely breathe.

“I… I will go right away.”

Except I was locked inside a villa like a captive wife of a mafia boss who lost everything that made him human.

I forced myself downstairs on crutches, pain cutting through my bones.

Stefano and Vexanna were curled together on the sofa watching a movie like a radiant couple who didn’t have ash and blood caked beneath their fingernails.

He looked up. His expression dropped.

“Who said you could leave your room?”

“My parents are in emergency surgery!” I cried. “They might not survive. I have to sign the papers. Please let me go.”

Vexanna snorted. “What a dramatic coincidence. After precisely three days of silence, they suddenly burst into flames?”

Stefano’s eyes hardened into stone. “Floryn, do you truly think this lie will save you?”

“I am not lying,” I shouted, reaching for his phone. “Call the hospital. Ask them. Horizon Burn Unit, emergency desk, the number is—”

He snatched it before my fingers touched it. “Enough! I will not fall for your little theatre.”

I dropped to my knees because there was nothing left to lose. My vision blurred. “For our five years. Let me go, please! If I’m lying, you can do anything you want to me when I come back. I swear.”

Vexanna’s smile unfurled, slow and venomous.

“Stefano, if she wants to go play rescuer so badly, we should enjoy the show.”

She whispered into his ear. I watched his jaw tighten, then the smirk bloom.

“She is right,” he said. “If you want to leave, get on your knees and beg her. Make her happy. Then I will think about it.”

My hands shook so violently the crutches slipped.

The same man who once walked me home in the rain, who waited after every rehearsal just to carry my bag, now stared while I collapsed before another woman.

“Hurry,” Vexanna sang, crossing her legs. “If you take too long, your parents might be charcoal by now.”

She dragged a finger across her throat and laughed. I lowered myself until my forehead touched the cold marble.

“Please,” I whispered. “Let me see them.”

“I did not hear you,” she chimed. “Louder.”

“Please,” I gasped. “I am begging you! Let me go.”

My injured leg screamed beneath me. My pride lay scattered like broken glass.

Vexanna clapped, delighted. “Look at her, Stef. She kneels perfectly. A trained pet.”

Stefano didn’t smile. His voice, when it emerged, was colder than extinguished embers.

“To escape me, you kneel for someone else. Fascinating.”

He stepped forward, eyes as empty as scorched houses at dawn. “You fucking want out this badly? Who is waiting for you? Another fucking damn man? Huh?”

I stared at him, my voice shaking. “Stefano, those are my parents!”

They raised me with my brother. They gave up everything just to make sure I and my brother had a chance in life. The only time I ever went against them was when I chose him. That's my biggest mistake I ever did.

For a brief moment, something in his eyes softened, then his phone rang.

He answered, annoyed. “What the fuck now?” His face changed. He glanced at me, slower this time. “Fine. I’m coming.”

He hung up and looked at Vexanna. “It’s real.”

She rolled her eyes. “What a mood killer. Hmp!”

I stood up, grabbing my crutch. “So I can leave now.”

He yanked it from my hand without warning. “I’m driving you. No one else touches you.” He said it like a threat, not care.

By the time we reached the hospital, I could not even cry anymore. The halls smelled of disinfectant and endings.

“The emergency room is that way,” a nurse said.

I limped toward it, heart pounding, and stopped dead.

A gurney. White sheet. Still.

“No. No, please!” I grabbed the doctor’s sleeve. “Where are they? Where are my parents?”

Please, tell me ..”

He removed his mask, and pity flooded his face. “I’m sorry. They did not make it. They called your name until the very last moment.”

My body dropped on its own. I kneeled on the cold floor and lifted the sheet with shaking hands.

Their faces were pale. Quiet. Too quiet.

“Mom… Dad,” I whispered, touching their cold skin. “I’m sorry. I came too late. I’m sorry.”

“What were their last words?” I asked.

The doctor hesitated. “They were fading in and out. They kept saying Floryn, leave your husband.”

Stefano snapped. “Don’t spout that fucking nonsense from a dying person! Show some fucking respect.”

The doctor flinched, confused by his rage, but I was already somewhere else, drowning under the truth.

When we returned to the villa, I walked through it like a soul that never made it to heaven.

My parents were gone and now nothing Vexanna did could break me any further. My pain was already complete.

For the funeral, Stefano let me go, but placed four guards around me like I was a criminal. Rain soaked through my clothes as I knelt in front of their grave. My brother Clint was't even there. The guards waited behind me, bored and cold.

“Time’s up,” one of them said.

I touched their names on the stone. “Mom… Dad, I will leave. I promise.”

Back at the villa, my silence seemed to infect him. Stefano started flaunting his mistress harder. Ordering me to pour them wine, clean their shoes, kneel and scrub floors.

Vexanna smiled like a spoiled cat. She pressed her heel into my fingers. “Look at you. The great ballerina. Now a crawling mutt.”

I felt nothing. Pain was just air now. Anger settled in my bones like iron.

…

That night, the screaming hit like a siren straight from hell, and it wasn’t pain nor fear. It was a craft. It was a curtain rise.

Vexanna sat crumpled outside my door, mascara bleeding down her cheeks like deliberate ink strokes and her white slip torn exactly at the places that would scandalize without crossing into indecency. Thin red lines streaked her arms and neck, the kind shallow enough not to sting yet dramatic enough to photograph. She raised her eyes to me, wide and wet, not with grief but with calculation polished over mirror rehearsals.

“Why are you doing this to me?!”

She was breathless but not weak, and she waited with the poise of someone who knew her next cue. Stefano rushed out from the far end of the corridor, his steps frantic as he fell to his knees beside her. His hands hovered over her like she was some fragile relic instead of a creature who sharpened her narrative like a blade.

“What happened? Who touched you?”

Vexanna grasped his wrist, trembling in perfect tempo.

“She… your ex-wife… she attacked me.”

She pointed at me not with fear but with precision,

“I only tried to speak to her. I only wanted to help her cope… after everything she’s lost because of me. I know she blames me for her baby. And her parents. I know she resents you for choosing me. I just… I just wanted to be kind.”

The sob that followed was so polished it deserved lighting crew and applause. Stefano turned to me, fury already locked and loaded.

“What did you fucking do?!”

I met his stare, steady and tired.

“Nothing.”

Vexanna thrust herself into another sob, “She cornered me in the hallway. She grabbed me. She said if you didn’t return to her, she’d finish what the fall started. I tried to run but she—”

The note she hit was agony wrapped in silk, and Stefano’s gaze settled into finality, not sharp but sealed.

“You lost your child. You lost your family. Your ability to dance and yes, I understand your pain. But I won’t let you harm her.”

I laughed, soft and hollow, too dry to be hysteria yet too real to be denied.

“You actually believe that.”

He stepped closer, his breath carrying cold and regret in equal measure.

“She tries to make peace while you hold onto bitterness. This is what you’ve become.”

My palm met his cheek in a quiet strike and his head snapped to the side.

SLAP!

He looked at me not with rage but with the ache of someone who wanted to remember when love was easier than clarity.

“You used to be gentle.”

“And you used to be loyal.”

Before he could answer, Vexanna gasped louder than necessary, “Stef… I’m scared… don’t leave me. She hates our baby. She wants me gone.”

That was all he needed. He gathered her into his arms and strode past me, issuing orders like vows.

“Get the car. Now.”

The guards followed without hesitation.

---

The hospital air tasted like disinfectant and quiet disaster. I was dragged into the private wing, and guards gripping my arms while Vexanna lay in the bed. IV threaded into her arm, skin pale in that delicate way actresses wear during award season. Stefano ignored me until I was placed in front of him, and when he finally spoke, there was nothing soft left in his voice.

“Kneel.”

I blinked, more from disbelief than defiance.

“What?”

He pointed to the floor. Coarse salt waited there, grains thick enough to bruise, arranged deliberately.

“You assaulted my Vexanna. You will stay on your knees and think about the woman you have become.”

He leaned close, his voice a storm sealed behind teeth.

“And when she wakes up, you will apologize. For everything. The jealousy. The cruelty.”

I didn’t move, and I didn’t breathe, yet I didn’t resist either. The room held its judgment like a sealed ritual and I walked to the center of the salted floor, kneeling without a word.

Pain arrived with precision. Salt didn’t simply sting, it burrowed and burned, and every grain felt engineered to remind me that humiliation was the point, not correction. Skin cracked open on contact, slow and quiet, creating tiny bleeding constellations across my knees.

The first hour turned warm and wet as blood surfaced. The second slid into numbness that wasn’t mercy but shock. By the third, I felt my body hollow into a vacant house, and they kept swinging at the beams to see what collapse looked like.

I stayed still and silent because stillness was the last thing they expected me to own.

Then she woke up.

Not groggy, not disoriented. Vexanna lifted her lashes.

“Stef…”

He was at her side before the sound finished leaving her mouth. I remained on the salt, bleeding into white tile.

Her gaze drifted, searching, then stopped on me with a perfect measure of pity.

“Baby… why is she on the floor?”

Stefano didn’t soften, at least not in my direction.

“She needs to understand what she’s done. She can’t keep hurting you.”

Vexanna turned her face just enough to appear fragile without appearing weak. "I only wanted to help her grieve. She lost her baby, and I know she resents me because of everything… because of the decision you made. But I never wanted her pain. I only wanted to talk. I only wanted peace.”

She took his hand with trembling fingers, and her eyes watered like she was afraid compassion might drown her.

“She threatened me, Stef. She said I ruined her life. She blamed me for her parents. For her useless leg but I swear... I never touched her."

She sniffed delicately, then added the final stroke.

“Please don’t make her kneel because of me. She’s hurting enough.”

Stefano’s features eased, not toward me, never toward me, but toward her performance wrapped in tragedy silk.

I laughed.

“You almost convinced me you believed that.”

Vexanna blinked, feigning confusion. “What do you mean?”

I lifted my head, “You’re not comforting anyone. You’re rewriting. You threatened to end your life unless he left me, unless he made me erase a child he didn’t want because you wanted his world without my shadow. Now you need him to believe I’m the danger.”

Stefano’s shoulders tensed. Vexanna’s throat caught on its own script. “Floryn… I never meant to—”

“You meant everything,” I said calmly. “You wanted his ring. My home. My perfume on his collars. My seat beside him. You didn’t take a man, you took a life and wore it.”

Stefano stepped forward, voice sharp. “Enough!”

“No,” I said, rising without asking my legs if they still belonged to me. Salt clung to torn skin and blood slid in quiet lines down my shins, yet I didn’t tremble.

“I bled for you. I lost a child because it was easier for you to protect her comfort than my existence. My parents begged you to let me go and you turned their pleas into ashes. And now you kneel me on salt while she plays saint, while she paints me unhinged because she ‘cares’?”

Silence thickened until breathing felt intrusive. I faced him fully, the man who called destruction devotion and named control love.

“You’re not punishing me,” I said, voice low. “You’re punishing yourself every time I stand back up. You hate that I survived you.”

Stefano’s jaw locked and Vexanna’s breath faltered, and in the stillness they finally saw what they built. Not ruin. Not a ghost.

…

By the time I got back from the hospital, blood had already seeped through the gauze on my knees.

Stefano followed, quiet and composed, as if the last twelve hours hadn’t happened.

He placed a cup beside me, “Drink a little... It’s ginger. You always said it settled your stomach. I just want you to rest.”

I didn’t answer.

“I need air,” I said quietly.

He flinched. Not visibly. But I saw the tiny betrayal flicker in his jaw.

“Floryn,” he tried, softer now, “I know today was—”

“You don’t get to narrate my pain,” I cut in. “Not after you ordered it.”

Before he could reply, the upstairs intercom crackled alive. Vexanna’s voice burst through perfectly pitched panic.

“Stefano, please—come up. I can’t move my arm. I think something’s wrong. I’m scared.”

“Stay in the house,” He was halfway to the stairs before he even looked at me, "I’ll be back.”

He turned, taking the steps like salvation waited at the top. I didn’t bother replying. The door clicked behind me before his footsteps reached the landing.

No running. No slamming. No theatrics. Just leaving. Because after kneeling, bleeding, and losing a child by his decree, I finally understood something fundamental:

He didn’t want a wife.

He wanted an audience.

And tonight, I chose not to sit in his theater anymore.

…

My hands wouldn’t stop shaking as I typed. Clint, my brother, was the only name that ever meant safety, even when he swore he was done with me. Bureau men quit nothing—not blood, not loyalty, not vengeance.

Me: I need out brother. Not just leaving. I want him to think I’m gone. For good.