Sophia’s Pov

“Admit what you’ve done, or watch your bastard daughter die!”

The words hit like a bullet to the spine. I stared at the open ramp of the private jet, heart pounding, breath caught in my throat.

There she was—Ariella—my baby girl. Clutched in Lorenzo’s arms, her tiny chest rising in short, panicked gasps. Her oxygen mask was gone.

Her lips were already turning blue. Her little hands curled, clawing at the air like she was trying to breathe in the sky.

“No… no… Lorenzo, please—she needs the oxygen!” I choked, my throat closing up.

He stood just feet from the edge of the hatch, calm and detached, like he wasn’t dangling a six-year-old over a crocodile-infested river thousands of feet below.

“Nine minutes,” he said.

I dropped to my knees. My fingers trembled against the cold floor of the aircraft as I looked up at him—at the man who used to cradle me like I was made of glass.

His face was now made of stone. Not a flicker of mercy.

He used to promise me the world. Now he promised to rip my heart out of it.

“Please, Lorenzo, I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I sobbed.

“You kidnapped Renata!” he thundered.

Her name hit harder than a slap.

Of course, it had to be about her.

Renata. The woman who’d dug her claws into his bed and his heart. His mistress, his obsession—the one who poisoned my home.

“I didn’t,” I whispered, voice cracking. “I swear to you—I didn’t touch her.”

He gave me a chilly smile, making my blood freeze.

“Eight minutes. Tell me where Renata is!”

“She’s your daughter too!” I screamed, desperation clawing at my lungs.

That’s when he laughed like it was a joke.

“She’s not mine,” he said, voice like venom. “And I’ve got the DNA test to prove it. You’re such a filthy whore, you don’t even know who her father is.”

My eyes snapped to Ariella. Her lips were purple. Her chest stuttered, struggling to rise. Her legs kicked weakly. Her fingers reached for the oxygen mask swinging in his other hand.

I dropped lower—onto my knees, forehead nearly to the floor. My voice trembled.

“I swear I don't know where Renata is. Please, just… save my daughter,” I cried, barely able to breathe. “Please…”

Lorenzo moved then. Stepped forward and grabbed my arm in a vice grip, jerking me upright.

“You are pathetic and a terrible liar,” he spat.

And then the slap landed.

Blinding and sharp. My vision burst into stars. My left ear rang, then went numb.

“There’s enough evidence to bury you in concrete,” he hissed.

I looked up at him, my skin burning, my soul barely holding together.

“You were the last person Renata texted,” he continued. “The hotel camera footage shows someone in your jacket dragging her by the wrist. Her bracelet? Found near your bedroom. Her blood? On a scarf in your closet.”

He stepped closer, his face inches from mine.

“There’s a threatening voice note from you a few hours before she went missing!”

I shook my head violently, tears spilling fast.

“I didn’t—none of that’s true—I didn’t even see her—”

“Seven minutes.”

”Mommy!” Ariella whimpered. The sound gutted me.

I looked at her, struggling in his grip, the blue deepening around her mouth, and the oxygen mask just out of reach.

She was wearing the little pink dress he bought her—back when he still called her princess.

“She’s not mine,” he muttered again, eyes dark with fury.

“She looks nothing like me. Renata showed me the real test. The one you switched. She’s a bastard just like her whore mother.”

I let out a broken sob and sank lower.

This couldn’t be happening.

I remembered the day I surprised him with plane tickets for our anniversary.

A trip to Japan. I planned every detail. The same hotel from our honeymoon. A private chef. The garden suite with the view of Mount Fuji. I spent two months organizing it.

But he never showed up.

I waited in that dress all night. When I called the airline, they told me the tickets had already been used.

He took Renata.

I remembered Ariella, two weeks later, standing in front of the door in her tiny Disneyland princess dress, waiting. She was so excited—he’d promised.

He never came.

I spent the evening wiping her tears and hiding mine. Lorenzo didn’t call.

He was with her again.

He used to love me. No—he used to worship me.

He once sat beside my hospital bed for two weeks after I got hit by a car.

The cold and ruthless mafia Don who showed no mercy to anyone had once begged for mine. He proposed. Apologized publicly. Promised me the world.

For a year, he pursued me with relentless devotion.

I refused him at first. I didn’t want the bloodstained world of the Mafia. But he swore he’d change—promised to leave it all behind.

He saved me once, too. Outside the city, when two men tried to drag me into a van… Lorenzo arrived and nearly killed them with his bare hands.

As an orphan, I’d never had anyone. But Lorenzo?

He became everything.

He gave me luxury, security, and love. Our wedding was a fairytale. And when I got pregnant, he treated me like I was made of porcelain.

When the doctors diagnosed Ariella of having a weak heart and needing constant oxygen he’d held us both and consoled us.

“I’ll never let anything happen to Ariella,” he once told me.

And for a time, he kept that promise.

Until Renata arrived.

She didn’t just seduce him. She destroyed me piece by piece.

She faked DNA results. Told him Ariella wasn’t his.

She doctored messages—made it look like I was feeding information to his enemies.

She even forged documents blaming me for the death of Lorenzo’s younger brother.

And somehow… somehow, he believed her.

He didn’t divorce me.

No—he vowed to ruin me.

I remember our last anniversary.

He gave me a pearl necklace. I thought it was an apology. I thought he’d finally seen the truth.

But when he clasped it around my neck, he pulled until it cut my skin.

“You’ll pay with blood for every humiliation, Sophia,” he whispered. “You and your bastard daughter.”

He locked me outside that night—bleeding and crying.

And while I shivered against the cold tile, I heard him and Renata on the patio as they had sex.

He made sure I could hear every breath. Every moan. Every reminder that I was nothing.

By the time I realized Ariella was struggling to breathe inside, it was too late.

She was rushed to the hospital, barely alive. She’s been on oxygen ever since.

Because he was too busy punishing me to notice our daughter was dying.

The sound of a phone rang through the cockpit.

One of his men answered, then passed it to him. Lorenzo pressed it to his ear.

His expression froze.

His grip around Ariella tightened.

Then his jaw clenched.

His entire body began to tremble.

“She’s been found, Boss,” the voice on the other end said. “In the trunk of Sophia’s old car. She almost died of suffocation.”

His eyes slowly lifted to mine.

They were filled with pure rage.

“You put her in that trunk,” he said quietly. “You tried to kill her. Now I’ll return the favor.”

“Lorenzo, no—NO! Please! I didn’t—”

He stepped toward the open ramp and slammed it shut.

“You’re a filthy liar!” he hissed at me then turned to his men, “Land this jet!”

The plane touched down with a screech of wheels and a scream trapped in my throat.

Lorenzo didn’t even look at us as he stepped over Ariella’s trembling body.

He crushed her oxygen mask beneath his shoe like it was made of plastic and not her lifeline.

He walked out onto the tarmac—toward a waiting car.

“I’m going to rescue Renata, have an apology waiting for her by the time I get back,” he stated coldly.

I grabbed my daughter, pressed her close, and ran to my car.

With shaky fingers, I started the car and drove to the hospital.

“Hang in there baby,” I said, whimpering as I stared at her blue lips.

I grabbed my phone and dialed a number. My fingers were shaking so hard I almost dropped the phone.

“Sophia, what’s wrong?” a worried voice asked on the other end of the line.

“Grandpa, I need your help,” I said in a shaky voice.

Six months ago, I saved a man who almost collapsed on the highway. Later, the man traced me using the beauty mark on my cheeks and found out I was his granddaughter.

He asked me to return and claim my inheritance but I refused. Back then Lorenzo hadn't gotten this bad, he was with Renata but he told me she was just a fling, he'd get over it. Other men in the mafia had mistresses.

“You’re the one I love,” Lorenzo would always say.

And like a fool I believed him. Instead of going home I had asked my grandfather to help me boost my husband’s company.

But after what he's pulled today, it’s very clear he's not the man I married again.

“Ask anything, Sophia, I’ll do it,” my grandfather said.

“I need to cancel our identities,” I whispered. “Mine and my daughter’s. I want us erased. That’s the condition I have to return and inherit the family’s properties.”

There was a pause.

“It’ll be done in seven days.”

I ended the call and looked down at my little girl in the car. Her lips were pale. Her body weak.

I kissed her forehead and whispered into her hair, “Seven more days, baby. Seven days… and our nightmare ends.”

Sophia’s Pov

”Mommy!” Ariella whimpered softly.

“Ariella,” I called her, “Just hang in there baby.”

She smiled at me weakly. Her eyes looked weak and her lips were pale.

“Mommy, I’m fine… I… I love you,” she stuttered.

Her body was freezing. When I got to the hospital I screamed like a mad woman.

“Get out of the way!” I yelled.

The nurses ran toward me immediately with a stretcher as they wheeled her away.

I tried to join them in the emergency room but they stopped me.

“Please wait outside, Miss,” they said to me.

Those forty-five minutes were the longest of my life. I paced, sat, stood, cried, prayed—then did it all again.

Eventually, the doctors stepped outside with the nurse.

“We’ve stabilized her,” they said to me.

“How’s she? Can I see her?” I asked, trying not to panic.

“She’s been stressed and without oxygen today. She needs to rest. I also advise you to do the same before you collapse. You can come back tomorrow, she’ll be better by then,” the doctor answered me.

Better? I wasn’t sure anything would ever be again.

But still I nodded, “Alright. I’ll come check on her tonight.”

The doctor told me to rest. To come back tomorrow.

But the moment I stepped out of the hospital, I didn’t go home to rest. I didn’t even realize I was still running on fear.

I just knew Ariella would want Mr. Snuggles—her stuffed rabbit. And her music box. And her pink blanket that smelled like home.

I had to get those for her. I had to feel useful. I had to feel like her mother again.

I drove to the mansion, too shaken to think. Still aching in every joint from the fall.

I pushed the doors open quietly, expecting silence.

But when I walked up the stairs and into Ariella’s room—

I stopped breathing.

The room was empty.

The walls were bare. The bed was gone. The shelves were cleared. Her toys, her books, the butterfly lamp, the unicorn rug—gone.

The sound of a crackling fire pulled my eyes to the window. Outside, at the edge of the garden… smoke was rising.

I stumbled down the hallway, down the stairs, and out through the glass doors to the back lawn—

And saw her things burning.

A pile of dolls, blankets, books, and drawings—Ariella’s world turned to ash.

“No… no… what is this?” I whispered.

A soft voice came from behind me.

“Oh, I hope you don’t mind…”

I turned around—and there she was.

Renata. Standing in Ariella’s room with a tape measure in her hand and paint swatches on the floor.

“She’s been in the hospital so long,” Renata said sweetly, tilting her head. “It made sense to start preparing the nursery.”

I blinked, stunned.

“Nursery?”

She smiled wider and rubbed her stomach.

“Lorenzo and I are having a baby.”

Her words were a gut punch.

I felt my stomach twist, but I refused to let her see the pain.

“There are dozens of rooms in this mansion,” I said, voice trembling. “Why use my daughter’s?”

Renata gave me that sickening, innocent shrug.

“Because everyone knows the miserable little bastard’s going to die soon anyway.”

The words struck like lightning.

I slapped her. Hard.

Her head snapped to the side. She gasped, then slowly looked back at me with a glint in her eye.

And she smiled.

“You’ll regret that,” she said.

Then, in one fluid motion, she threw herself back and slammed her head on the wall.

Blood started dripping from her forehead.

I stood frozen.

“What are you—?”

She screamed. A long, piercing, fake shriek.

“STOP! SOPHIA, PLEASE! I didn’t tell anyone to burn Ariella’s things—DON’T HURT ME!”

What?

“Stop! Please!”

The door burst open.

And Lorenzo stormed in.

His eyes landed on Renata—bleeding, crying, cowering.

“What the hell did you do to her?!”

He didn’t wait.

The slap sent me to the floor.

My cheek burned. My lip split open.

“Lorenzo, I didn’t—she hit herself—I swear—”

“SHUT UP!” he bellowed. “I told you if you touched her again—”

He grabbed my wrist and dragged me to our room.

I tried to explain but he wasn’t listening.

He opened my closet. Yanked every gown, every shoe, every gift, every memory we ever shared.

He ripped the framed wedding photos off the wall. Tore the letters I wrote him to pieces. He dumped it all in a pile and set it on fire.

“Everything I ever gave you, everything we ever shared—burn it all,” he spat. “You hurt Renata because of your bastard daughter, you don't deserve anything I've ever given you!”

I watched our history go up in flames. I didn’t cry, I couldn't move.

He turned to the guards.

“Take her to the dungeon. She can rot there tonight until she learns her damn place.”

“No—no, please, Lorenzo—I have to see Ariella! Let me see my daughter!”

But they were already dragging me.

And he knew. He knew I was claustrophobic!

I screamed, fought, clawed, but the iron door slammed shut.

The room was small. Tight, airless, no windows, no lights and the smell hit me instantly.

Jasmine. Hundreds of them. Scattered, hanging. Pressed into every surface.

My throat tightened. My eyes burned. I couldn’t breathe.

He’d filled the room with jasmine flowers. The one thing I was deathly allergic to.

“No… please…”

I banged on the door. Scratched at it. My chest was caving in.

“Let me out! My daughter—she needs me!”

My throat was closing. My lungs were seizing. I fell to the ground.

“Ariella—Ariella—”

The world swam in and out of focus.

“Please… I have to… see her…”

And then—

Everything went black.

The last thought on my mind was how they'd kill me before I could leave.

Sophia’s Pov

When I opened my eyes everything was white. The ceiling, the lights, the sheets.

Even the dull ache in my chest felt white—empty and lifeless.

I blinked slowly, my eyes still swollen. My throat burned like someone had poured acid down it. My head throbbed, pulsing with the rhythm of my heartbeat.

“You’re awake,” a voice said gently.

I turned my head toward the figure in the white coat. It was a doctor with kind eyes and a tired face.

“You were severely allergic to something in the air… jasmine, I believe?” he said, flipping through his chart. “You’re lucky someone found you when they did.”

I didn’t feel lucky. I felt hollow.

“How are you feeling?” he asked.

“Like I’m still dying,” I rasped.

He gave me a small nod. “You’ve suffered quite a bit of trauma, but that’s not all.”

I frowned. “What do you mean?”

He looked at me carefully—like he didn’t know where to begin.

“You’re three weeks pregnant, Mrs. Moretti.”

The room swayed.

Pregnant? My lips parted, but no sound came out.

How could I be pregnant?

The memory hit me like a slap.

That night. The stench of alcohol on his breath. The way he stumbled into the room, calling me Renata. The way he pinned me down, too drunk to see the difference. I had screamed, begged, tried to push him off—

But he’d already made up his mind.

“I want to terminate it,” I said.

The words were quiet, but sharp.

The doctor looked taken aback. “Are you… sure?”

“Yes.”

His eyes softened with pity. “You’re still recovering from the allergic reaction. You’ll need to wait a few more days—three, at most. Then we can proceed.”

I nodded once. I had made my decision, Lorenzo was a monster, I wasn't going to bring another child into the world for him to torment.

“How’s my daughter?” I asked, clearing my throat.

He hesitated. That split second of hesitation nearly stopped my heart.

“Didn’t your husband tell you?” he asked, brow furrowing.

My blood turned to ice.

I sat up—ignoring the pain tearing through my skull.

“Tell me what?”

He shifted awkwardly, searching for the right words. There were none.

“There was… a brain hemorrhage. Caused by the lack of oxygen.”

My breath caught in my lungs.

“Last night… we tried to operate. But we needed parental consent.”

He paused.

“We couldn’t reach you. And your husband… he said—”

He swallowed hard.

“He said he didn’t care if the bastard died. That she’s been a pain in the ass since she was born.”

I couldn’t breathe. The walls closed in. His voice kept speaking but it felt like it was coming from underwater.

“I’m sorry… your daughter didn’t make it.”

My ears rang.

Ariella. My sweet innocent baby girl.

I surged off the bed and grabbed the doctor by his coat.

“Where is she?! Where is my daughter?!”

Tears blurred my vision as I screamed in his face.

“WHERE IS SHE?!”

He tried to steady me. “Please—Mrs. Moretti—Sophia—Renata came earlier this morning. She… she claimed the body.”

I didn’t hear the rest.

I tore out of that hospital like a woman possessed.

—

The mansion gates were open. As if they were welcoming the devil back home.

I ran through the front doors, my throat raw from screaming, my chest caving in with every breath.

She was lounging on the couch like a queen. Legs crossed. A glass of wine in one hand. A wicked smile on her lips.

“Where is my daughter?!” I shouted.

Renata didn’t even flinch. She pressed the remote.

The television turned on.

A video began to play.

The screen showed a tiny, frail body—Ariella—gasping for air. Her lips were blue. Her chest heaving.

Doctors rushed around her, trying to revive her.

And then… they stopped.

The line on the monitor went flat.

I screamed. Covered my mouth. Collapsed to the floor.

“You bitch,” I sobbed. “You heartless bitch…”

Renata turned up the volume.

I looked up at her on the screen as Renata roughly dragged her lifeless body and tossed it into a big iron can and set it ablaze.

“This is your brat’s last moment on earth,” she said with a smile. “Touching, isn’t it?”

My heart broke into a million pieces as I stared at the horrific scene on the screen. The only thought running through my mind was how I had failed my daughter.

“How could you… how could you burn her without asking me?” I stuttered, my voice breaking.

“Oh, is this so heart breaking? Does it make you want to scream and hit me?” Renata laughed mockingly, “Wait till you hear what happened last night when the doctor called.”

I narrowed my eyes at her, dread already forming in the pit of my stomach like I knew what she wanted to say.

“What did you do?” I queried.

Renata giggled like a maniac, “The doctor called and I picked the call. I'm pregnant, Sophia, you don't expect me to save your brat, do the maths.”

“You had my daughter killed for some petty reasons? How could you?!” I yelled, fury radiating off me.

She shrugged. “Because I can.”

I stood up, ready to lunge at her when from behind her, she lifted a small glass jar.

“These are her ashes,” she said sweetly. “If you want what’s left of your brat… hit your head on the floor ten times.”

I stared at her. Surely she was bluffing.

But the look in her eyes told me she wasn’t.

I dropped to my knees.

“One… Two… Three,” she counted, giggling like a maniac.

By the fourth time, blood was running down my face. My vision was blurring. My ears were ringing.

“Seven… Eight.”

I was swaying now. Barely conscious.

“Ten!” She clapped mockingly.

“What a devoted little mother you are,” she said, stepping forward with the jar.

I reached out to take it, hands trembling, heart pounding.

But then—

She let go.

The jar hit the floor.

It shattered and my daughter’s ashes were scattered everywhere.