His friends all wore expressions that said they'd seen this coming a mile away.

"Really."

I nodded. "Have the divorce papers drawn up and signed for me. Tomasso, the syndicate you run now is one we built together. If we're getting divorced, I'm taking half. That's fair, isn't it?"

"More than fair. Take all of it if you want. It's just a formality anyway!"

He shot his buddies a cocky look, and the whole group burst into applause and whistles. The sound bounced off the hospital corridor tiles, sharp and hollow, the way men celebrate when they think they've already won.

"Tomasso, you legend! Living the dream with a woman on each arm. Can't even be jealous!"

My eyes were ice. He didn't notice.

The men around him clapped his shoulders, grinning like soldiers after a clean hit. Not one of them looked at me. Not one of them understood what had just been set in motion. They saw a woman agreeing to step aside. They didn't see the Valente blood in my veins turning cold and quiet, the way it does before a reckoning.

Catarina said she was hungry. She wanted some soup.

Tomasso rounded up his friends and left immediately to get it for her. On his way out, he turned back to me. "Giovanna, are you hungry? Want me to grab you something?"

"I'm fine. Don't bother."

"Then take good care of Catarina for me, will you? She said her chest is sore from the milk coming in..."

The door clicked shut. The bodyguard posted outside shifted his weight, leather creaking faintly, and then there was nothing. Just the two of us now.

The fluorescent light hummed above us. Somewhere down the hall, a monitor beeped in steady rhythm. The private wing Tomasso had secured for her was quiet as a confessional.

Catarina didn't have to pretend anymore. She turned to me with a look that was pure provocation. The softness she wore for Tomasso fell away like a mask lifted, and what was underneath had teeth.

"Well, well. I have to say, I'm impressed. Your husband is sleeping with another woman, talking about divorcing you to put someone else's baby under his name, and you don't even flinch? That's some next-level doormat energy."

I watched her in silence.

Her lips curled. One by one, she undid the buttons of her hospital gown, slow and deliberate, the way she tucked her hair behind her left ear when she was performing. Everything about this woman was choreography.

"You know what the difference between us is, Giovanna?"

The figure she revealed made my brow tighten.

"Your body? Let's see how long that lasts after you're done breastfeeding."

"Oh, I won't be breastfeeding. You think these are natural? Why would I ruin them? You know what Tomasso told me?" She tilted her chin up, the hospital light catching her collarbone like she was posing for a painting. "He said you're boring. No fun at all. And your body doesn't compare to mine. I'm an E cup, sweetheart."

So even her chest was fake.

Tomasso really had no standards. The Don of the Rossetti Family, the man I had built from nothing, couldn't tell the difference between a woman who would die for him and one who was performing for his wallet.

"Are you done?"

"Not even close. I'm telling you to get lost. Stop standing between us, or I'll make your life a living hell. My husband is dead. I need a new one, and Tomasso is the man I picked. I'm never letting him go—"

Before she could finish, my hand was already in the air.

The slap cracked across her face.

The sound was clean. Final. It cut through the hum of the fluorescent light and the distant beeping of monitors and left a silence so absolute that the room seemed to hold its breath. My wedding band caught the light as my hand fell back to my side. I turned it once with my thumb. Twice.

Then I stopped.

"You hit me?!" She froze, one hand flying to her cheek. The red was already blooming across her skin, vivid against the white hospital sheets behind her. She lunged to hit me back, but I caught her arm and swung again.

"You—"

"Yeah, I hit you." My voice was steady. Not raised. Not shaking. Steady the way my father's voice was steady when he passed judgment in his study, the way Valente women have always sounded when they've stopped asking and started telling. "That first one was for being shameless enough to seduce another woman's husband."

A second slap landed clean. Her head snapped to the side. The room was so quiet I could hear the bodyguard outside shift his weight again, uncertain, listening.

"That one's for climbing into a married man's bed when your own husband hasn't been dead five months and you were nine months pregnant. Fausto took a bullet for Tomasso, and this is how you honor his memory."

Then a third.

The sound of it hung in the air like the last note of a bell.

"And that's for destroying a family and not feeling an ounce of remorse."

Three slaps. She stood there, stunned stupid. Her cheek was scarlet and swelling. Her hospital gown hung open. The provocation was gone from her face, replaced by something raw and animal, the look of a woman who had never been hit back before.

The silence settled over us like dust after a detonation.

Then she screamed, clawing her way off the bed. "Giovanna, I'll kill you!"

She shoved me hard. I hit the ground, and a sharp pain shot through my lower abdomen. Not a bruise. Not a cramp. Something deeper. Something wrong. Dread flooded through me instantly, cold and total, like ice water poured into my chest. I gritted my teeth and dragged myself up, bracing against the wall to stay on my feet. My hand pressed against my stomach. My fingers were shaking.

She swung at me, her palm connecting with my face. "You hit me? You think I'm someone you can push around? Those three slaps? I'm paying them back double!"

She raised her hand for a second strike, but footsteps echoed in the hallway outside. Multiple sets. Heavy. The sound of men returning.

Her arm froze mid-swing.

The rage vanished from her face so fast it was like watching someone change channels. In one fluid motion, she snatched the baby from the bassinet, dropped him onto the floor from a low height, then threw herself down beside him, curling over the infant and wailing as if the world were ending.

The transformation took less than three seconds. From fury to theater. From predator to victim. She tucked her hair behind her left ear with a trembling hand and screamed louder, the sound pitched to carry through the door and down the corridor to where Tomasso's footsteps were getting closer.

The baby's screams tangled with hers, filling the room.

I stood there clutching my stomach, my body locked in place. The pain in my abdomen pulsed in time with my heartbeat, but I couldn't move. I couldn't process what I'd just witnessed.

Catarina had hurt her own child.

He'd just been born. Hours old. Still wrinkled and red and smelling of new life. And she'd thrown him on the ground without a second thought, the way a soldier discards a spent cartridge. Not out of madness. Not out of desperation. Out of calculation. Because the footsteps were coming, and she needed a story, and her own newborn son was nothing more than a prop in the performance.

I stood against the wall with my hand pressed to my stomach, and I understood, with a clarity that cut through the pain like a blade, exactly what kind of woman had moved into my home.

"I'm sorry, Giovanna. I was wrong. I wouldn't dare dream of marrying Tomasso anymore. I'll take the baby and go far away. Please, I'm begging you, just stop hurting us, okay?"

"What are you doing? Putting on another act?"

The pain in my abdomen was getting worse. A dark premonition crept through me, cold and certain, the way you feel the air change before a storm rolls in off the harbor. Terrified that something was actually happening to my baby, I moved toward the door to find a doctor, but it swung open before I could reach it.

A crowd stood in the doorway. Soldiers. Associates. The inner circle of the Rossetti household, still dressed in the dark suits they wore to every formal occasion, still carrying themselves with the quiet vigilance of men who lived inside a world where doorways were always dangerous. And at the front, Tomasso.

The moment he saw Catarina and the baby on the floor, the infant screaming in raw, bloodcurdling wails that bounced off the sterile hospital walls and filled the corridor beyond, the color drained from his face. He dropped the bowl of porridge in his hands without a second thought. The ceramic shattered against the tile, and not a single man behind him flinched. He rushed over and scooped the baby up, cradling the child against his chest with hands that had broken bones and signed death warrants and never once trembled the way they trembled now.

"What happened? We were gone ten minutes. What the hell happened?"

"Tomasso..."

Catarina lifted her face. The handprints across her cheek were vivid and unmistakable. Three of them, layered, the kind of marks that told a story all on their own.

She was trembling, tears streaming down her face. She tucked her hair behind her left ear with a slow, deliberate motion, and when she spoke, her voice cracked in exactly the right places. "It's my fault. I never should have come to you for help. If I weren't so afraid my baby would grow up without a father, I'd never have degraded myself like this!" She turned her wet eyes toward the men gathered in the doorway, making sure every one of them could see. "Donna Rossetti, if you didn't want me and Tomasso to register the marriage and bring the baby into the Family name, then why did you pretend to agree and then turn around and try to force us out? Hitting me was one thing. But throwing a newborn on the floor?"

Her shrill sobs and accusations sent a chill through the room. The silence that followed was the particular silence of made men recalculating. I could feel it. The shift. The weight of judgment settling onto me like a physical thing, pressing the air from my lungs.

Everyone turned to look at me. "Giovanna, you..."

"Giovanna!"

Tomasso walked toward me with the baby in his arms and slapped me across the face.

The blow sent my vision black. I nearly passed out. The sound of it was worse than the pain. A sharp, flat crack that echoed in the small room, and behind it the absolute stillness of men who had watched their Don strike his wife and understood that no one was permitted to react.

I was already unsteady on my feet. My body crumpled and I hit the floor. My knees struck the cold tile first, then my palms, and the shock of it traveled up through my wrists and into my shoulders. The fluorescent light above me buzzed. Someone's shoe leather creaked. No one moved to help me.

The pain in my abdomen sharpened. I pressed both hands against my stomach, hard, while cold sweat beaded across my forehead and rolled down my temples. The room tilted. I could hear the baby crying, could hear Catarina's practiced sobbing, could hear the low murmur of the men by the door. All of it reached me as if through water.

"I thought you were actually being generous when you agreed to the divorce! How can you be this two-faced? The baby is so small. He isn't even a day old, and you threw him on the ground!" His voice was a blade, each word precise and final, the voice of a Don delivering a sentence. "You're going to be a mother yourself. Aren't you afraid your own child will pay for what you've done?"

My cheek burned. I turned my head slowly and saw the hatred carved into his face. I could barely process what I'd just heard.

For the sake of Catarina's child, he had cursed ours.

The man I had loved for seven years. The man whose syndicate I had built from nothing, whose alliances I had secured with my own blood name, whose enemies I had kept at bay by being a Valente. He stood over me on that hospital floor with another woman's child in his arms and cursed the baby growing inside me.

"Yeah, Giovanna, how could you do that? She just gave birth. You shouldn't have hit her!" One of the soldiers' wives, someone who had eaten at my table, who had kissed my cheek at Sunday dinner.

"No wonder the Don says he's more comfortable with Catarina. Giovanna's temper is way too much." Another voice. Quiet, but not quiet enough.

They all talked over each other, a chorus of noise that split my skull open. My breathing turned shallow and ragged. The room pressed in. Every face was turned away from me or turned against me, and I understood, in that moment, how completely Catarina had constructed this. She had given them exactly the story they wanted. The jealous wife. The innocent widow. The helpless child.

I pressed my hands harder against my stomach and forced myself to speak.

"Enough! All of you, shut up!" My voice tore out of me with a force that startled even me. I saw two of the soldiers step back. "'Giovanna' and 'Catarina'? Do none of you have any sense of right and wrong? This isn't the old country. A man doesn't get to keep a wife and a mistress under the same roof and call it honor! Tomasso cheated. That's on him! And even if I did hit Catarina, she had it coming!"

My outburst stunned the room into silence. Real silence. The kind where men stop breathing because they are not sure what happens next.

"Tomasso was only kind to me and the baby because of my late husband!" Catarina sobbed, crawling to Tomasso's legs. She pressed her face against his knee, and the gesture was so perfectly calibrated, so precisely the image of a grieving widow seeking protection from her fallen husband's blood-brother, that I almost admired it. Almost. "The baby fell from a height. I don't even know if he'll survive. Tomasso, please, don't waste any more time. Call a doctor!"

"Don't be scared. I won't let anything happen to him." His voice dropped low, tender, a register I hadn't heard him use with me in years. He cradled the child closer.

Tomasso turned to leave with the baby in his arms.

And in that moment, I felt something warm and wet sliding down between my legs.

The sensation froze me with terror. Everything else disappeared. The voices, the faces, the fluorescent hum, the smell of antiseptic and spilled porridge. All of it fell away, and there was only the warmth spreading beneath me and the cold that followed it, a cold that started in my chest and moved outward until my fingers went numb.

I looked down. A shock of red was spreading beneath me. Bright against the white tile. Impossible to mistake for anything else.

"Tomasso, my baby... our baby!"

He didn't turn around. He didn't even slow down. His soldiers parted for him in the doorway, and not one of them looked back at me on the floor.

"Giovanna, I've never been more disappointed in you. Get yourself home. I'll be staying at the hospital with Catarina and the baby for the next few days." He paused in the doorway. The light from the corridor caught the edge of his jaw, and I could see the muscle there working, tightening. "And you'd better pray her child is all right. Because if he's not, I won't let you off."

Every last one of them followed him out the door. The room emptied the way rooms empty after a Don has spoken. Completely. Without hesitation. Without a single backward glance.

I stayed on the floor. The blood kept spreading. The fluorescent light kept buzzing. Somewhere down the hall, I could hear Catarina's voice rising in fresh sobs, and the low reassuring murmur of Tomasso answering her, and the quick footsteps of a doctor being summoned.

No one summoned a doctor for me.

I pressed my hands against my stomach and held on to what I was losing, and the tile beneath me grew warm and then cool and then warm again, and I understood, with a clarity that cut through everything else, that I was alone. That I had been alone for a very long time. That the name Valente, which had protected everyone in this building, could not protect the one thing I needed it to protect most.

But not a single person noticed the blood pooling beneath me.

I lay on the floor, screaming in agony. The marble was cold against my back, and the sound of my own voice echoed off the corridor walls and came back to me distorted, animal, the kind of sound that makes strangers look away.

No one answered.

"Help... please, save my baby..."

My mother had told me I could keep the child and take her abroad. Leave the husband, keep the baby. Those words had been carved into my mind for weeks. Donna Valente did not make offers lightly. She had laid it out in the private study of the Monaco estate with her fingertips pressed together, her voice carrying the weight of a woman who had brokered alliances between Families and never once been wrong. Come home. Bring the child. Leave the Rossetti name at the door.

I'd already decided to keep this child.

So why was this happening?

The blood was warm and spreading beneath me and I could feel my body giving up something it was supposed to protect, and the hallway was empty because every soldier, every enforcer, every man sworn to the Rossetti name had followed Tomasso out the door with Catarina and her stolen performance, and I was alone on the floor of a hospital that the Rossetti Family funded, and not a single person in this building knew I was dying.

As consciousness slipped away, I saw a nurse passing by. She froze, then rushed in.

"What happened? Someone help! Miss, don't be scared. Why are you here alone? Where's your husband? Do you remember his number? I'll call him for you!"

"I... don't have a husband..."

Then everything went black.

My baby was gone.

Four months along. Just barely formed.

The doctor said it was a girl.

I stayed in the hospital for three days. A private room on the fourth floor. The blinds drawn. The machines beeping in a rhythm that meant nothing except that I was still alive, which felt like the cruelest possible outcome.

In those three days, Tomasso didn't call me once. Not a message. Not a soldier sent to check. Not even Nino Basile with his careful glasses-cleaning and his rehearsed condolences. Nothing. As if I had already ceased to exist inside the Rossetti world.

But I saw his social media post.

Blessed with a baby boy.

Four words. Accompanied by a photo of a woman and child sleeping, shot from behind. Catarina's dark hair fanned across a pillow. The infant tucked against her chest. The angle chosen with the same deliberate care she used when she tucked her hair behind her left ear before a lie. Even in sleep, she was performing.

The comments were flooded with congratulations. Associates. Allied Family heads. Men whose names I recognized from sit-downs and territory negotiations, men who owed their positions to Valente protection they didn't even know about, falling over themselves to celebrate the Rossetti heir.

I stared at that photo. The tears came anyway.

Some things are simply cruel.

The girl I'd lost didn't even have a name yet. I'd been saving that. Waiting until she was further along, until it felt safe to say it out loud. In this world, you learned not to name things you loved too early. The Families taught you that. Name it, and someone can take it from you.

But I was grateful, at least, that I'd found out before it was too late. I could still walk away.

The day I was discharged, a nurse helped me pack my things. My hands were steady. My face was washed. I had put myself back together the way my mother had taught me, the way a Valente woman does it: from the inside out, so that by the time anyone sees you, there is nothing left to pity.

"Ms. Valente, how come no one's visited you these past few days? Are you sure you'll be okay going home alone?"

"I'm fine. Thank you all for taking care of me. I'm feeling much better."

I managed a smile and walked out of the room.

I hadn't gone more than a few steps when I heard the nurses whispering behind me. Their voices carried in the tiled hallway, bouncing off the walls the way secrets do in places that are supposed to be sterile.

"Poor thing. A miscarriage, and not a single person by her side. Where's her husband?"

"She said she doesn't have one. Probably passed away. Life really isn't fair, is it? You know the woman in the next room? Her husband adores her. He's at her bedside every single day, holding the baby. You can tell he's absolutely smitten."

"Oh, I know. That room's been a revolving door of visitors. And they're all gorgeous men, too. How come I never get that kind of luck?"

They didn't know.

The devoted husband they were gushing about was mine. The gorgeous men filing through that room were Rossetti soldiers and capos paying tribute to their Don's household, kissing Catarina's hand like she was the Donna, bringing gifts wrapped in silk for a child that wasn't even Tomasso's blood. And three doors down, the actual wife of the Don of the Rossetti Family had bled out a daughter alone on the floor and no one had come.

I walked to Catarina's door. The hallway smelled of flowers. Lilies and roses, dozens of arrangements from well-wishers, crowding the corridor outside her room like an altar. I stopped in the doorway.

Sure enough, Tomasso was lying beside her, asleep.

He looked peaceful. His jaw was slack, the tension gone from his shoulders, one arm draped across the mattress. The blood-oath scar on his right palm was visible, the one from his fratellanza with Fausto, and even in sleep his fingers were curled loosely around Catarina's wrist as if she were something precious he was afraid to lose.

Catarina had her phone out, leaning against his chest, snapping photo after photo. Her expression was the careful blankness of a woman composing a frame. She tilted her chin. Adjusted the angle. Made sure the light caught the curve of the baby's cheek.

Tomasso rolled over and pulled her into his arms, his voice low and groggy. "I thought you said you were tired. Go back to sleep."

"I'm not tired."

She looked up at him, then undid the buttons of her top and climbed on top of him.

"I want you. Give it to me."

His Adam's apple bobbed as his eyes traced her body.

"You just had a baby. Rest. Don't start something."

"I don't care. I want you."

She leaned down and kissed him.

He pushed at her a few times, halfheartedly. Within seconds, they were tangled together.

The sight made my stomach turn.

I could still feel where my body had emptied itself three days ago. I could still feel the absence. And here was my husband, the man who had built his entire empire on the name I gave him, wrapped around the woman who had put me on that floor.

I spun around and ran out of the hospital. I grabbed the tree by the entrance and threw up until there was nothing left. My knees buckled against the trunk and I stayed there, bent over, my forehead pressed against the bark, breathing in gasps that tasted like bile and cold air. A black sedan idled at the curb. Rossetti plates. The driver glanced at me without recognition and went back to his phone.

I never imagined the man I'd loved all these years could be this person.

The moment I got home, I went straight for my documents. The marriage certificate. The formal alliance papers. Every piece of evidence that bound the Valente name to the Rossetti Family.

I was going to end this. Formally. Irrevocably. A severance of the blood-alliance so complete that every territory, every arrangement, every ounce of protection the Valente name had ever extended to Tomasso Rossetti would be withdrawn in a single stroke.

When my parents had returned to Monaco, I'd stayed behind for Tomasso. I had chosen him over the Family. Over the compound. Over my mother's steepled fingers and my father's single tap of his signet ring that meant the conversation was over.

Now it was time to go.