Seeing the mess, Dominic released me with a look of disgust.

"You broke her bracelet on purpose and injured her. Don't you think an apology is the least you owe her?"

Since marrying into the Valente Family, "I'm sorry" had become my most-used phrase.

The soup I cooked was too bland, so I apologized.

Worried that he might feel uncomfortable after drinking, I sent him a message, disrupting his peace. I apologized again.

I stumbled upon a text from Daniela, inviting him to a hotel. And once more, I found myself saying, "I'm truly sorry for invading your privacy..."

With blood in my mouth and pain in my bones, I straightened up, resigned. My thumb pressed against the inside of my ring finger where the wedding band still sat, though it felt like nothing. Like absence shaped into gold.

Bowing 180 degrees to Daniela, I offered three deep apologies.

Then I looked at Dominic with cold, empty eyes.

"Is that enough?" I quietly asked.

His chest rose sharply, eyes fixed on the blood at the corner of my lips.

"Seraphina," he sneered, "your precious old man isn't here to protect you anymore. The Rossetti name doesn't open doors in this city. Not anymore. Who are you pretending to be so pitiful for?"

Before I could answer, the Family's private physician arrived, bag in hand, flanked by one of Dominic's soldiers who held the door.

Brushing past me like I didn't exist, Dominic led him straight to Daniela's side.

While Dominic's world revolved entirely around Daniela, I walked swiftly out the door.

I had barely stepped beyond the foyer of the estate when a car horn sounded twice from the darkness beyond the perimeter wall.

Two short blasts. A signal.

I saw a silver sedan idling just past the iron gate, its headlights off, and quickened my pace, hope rising in my chest like something I hadn't allowed myself to feel in years.

But before I could reach the gate, two of the Family's soldiers materialized from the guardhouse shadows, moving with the practiced silence of men who had done this before.

They grabbed me roughly, one on each arm, and dragged me back into the estate without a word, their grips bruising through the fabric of my sleeves, as if I were contraband being returned to inventory.

Inside the study, Dominic had me bound to a chair, my arms restrained behind my back with zip ties that bit into my wrists, the kind the enforcers kept in the supply closet alongside things I tried not to think about.

Without warning, he ordered the Family's private physician to drive a needle into my vein, the bore of it so thick it looked like it belonged in a veterinary clinic, not pressed against the crook of a woman's arm.

From behind the half-open door of the study, I heard the doctor speaking in a voice that trembled at its edges, the way men's voices trembled when they knew they were caught between a medical oath and the only oath that mattered in this house.

"Don Valente, although both your wife and Miss Ferraro share RH-negative blood, your wife has a long history of heart disease. Forcing a draw of this volume could trigger acute cardiac shock. I strongly advise we transfer her to a proper facility where we can monitor—"

"No need to persuade me." Dominic's voice was ice over stone. The silver Zippo was motionless in his left hand, pinched between thumb and forefinger, perfectly still. "Your only job is to make sure Daniela gets better. I'll handle everything else."

I heard his footsteps approaching across the hardwood, each one measured and deliberate, and I slowly closed my eyes.

"Does it hurt?"

His tone, for once, carried a trace of gentleness, thin as a razor's edge and just as dangerous.

"Hang in there. It'll be over soon."

I turned my head away, unwilling to waste a single word on him, staring instead at the wall where a framed photograph of Salvatore Valente's younger days hung in judgment over the room.

By the time they had drawn eight hundred cc's of blood, my lips were already turning purple, and the edges of my vision had gone soft, the study dissolving into watercolor at the periphery.

Just then, a faint cough echoed from the master bedroom down the corridor. Daniela.

Upon hearing it, Dominic immediately pushed the doctor's hand aside and ordered him to draw twice as much, his voice carrying the flat certainty of a man issuing a kill order.

The doctor, drenched in cold sweat, his hands shaking around the syringe, warned him again. "If I continue, your wife could die."

Dominic paused for only two seconds, and in those two seconds the room held its breath, the soldier by the door held his breath, and even the old house seemed to hold its breath, waiting to learn what kind of man its master truly was.

"Daniela is pregnant," he said coldly. "The baby comes first."

"But—"

Without hesitation, I interrupted the doctor. "Just do it." My voice came out steadier than I expected, hollowed out of everything except the exhaustion of nine years. "But after this, let me go."

Looking at my bloodless face, Dominic's eyes flashed with cold fury, the kind that preceded the worst of him, the kind I had learned to read the way sailors read weather.

He opened his mouth to scold me, ready to ask if I'd had enough of this childish tantrum, if I was really going to abandon our home over something so trivial.

Then Daniela's delicate voice drifted from the bedroom like smoke through a cracked door. "Dominic..."

And just like that, he left me behind. His footsteps didn't slow. They didn't hesitate. The study door swung shut, and I was alone with the doctor and the needle and the quiet, rhythmic sound of my blood leaving my body, filling a bag meant for the woman who had taken everything else.

—

Two days later.

I woke in a private room at the Family's clinic, the kind of room with no windows facing the street and a lock that only opened from the outside, still weak from the shock that had nearly stopped my heart on the study floor.

As soon as I opened my eyes, I saw Dominic sitting at the side table, flipping through documents stamped with the Valente crest, his reading glasses low on his nose, the silver lighter resting beside his coffee cup like a sleeping weapon.

Our eyes locked for a long moment, and the silence between us was the silence of a room where too many things had been said and none of the right ones.

Expressionless, he set the documents aside, picked up a bowl of porridge from the tray, and moved to feed me, the spoon held with the same hand that had ordered my blood drained two nights ago.

I shook my head. "I'll do it myself."

He said nothing, just watched me quietly as I ate half the bowl, my hands trembling around the ceramic in a way I couldn't hide no matter how hard I pressed my fingers together.

Then he asked, "Do you feel unwell anywhere?"

I didn't answer the question. My thumb pressed against the inside of my ring finger, tracing the groove where the wedding band used to sit, the skin there still slightly paler than the rest, a ghost of a promise that had never been kept. "Please give me my phone."

Perhaps my tone was too distant, too stripped of the deference he had come to expect from nine years of trained obedience, because he froze for several seconds, the lighter on the table catching the fluorescent light as if even it was surprised.

Then he called the housekeeper to bring it over.

As I checked the screen, I noticed numerous missed calls, the notifications stacked like small emergencies, each one a voice I hadn't been allowed to answer.

"Who's been calling you?" Dominic's voice cut in, sharp and sudden, the way a blade appears in a conversation that was pretending to be civil.

He never used to ask questions like this. In nine years, he had never cared enough to wonder who might want to reach me.

A hint of annoyance flitted through my eyes before I could stop it.

"Someone you don't know," I replied flatly.

He unfastened the top button of his shirt with one hand, a gesture that in another context might have been casual but here, leaning over my hospital bed with that cold gaze bearing down, felt like a predator settling into a more comfortable position before the strike.

"Seraphina, how long do you plan to keep up this spoiled act?"

"I give you an inch and you want the whole mile?"

In the past, whenever he got angry, I'd rush to reflect on my mistakes, to soothe him, to fix things, to smooth the edges of his temper with apologies I had rehearsed so many times they no longer meant anything.

But now?

I simply pointed to his buzzing phone on the side table and said, without emotion, "It's Daniela."

The moment her name left my lips, Dominic's expression softened with a hint of a smile, the first warmth I had seen on his face in days, and it wasn't for me, and it had never been for me.

Without another glance at me, he rose from the chair and stepped into the corridor to take her call, the door clicking shut behind him with the soft finality of a man choosing, again, the same thing he always chose.

As soon as he left, my phone rang, the vibration loud against the metal tray in the quiet room.

Taking a deep breath, I answered the call.

Before I could say anything, the voice on the other end broke through, anxious and urgent, the sound of someone who had been pacing for days.

"Weren't you supposed to meet me? Seraphina, did you change your mind?"

"No... I didn't. Something just came up," I said, and my voice cracked on the last word in a way I couldn't control, the way a wall cracks before it falls.

"Something came up? What happened? No, this won't do. I'm coming back. I'm flying home myself!"

I cut off the person on the other end of the secure line, my voice barely above a whisper as I lowered my gaze and pressed my lips together.

"Just give me a few more days. That's all I ask."

When Dominic returned to the hospital ward, I had just ended the call.

Noticing the faint smile tugging at the corner of my lips, a smile he hadn't seen in a long time, something in his chest twisted uncomfortably. I could tell by the way he paused in the doorway, his hand still on the frame, the silver Zippo frozen mid-turn between his fingers.

But he had just promised Daniela he'd be home soon, back to the Valente penthouse to sing lullabies for her and the baby.

So he didn't have time to ask who I'd been talking to.

He assumed it was probably my cousin, the only Rossetti woman still willing to speak to me since the alliance marriage. After all, I no longer had anyone of my own. The Family had made sure of that. Nine years inside the Valente household had stripped me of every connection that wasn't his to control.

Without turning back, he gathered his files from the bedside table and said coldly, "Seraphina, something came up at the social club. I'll come again tomorrow."

In the blink of an eye, tomorrow had passed and the day after.

And the day after that. He never showed up. The soldier stationed outside my door changed shifts three times. None of them spoke to me. None of them had orders to.

Instead, thanks to wives of associates, women who circled the Family's orbit like satellites, I kept receiving videos of him and Daniela. Sent to my phone with no commentary. Just the footage. Just the evidence of what everyone already knew and no one would say to my face.

He took her to dinner at Family-owned restaurants where the staff cleared the room for them. He brought her to charity galas where the Valente name bought silence and admiration in equal measure.

He looked like a giddy young boy in love, showing her off to every Capo and associate like she was the greatest prize he had ever claimed. His hand on the small of her back. His mouth at her ear. The Don of the most powerful syndicate on the Eastern Seaboard, reduced to a fool by a woman with no family name and a talent for performance.

On the day I was discharged from the hospital, Dominic posted a nine-grid photo on his social media, the public-facing account that maintained the Valente family's image of legitimate wealth and domestic bliss.

In the golden hues of sunset, he stood on a romantic hot air balloon platform, gently cupping Daniela's rosy cheeks as they kissed passionately. The city sprawled beneath them. He looked free. He looked like a man who had never made a blood oath to another woman.

I left a comment.

[Wishing you two a lifetime of love, and a healthy baby on the way.]

Ten minutes later, my phone rang. It was Dominic. The screen lit up with his name, and the soldier outside my door glanced in through the window as if even the phone ringing was an event that required surveillance.

I didn't pick up.

Thirty minutes after that, I finished the discharge process alone. No escort. No driver waiting at the curb. The Don's wife, walking out of a hospital with a plastic bag of belongings and a heart monitor still taped to the inside of her wrist, and not a single soul from the Valente Family there to witness it.

And just as I walked past the OB-GYN department, I saw Dominic, and beside him was Daniela. Her hand rested on his arm with practiced ease, and her other hand sat over her stomach. Always over her stomach. Always when he was looking.