I overheard a young nurse at the consultation desk say sweetly to Daniela.

"Mrs. Valente, your husband really adores you. He comes with you every time, and even warms the ultrasound gel himself so you won't feel cold during the checkup."

The surrounding pregnant women looked at her with open admiration. The Don's wife. They thought she was the Don's wife. And why wouldn't they? He stood beside her like a man guarding something precious. He had never once stood beside me that way. Not in nine years.

My hand moved subconsciously to my stomach.

I remembered...

There had been a child here once. A heartbeat inside me that I had spoken to in the dark of the Valente estate when the hallways were empty and the soldiers had changed shifts and no one was listening. A small, impossible thing that had made the blood-bound union feel, for one brief season, like something other than a cage.

On the day of the car accident, the hit that everyone in the Family called an accident but that I knew in my bones was something else, I suffered a miscarriage due to blood loss. I cried while making a video call to Dominic on the encrypted line.

But all I saw was a naked Daniela on the screen, smiling as she said, "Mrs. Valente, your husband lost a game to me, so as punishment, he's currently tied to the bed. Is there something you need from him?"

I said nothing and hung up. My thumb pressed hard against the inside of my ring finger, against the band that was supposed to mean something, against the metal that had become nothing more than a shackle I couldn't remove.

Not even a minute passed before Dominic called back.

Holding a teary-eyed, wronged-looking Daniela in his arms, he exploded at me. "You're so petty and pathetic, Seraphina. Always making trouble!" His voice carried the particular cruelty of a man who has never been told no, who has confused authority with righteousness, who believed that volume alone could make him right.

And then, with disgust in his voice, he added, "You couldn't even hold on to your own baby. What can someone like you possibly do right?"

"Honestly, I wish that truck had finished the job and killed you." The words landed the way a bullet lands. Not with heat. With finality. With the understanding that the man who had sworn a blood oath to protect me had just wished me dead, and meant it, and would not remember saying it by morning.

Snapping back to the present, I was about to take a detour and walk away, to disappear down the corridor before either of them noticed me standing there like a ghost in their perfect picture, but Dominic walked toward me with that cold expression and snapped, "Why are you just standing there like an idiot?"

Startled, I instinctively tried to explain. "I wasn't following you. I really just ran into you by coincidence. I'm sorry if I disturbed you." The words came out before I could stop them. Nine years of conditioning. Nine years of apologizing for existing in a house that was supposed to be mine.

"Wait."

He frowned, and at the sound of that single word, I caught the flicker of jealousy in Daniela's eyes. It was quick, controlled, the way a woman who has survived on performance learns to manage every micro-expression. But I saw it. I had spent nine years learning to read the danger in that woman's face the way soldiers learn to read a room.

She clutched his arm a little tighter and smiled at me sweetly, her hand drifting back to her stomach with choreographed precision. "Mrs. Valente, thank you again for the blood donation. Without you, I'd still be so dizzy today. You saved me and my baby!"

"Dominic, won't you bring Mrs. Valente home with us? Please?" Her voice was silk over a blade. The request sounded like generosity. It was territory. She wanted me in the car. She wanted me to see.

Dominic dotingly tapped the tip of her nose and gently replied, "My sweet angel, whatever you say goes." The Don of the Valente Family. The man who decided which soldiers lived and which ones disappeared. Reduced to a puppet by a woman who placed her hand over her stomach like a shield every time the light shifted.

Since I had to return to the estate to gather my things anyway, I didn't refuse Daniela's "kindness." There were documents I needed. Things hidden in places she hadn't thought to look. A passport she didn't know I still had.

Inside the spacious black car, the armored sedan that ferried the Don through territory he controlled, silence hung heavily. The driver kept his eyes forward. The partition was up. The leather seats smelled of expensive cologne and something else, something faintly sweet and wrong. And then, as if right on cue, I spotted something wedged between the seat cushions.

A pair of still-damp lace panties.

"Oh my!" Daniela gasped, her hand flying to her mouth with the precision of a woman who had placed them there herself and rehearsed the discovery. "How did that end up here?"

"Dominic, didn't you say you took care of it already?"

Biting her lip, Daniela threw herself into his arms, blushing as she playfully hit his chest.

Dominic chuckled and apologized, blaming everything on himself, yet his eyes subtly shifted, watching my reaction.

But when he saw that I wasn't angry at all, the same restlessness he'd felt back in the hospital room crept back into his chest, inexplicably heavy.

"Seraphina," he said coldly, "you've been glued to your phone ever since you got in the car."

His voice carried a note of jealousy, low and controlled, the way a man accustomed to absolute authority sounds when something slips beyond his reach.

"Chatting with your cousin? Or someone else I don't know?"

I had just finished booking my plane ticket and locked my phone screen.

"Just reading the news," I replied calmly.

But rather than easing his mood, my answer only deepened the frown between his brows. The silver lighter appeared in his hand, turning end over end between his fingers, the soft click of metal filling the silence of the armored sedan.

Catching me off guard, he snatched the phone from my hand.

"What's your password?" he demanded. The lighter stopped moving.

"My birthday," I said.

Nine years of marriage. Nine years of a blood-bound union.

A six-digit password that simple, and yet, he still failed to unlock my phone before it locked itself from too many incorrect attempts.

The rest of the ride passed in silence. The enforcer behind the wheel kept his eyes on the road. The one in the passenger seat did not turn around. They knew the temperature of the air between us. Everyone in the Valente household always knew.

When we arrived at the estate, Dominic immediately helped Daniela, who was suffering from pregnancy nausea, into the master bedroom with a look of deep concern. The soldiers stationed along the hallway straightened as he passed, eyes forward, postures locked. He moved through his own home the way he moved through every room: as though it had been built around him.

Then he instructed the cook to prepare all her favorite dishes.

Coming back downstairs, he caught a glimpse of me walking alone toward the guest room. Something about my lonely silhouette made him pause. My shadow stretched long across the marble floor of the foyer, thin and solitary against the dark wood paneling and the oil portraits of Valente men who had come before him.

After a moment's thought, he said to the cook, "Prepare a couple of Seraphina's usual dishes too. Set the table for three tonight."

In the guest room, I opened my suitcase, and every piece of clothing inside had been slashed to ribbons. Silk blouses gutted seam to seam. Dresses split open like wounds. The kind of damage that required patience, a sharp blade, and hatred held at a steady simmer.

Thankfully, my passport and the documents tucked deep inside, the ones that mattered, were untouched. My thumb pressed against the inside of my ring finger where the wedding band used to sit. The skin there was smooth now. Almost healed.

Just as I gathered everything and turned to leave, I found Daniela blocking the door.

She held a black bottle in her hand, eyeing me with scorn as she scanned me from head to toe. Her other hand rested on her stomach, that practiced, deliberate gesture, though no one else was in the room to perform for. Old habits. Or perhaps she simply never stopped performing.

"Wow, Seraphina. You've got some nerve," she sneered.

"Even after I waltzed in here and made you the laughingstock of every Family wife on the Eastern Seaboard, you're still shamelessly clinging to the Valente name like some parasite."

"Oh right, your grandmother died last month, didn't she?" Her tone was syrupy and cruel, the kind of sweetness that coats a razor.

"Now that your precious old woman's gone, I guess you've got no one left to rely on. Well, it makes sense you'd cling to Dominic like he's your last lifeline."

She suddenly remembered something, laughing as she brought her phone screen up to my face.

"Oh right, remember the day you begged Dominic to send the helicopter to take you to the hospital to see your grandmother one last time?"

"Wanna know why he didn't take you?"

"Because he had promised to take me to the beach to watch the sunset. Look, the photo of us kissing on my phone screen was taken during that moment."

The room went very still. The kind of stillness that precedes violence in houses like this one.

Unable to endure it any longer, I slapped the phone out of her hand and grabbed her by the throat.

The black bottle in her hand slipped and fell. Glass shattered against the hardwood floor.

The sharp, acrid stench of gasoline instantly filled the air. It soaked into the slashed remains of my clothes, pooled between the floorboards, and the guest room became something else entirely. Not a room. A trap.

In the chaos, Daniela hastily lit the gasoline on the floor.

Thick smoke filled the air, and flames erupted violently, climbing the curtains, devouring the bedframe, turning the guest room into an inferno that roared against the old walls of the Valente estate. The fire moved with a hunger that felt almost personal.

Having just been discharged from the hospital, I quickly succumbed to the fumes, my body growing weak as I collapsed to the ground. The smoke was everywhere. In my lungs, behind my eyes, pressing down on my chest like a hand.

Through the haze, I heard Dominic's voice.

"Seraphina!"

Then came the sounds of soldiers and household staff trying to stop him.

"Boss, it's too dangerous! Wait for the extinguishers, we've got men coming from the south wing—"

"Move! Seraphina is still inside!"

His voice cut through the chaos like a blade. For one moment, one fraction of a second that I would carry with me across an ocean, I heard something in it that I had not heard in nine years. Something raw. Something real.

In the end, he ignored their warnings and rushed into the flames.

What he didn't expect was to find Daniela inside too.

"Dominic... help..." Her voice was thin and trembling, and her hand found her stomach again, the choreography flawless even through smoke and fire. The gesture that had shielded her for months. The gesture that had rewritten the hierarchy of this house.

She hadn't even finished her sentence before he scooped her up in his arms, never once glancing at me.

Without hesitation, he turned and walked away. The flames closed behind him like a curtain falling. And I lay on the floor of the guest room, alone, the heat pressing against my skin, watching the doorway where he had stood. Where he had chosen. The way he had always chosen.

Thirty minutes later, after calming Daniela down, he searched the entire house, but I was nowhere to be found. Every room. Every hallway. The wine cellar, the east wing, the garden perimeter where the soldiers kept watch. He sent Marco to check the cameras. He called the gate. Nothing. I had vanished from the Valente estate like smoke clearing after a fire, and the house felt different without me in it, though he would not have been able to say how.

Late that night, at the airport.

After mailing a package at the terminal counter, I boarded a flight to the UK, coughing as I made my way down the aisle. My lungs still burned from the smoke. My throat was raw. The bruise on my wrist from where I had dragged myself across the floor was already darkening. But my passport was in my hand, and the documents were in my bag, and the ring finger on my left hand was bare.

Just before the plane took off, my phone buzzed with a text from Dominic.

[I don't have time to play hide-and-seek with you.]

[Daniela has a prenatal check-up tomorrow at 10 a.m. Come with her, and get your lungs checked too.]

I didn't reply. Instead, I removed the SIM card and powered off the phone, dropping it into my coat pocket like something dead.

'Dominic. From this day forward, you and I are done. We will never see each other again.'

The next day, at the Family's private clinic on the Upper East Side.

"Dominic, is our baby okay?"

Meeting Daniela's pitiful, anxious eyes, Dominic immediately pulled her into his arms, speaking to her in a soft, reassuring voice.

"The doctor said the baby is perfectly healthy. No signs of trauma from what happened yesterday."

"That's such a relief," she breathed out, her voice trembling slightly. Her hand drifted to rest over her stomach, fingers splayed in that careful, practiced way she had perfected, always when he was watching.