I stood against the door for a long, long time. My legs went numb before I finally managed to calm down.

Since I couldn't get out, I might as well start packing what was mine.

I threw every dress, every handbag Damiano had ever given me into the trash. Silk, cashmere, leather soft as skin. All of it purchased with laundered money and handed over like I should be grateful. Every piece went into the bin without ceremony.

It wasn't until I was done that I realized.

All I could actually take with me was an ID card and my personal documents. Nothing else. Five years in the Mancini compound, and the only things that were truly mine fit inside a single envelope.

Damiano didn't let me out until the following evening, for dinner.

He noticed the things in the trash. I saw him pause. His eyes moved over the pile of designer labels, and for one beat the muscle at his jaw tightened.

"What kind of tantrum is this?"

I just smiled faintly.

"They got old. I stopped liking them. So I tossed them."

That shut him up. He was quiet for a beat, and when he spoke again, it was in that tone of his, the one that made everything sound like charity:

"I'll buy you new ones in a couple days. Consider it an apology."

"Come eat. And be nice to Luciana. She's only staying a few days."

"Stop being jealous and picking fights with her."

He paused at the end, just slightly. His fingers moved to his watch strap, adjusted it, then let go.

"Burning those things... I may have gone too far."

"But people need to move forward. The directress has been gone a long time now."

I nodded. My voice was flat.

"Fine."

He'd gotten what should have been my forgiveness, but something about it made Damiano uneasy. He stood in the doorway of the dining room where two of his soldiers sat at a far table finishing their meals, and I could feel him watching me the way he watched men he wasn't sure of anymore.

I was standing right in front of him, yet he felt like I was already far away.

Tomorrow was the last day of my arrangement with the Valente Winslow. My plan was simple: wake up, go through with the surgery, and leave.

But in the dead of night, the bedroom door slammed open. Before I could even register what was happening, Damiano hauled me out of bed and dragged me down the hall to the room next door.

His grip was brutal, like he wanted to break me apart. The moment he let go, I slammed into the wall. Pain exploded across my back and my vision went black. Somewhere down the corridor a soldier shifted but did not come closer. No one intervened in the heir's private quarters. That was understood.

Before I could recover, his voice came down from above, raw with fury.

"Serafina, is this how badly you can't stand Luciana? You're so jealous you'd drug her?"

My ears rang. My vision swam, then slowly focused.

On the bed, Luciana's cheeks were flushed, her clothes disheveled. She was practically draped over Damiano, whimpering and pressing herself into his arms.

"It wasn't me."

My voice was hoarse, but I forced the words out. "I didn't do anything like that."

The moment I finished speaking, Luciana flinched as though she'd been struck. The tears came instantly.

"Serafina... the only thing I ate tonight was the dessert you had Ruggiero bring me. I didn't touch anything else..."

"I had someone bring you dessert?" I stared at her, my expression ice cold.

"You burned the directress's keepsakes, and you think I'd send you a treat? Luciana, do you really think that highly of yourself?"

My voice dropped lower, shaking with barely contained rage. "And what would I even gain from drugging you? If you're going to frame someone, at least come up with a believable story."

"Enough with the excuses."

Damiano cut in, irritation thick in his voice. He stood over me, the full weight of his authority pressing down like something physical.

"Ruggiero already admitted you told her to do it."

"Witness and evidence, both accounted for. How am I supposed to believe you?"

The cold seeped into my chest, inch by inch. I hadn't imagined that in Damiano's mind, I was someone capable of this.

"What witness? What evidence?"

I bit down hard on my lip, the words grinding out between my teeth.

"This compound has security cameras everywhere. If you really think I did it, then check the footage. One look and you'll know the truth."

I held his gaze, stubborn, refusing to bend. Somewhere behind the walls I could hear the low hum of the surveillance system he'd installed himself, the one that watched every corridor and gate of the Mancini estate.

I would not confess to something I didn't do.

Damiano hesitated. Just for a second.

But then Luciana let out a soft, shuddering gasp and clung to him tighter, her voice trembling and paper-thin. Her fingers rose to the pearls at her throat, touched them once, then fell away.

"Damiano, it hurts so much... please help me, please..."

Her collar had slipped. Pale skin spilled into view.

Damiano's hand froze. Instinct told him to push her away.

But Luciana ducked her head and sank her teeth into her own arm without a moment's hesitation. Hard.

Blood welled up instantly.

Bright red, streaming down her skin. Impossible to look away from.

"I know you only see me as a little sister, Damiano. I know this whole marriage these past few days was just an act. It's my fault for letting myself get lost in how sweet it felt, for letting myself imagine you might care about me, even a little..."

Her voice shook. The tears fell harder.

"I'll handle it myself. Don't worry about me. I don't want to be a burden to either of you anymore..."

Damiano's expression changed completely. He grabbed her arm to stop her from biting down again, pulling her into his arms to hold her still. When he spoke, his voice was rough and strained.

"Stop hurting yourself. I'll help you."

I stared at Damiano, almost certain I'd misheard him.

But there was no guilt on his face. Only disappointment. In me.

"Serafina, I thought you were different from all those petty, scheming women. Above using dirty tricks to bully people. But I was wrong."

My throat clenched. It felt like someone was carving my chest open, one slow cut at a time.

"Since you're the one who drugged her," Damiano said, refusing to meet my eyes, "then the consequences are yours to bear."

Luciana nestled obediently against his chest, but her gaze found mine over his shoulder, bright with undisguised triumph. Her fingers drifted to the pearls at her throat, touched them once, and fell away. She didn't need to touch them again. She wasn't cornered. She'd already won.

A violent cramp tore through my lower abdomen, something twisting and churning inside me. The pain nearly buckled my knees.

I gritted through it, my voice cold and cutting. "Damiano, where is your brain? I drugged Luciana and then sent my own man to be the cure?"

"And when you could've just called the Winslow physician..."

Before I could finish, Luciana let out a soft whimper and pressed her hand to her wound.

"Damiano, just go. Don't worry about me. I'm afraid if you actually help me, my sister will hate me even more."

"And don't blame her, either. She just loves you too much. That's why she did something like this."

I'd already decided to let go of Damiano, but I still couldn't stand there and let Luciana spew lies that dragged my character through the mud.

"Luciana, have you no shame? You drugged yourself, then threw yourself at my man and pointed the finger at me. Were you raised by wolves?"

Crack.

The words barely left my mouth before Damiano stood and slapped me across the face.

The force whipped my head to the side. A high-pitched ringing flooded my ears.

"Serafina, Luciana never once said she wanted anything done to you, but you haven't stopped attacking her. Guess that's what happens when you grow up in a church orphanage. Not an ounce of class."

"Since you love drugging people so much, tonight you're going to sit here and watch exactly what that costs."

Before I could react, he'd dragged me to a chair and bound me to it with strips of clothing.

As he pulled off his shirt, the compound was silent around us, the hallway beyond the door holding its breath the way every room in the Mancini house did when the heir's temper turned. He left me with one last sentence: "You brought this on yourself. Don't blame me."

A bone-deep chill spread through me.

The entire night, I watched the man I'd loved for ten years sleep with another woman.

Panting. Wet kisses. The sounds circled my ears like a curse that wouldn't break.

And the whole time, my abdomen screamed with pain. Cold sweat soaked through every layer I wore.

I tried to call for help, but Damiano dismissed it as another ploy for attention. Moments later, Luciana's moans grew louder, drowning me out.

At first I still cried. Then the tears ran dry, and all that was left was numbness.

Every image seared into my eyes was the same reminder: this is what happens when you love the wrong person.

The last shred of feeling I had left died that night.

The moaning lasted until dawn. The compound woke around us in small increments: a gate latch somewhere below, the distant clink of Adrian Ruggiero's keys as she began her morning rounds. None of it reached inside this room. Only then did Damiano finally untie me.

"Learned your lesson?"

He looked down at me from above.

When no answer came, he glanced down and saw my face drained white, my consciousness slipping.

Panic flickered across his features. He checked beneath me and found a pool of red soaking through.

He bent to scoop me up, ready to rush to the clinic, but Luciana's voice drifted from the bed.

"Damiano, you were too rough last night. I think I'm bleeding down there. Could you come take a look?"

"If not, you could just send one of the Ruggieros. That's fine too."

Her voice was hoarse, fragile. She looked utterly pitiful.

Damiano hesitated. His resolve softened. It had been Luciana's first time, after all, and he hadn't exactly held back.

So I watched him set me down, watched him tell me to wait.

But I was in so much pain.

I forced myself upright, called a car on my own, and staggered toward the door one lurching step at a time. My wedding band bit into my finger. I turned it once with my thumb, slow and deliberate. I had stopped hoping. I was deciding.

"Where are you going, sis?"

Just as I reached the top of the stairs, Luciana rushed over and seized my wrist.

"I'm so sorry, sis. This is all my fault. I'm the reason you and Damiano never got to sign the papers."

She tilted her face up at me, fresh tears spilling down her cheeks.

"Hit me, yell at me, I'll take it all. Just please don't break up with him over me..."

My head swam. A low buzz filled my ears.

"Let go." My throat was so dry it burned.

Luciana only gripped tighter, stepping closer, as if terrified I'd slip away. Her free hand rose to her pearls, touched them, then touched them again. Twice. She was cornered, and she knew it, because I was actually leaving.

"Please don't leave, sis. Damiano really does love you. He's just soft-hearted. What he feels for me is only habit. Don't misunderstand him..."

Love me?

The pain in my abdomen clenched like a fist. My legs nearly gave out, and a wave of nausea surged up with the irritation.

"Enough." My voice went cold. "Luciana, who exactly are you performing for?"

I yanked my hand back.

I barely used any force.

But in that instant, her body went limp and she tipped backward.

"Ah!"

Her shriek split the stairwell open.

I froze for a fraction of a second, then reached for her on instinct.

My fingertips grazed her sleeve, but she was already falling.

Weightlessness seized me.

Luciana's grip dragged me down with her.

The world flipped.

My back, my elbows, my knees slammed against the hard edges of each step, over and over.

Thud.

I hit the ground floor hard. My vision went black.

Then I heard footsteps, fast and frantic.

"Sera!"

Damiano's voice.

He came tearing down the stairs, steps uneven, more rattled than I'd ever heard him.

Through blurred vision, I saw him reach me.

But before he could get close, a hand caught his sleeve.

"Damiano..."

Luciana's voice, thin as thread.

"I lost my footing. It wasn't her fault. She grabbed for me and got pulled down too..."

"Go check on her first. She fell harder than I did..."

Damiano's movement stuttered.

He'd been about to come to me. But that pause was all it took. His eyes landed on Luciana's disheveled state instead.

Her collar had shifted, exposing the marks he'd left on her skin the night before.

His throat bobbed.

I thought, even if Damiano had no conscience at all, he'd at least check on me first. I was pregnant. I'd just tumbled down an entire flight of stairs in the Mancini compound, and not a single soldier, not a single retainer, had come running. The house obeyed him. Only him. And he chose her.

I watched him gather Luciana into his arms.

Careful. Gentle. Like she was something precious and breakable.

"Let me take you to the Nurse first. You're already fragile, and yesterday I... nothing else can happen to you."

Damiano did not look at me once when he said it. His voice carried through the hallway of the Mancini compound like something rehearsed, something he had decided on the walk down the corridor, and his eyes stayed fixed on the woman draped against his chest as though she were the only living thing in the room. The hallway's pendant lights threw long shadows across the marble, and I could hear the faint creak of a soldier shifting his weight outside the stairwell door, pretending he had not witnessed any of it.

Luciana clutched the front of his shirt, her voice small. "But what about Serafina..."

"I'll come back for her."

He carried Luciana out without looking back. His footsteps faded down the hall, each one precise, unhurried, the stride of a man whose authority meant he never had to rush. Somewhere below, a car door opened and closed. An engine turned over. Then nothing.

I was the only one left, lying on the cold floor.

I stared at the ceiling. The crown molding up there was hand-carved, old money made visible, and the plaster had a hairline crack running from the chandelier mount to the far wall. I watched it the way you watch something meaningless when your mind is trying to leave your body. My vision blurred, slowly, then all at once.

I laughed.

It came out hoarse and hollow, the sound swallowed by the empty corridor before it could echo. If the soldier outside heard it, he did not come.

My hand found my stomach. My fingers were shaking.

"Baby, did you see that?"

"Your daddy doesn't love Mommy. He doesn't love you either."

"How could Mommy... ever dare bring you into this world."

The words left me in a whisper meant for no one alive enough to hear them. I pressed my palm flat against my abdomen and felt the nothing there, the terrible quiet of a body that had already made its own decision while the man who should have cared was carrying someone else down the stairs. The floor beneath me was cold and smooth, imported stone that the Mancini Winslow had paid a fortune to lay, and it held no warmth for anyone.

I don't know how long I lay there before my phone buzzed beside me.

The ride I'd called earlier had arrived.

I pressed my palms against the floor and pushed myself up, inch by inch. My body felt like it had been taken apart and put back wrong. Every movement sent tremors of pain through me. The stairwell banister was close enough to reach, and I locked my fingers around it, the wrought iron biting into my grip. The compound was silent the way it always went silent when the heir left and the household staff scattered to their posts, pretending the night had not happened.

But I stood up.

One step at a time, I walked toward the door.

Blood ran down my legs. I couldn't feel it anymore. The driver waiting outside the compound gate did not ask questions. In this neighborhood, on this block, you did not ask questions about a woman leaving a Mancini property in the small hours with blood on her dress. You opened the door and you drove.

By the time they wheeled me into the operating room, my consciousness was already slipping. The Nurse was not the private Mancini clinic. It was a public emergency ward, fluorescent-lit, the curtain around my gurney a thin blue barrier between me and a hallway full of strangers who did not know my name or which Winslow's compound I had just crawled out of. Voices drifted in and out.

"Miscarriage... she needs a D&C..."

"Where's her Winslow?"

"There's no Winslow."

The words landed somewhere distant, on the other side of a pane of glass I was slipping behind. No Winslow. The phrase should have stung, but it was only true. The Bellandis had never claimed me, not really, and the man who had promised to had just carried my sister out of the house while I bled on the floor. I let my eyes close. The surgical light above me burned white through my lids, and then there was nothing at all.

I don't know how much time passed before I opened my eyes again.

Before I could figure out where I was, the door slammed open.

"Serafina!"

Damiano stormed in, breathing hard. His jacket was gone. His sleeves were rolled to the forearm, and there was a smear of something dark along his cuff that might have been Luciana's blood or the residue of the surgical wing's antiseptic. The overhead light caught the face of his watch, and even from the bed I could see how tight the leather strap was cinched, the skin beneath it blanched white. That sound, the creak of the strap adjusting against his wrist, had become a language I understood better than Italian. Someone was about to pay for his mood.

He crossed the room in three strides and seized my wrist. His grip was so tight I thought the bones would splinter. The IV stand rattled. The heart monitor beside me spiked once, a sharp digital protest that neither of us acknowledged.

"You have the nerve to just lie here?"

His voice was low, but the fury in it was unmistakable. It was the voice he used in back rooms when a capo brought bad numbers, the voice that made soldiers step out of doorways to give him space. He used it on me like I was one of them, like I was someone who owed him something and had failed to deliver.

"Luciana's spleen ruptured because you pushed her. Massive hemorrhaging. She's in emergency surgery right now. You're the same blood type. You're giving her a transfusion."

The fog in my head cleared instantly.

What he was accusing me of was so absurd that for a moment I forgot the pain entirely. My mind replayed the stairwell in a single flash: Luciana's fingers rising to the pearls at her throat, the pivot of her body as she misjudged the step, the sound of her falling that came before I ever moved. I had been standing three steps above her. I had not touched her. And yet here stood Damiano Mancini, heir to a syndicate built on omertà and witness corroboration, choosing to believe one woman's silence over another's words because belief was not the point. Control was.

"I didn't push her." I wrenched my hand free, my voice raw and cold. "Damiano, have you lost your mind? You want me to give blood? I just had a—"

"You're still denying it!"

He cut me off, his eyes darkening with something vicious. The strap on his watch creaked again, louder now, and the fluorescent light above us hummed as if the room itself were bracing for what came next.

"I saw it with my own eyes. You pushed her down those stairs. Luciana is the one covering for you because she's too kind, afraid I'd blame you. She protected you, and you won't even save her life?!"

I watched him construct his own version of reality and convict me with it. It was so ridiculous I almost laughed. In the Mancini house, truth was whatever the heir decided it was, and everyone else arranged their faces accordingly. "Who asked for her kindness? I didn't do it, and I didn't do it!"

"If something happens to Luciana, how are you going to keep your place in the Bellandi Winslow? Is that what you want? For them to disown you? Would that make you happy?"

He wasn't listening to a single word I said. His brow furrowed like he genuinely believed he was looking out for me, like threatening me with the Winslow that had never wanted me was an act of mercy.

"You and Luciana have the same blood type," he said. "You're donating. Consider it your apology."

Something lodged in my chest. I couldn't breathe. The Nurse room was small and the walls were close and Damiano filled whatever space was left with the force of a man who had been raised to believe his presence alone settled arguments. My thumb found my wedding band and turned it once, a motion so slight he would never have noticed it. But I felt it. The cool metal rotating against skin. I had stopped hoping. I had started deciding.

"I told you. I didn't push her." Every word was deliberate. "And I just—"

"Stop pretending to be sick." Damiano's frown deepened, his patience visibly fraying. "Serafina, when did you become like this? You won't own up to what you did, and now you're playing the victim?"

I lost every last shred of desire to communicate with him.

When someone has already decided you're guilty, nothing you say will ever be the right thing.