When I lost my baby in a car wreck, Dominic just happened to be driving by with his personal aide in the passenger seat.

He saw my white dress soaked in blood, shielded Penelope's curious eyes with his hand, and coldly muttered, "Bad luck. Don't look." Then he sped off.

That same night, while I was in the bedroom of the townhouse on Sloane territory, I found a lace bra stuffed in the corner of our closet. A bra that definitely wasn't mine.

I stood there for a long time. The house was quiet the way houses in this world are always quiet. Not peaceful. Monitored. Two soldiers stationed at the front door, another in the car idling at the curb. The low hum of a surveillance feed running somewhere behind the walls. I had lived inside this silence for seven years, and I had mistaken it for safety.

Closing the closet door, I calmly dialed a number. "Salvatore, I've made up my mind. I can leave the city next week and start handling the books for your operation."

"That's wonderful news, Olivia! We're excited to have you with us!" he replied, and I could hear the satisfaction beneath the warmth. A man like Salvatore Mancini didn't get excited. He got strategic. Recruiting the woman who had managed every laundered dollar flowing through the Sloane syndicate for the better part of a decade was the quietest act of war anyone had ever committed against Dominic.

I knew what I was doing. I knew what it meant.

The second the call ended, Dominic walked out of the bathroom. His hair was damp, and beads of water still clung to his skin. The silver lighter sat on the edge of the sink where he'd left it. Penny's lighter. He carried it everywhere, never lit a thing with it.

He used to take five minutes in the shower. Lately, he'd been spending at least half an hour, always with his phone in hand.

"Who were you talking to?" he asked, not even looking up from his screen.

"I was on the phone with Salvatore Mancini," I replied honestly.

The name should have stopped him cold. Mancini. The family that had been locked in a cold war with the Sloanes for a decade. The name alone, spoken inside this house, should have made the soldiers downstairs shift on their feet.

"Ah," he said, barely paying attention. As usual, he wasn't really listening.

And for the first time, I didn't get mad or make a fuss. I just started drafting my formal severance of allegiance on my phone. The language was careful, clinical. In this world, you didn't simply leave. You documented your departure in terms that couldn't be mistaken for betrayal, even when betrayal was exactly what it was.

When he reached for his water glass, likely expecting the chamomile I used to prepare for him every night, he paused, noticing it wasn't there.

Finally, he spared me a glance.

"I showed your CT scan to a specialist. He said it was just a minor injury, nothing serious. Just keep the wound dry."

"Alright," I said without looking up, still typing.

This afternoon, I'd had eight stitches in my leg from the wreck. Worse still, I had just found out I was four weeks pregnant and already showing signs of miscarriage.

The doctor had apologized, saying that if I had been brought to the hospital sooner, the baby might have been saved.

If I had been brought sooner. If the Don of the Sloane family had stopped his car instead of shielding his aide's eyes from the sight of me bleeding on the pavement. If he had carried me to the back seat the way he carried Penelope's shopping bags and dry-cleaning and whatever else she needed ferried from place to place. If he had done any single thing differently.

But he hadn't. And the baby was gone.

Seeing the blank expression on my face, Dominic frowned and started walking over to check what I was doing.

But just then, his phone buzzed.

His lips curved into a smile, and without a second thought, he turned and disappeared into his study. The door closed with the soft, definitive click of a man entering the only room in the house where he actually wanted to be.

Once he was out of sight, I opened up my private account and scrolled through his feed. Sure enough, there was a new post, visible to everyone but me. He had blocked me from seeing it. The Don of one of the most powerful syndicates on the Eastern Seaboard, and he was hiding social media posts from the woman who shared his bed like a teenager with a secret.

It was an apology letter.

I shouldn't have let the cutest aide in the world down. Promised her dinner after the sit-down, but business got in the way, and I made her wait a whole ten minutes. Totally my fault. I'll do better from now on, be a good boss.

I liked the post. Let him see that. Let him wonder how I found it and what I thought and whether he should come out of his study and say something. Let the wondering sit in his chest the way seven years of silence had sat in mine.

In the same breath, I received a notification from Salvatore: the arrangement, laid out in terms that any family lawyer would recognize. My skills, my knowledge, my loyalty, transferred to the Mancini operation in exchange for protection, compensation, and a life that didn't require me to bleed on a sidewalk while the man I loved drove past.

I clicked the link and signed without hesitation.

My thumb pressed against the inside of my ring finger. The bare skin where a ring had never been. Seven years, and he had never once offered. I pulled my hand away and set the phone down.

The next morning, Dominic woke up early and brought back bagels and pastries from a well-known bakery in Midtown. The kind of place where made men took their families on Sunday mornings, where the owner knew which orders went to which houses and never asked questions.

Just as I was about to open the bag with chocolate croissants, he slapped my hand away.

"You like peanut butter bagels, right? I got one just for you."

I froze for a second before realizing. The chocolate croissants weren't for me. They were for his aide. For Penelope Vitale.

I couldn't hold back anymore. "We've been together for seven years, and you still don't know I'm allergic to peanuts?"

His expression darkened, and he stood abruptly, snapping, "Stop making a fuss. Eat or don't. I don't care."

The Don's voice. The one that ended conversations in sit-downs, that made capos twice his age look at the floor. He used it on me the way he used it on everyone. As if I were just another person in the room who needed to stop talking.

As he prepared to leave, I walked into the bedroom and came back with a bag.

"When you see Penelope later, do me a favor and return this to her."

His brows knitted together before taking the bag. When he looked inside and saw the lace bra, a look of surprise flashed in his eyes. He opened his mouth like he was about to explain something, but when he saw my calm, indifferent face, he only said, "I'll tell her to stop being so careless."

"Yeah," I replied with a quiet tone.

The lighter was in his hand now. I hadn't seen him pick it up, but there it was, rolling between his thumb and forefinger in that slow, absent rhythm. Penny's lighter. The dead sister's keepsake, turning and turning while he stood in our kitchen holding another woman's underwear and deciding how little he needed to say.

Sensing my low mood, Dominic offered, "I can give you a ride to work today."

Seven years together, and not once had he driven me to work, no matter how bad the weather was. He always kept Family business and personal life separate. Those were his words. His rule. The line he drew so cleanly that I spent years believing it was principle instead of what it actually was: a way to keep me at a distance he could manage.

But Penelope? On her first day as his personal aide, she was already getting chauffeured by the Don of the Sloane family. The black armored sedan. The soldier holding the door. The whole performance of protection that I had never once been offered.

I pressed my thumb against the inside of my ring finger again. The bare skin. The absence.

"No need," I said. "I'll manage."

As I sat there turning over the difference between how Dominic treated his aide and the woman who had shared his bed for seven years, my fork slipped from my fingers and clattered against the tile floor. My hands were trembling when I bent to retrieve it.

By the time I straightened up, Dominic was already standing at the entrance of the kitchen, jacket on, keys in hand. He didn't look back.

"Something came up at the club. I'll give you a ride next time," he said, and the front door closed behind him before the sentence had fully settled in the room.

The two soldiers stationed outside the townhouse didn't acknowledge me when I left thirty minutes later. They never did. I was the Don's woman in name, which meant I existed in a category no one knew how to handle: not family, not civilian, not quite anything that had a protocol.

I limped into the back office of the Sloane import-export front on Mulberry Street. My desk sat in the narrow room behind the legitimate operation, where the real books lived. For some reason, every associate I passed that morning looked at me with something between pity and discomfort, the way men look at someone who's already dead but hasn't been told yet.

Later, while filling my mug in the small kitchen off the hallway, I overheard two of the women from the front office whispering to each other through the half-open door.

"So it's true? The Don really passed over Olivia for that girl? The Vitale girl?"

"You should have seen it this morning. Penelope came in with some little stain on her dress, and he picked her up. Right there in the back room, in front of everyone at the sit-down. Carried her like she was made of glass."

My hand slipped. The mug hit the edge of the counter and shattered on the floor, and the whispering stopped like someone had cut a wire.

I crouched down and gathered the pieces one by one, placing each shard carefully into the trash can without saying a word. Neither woman came around the corner. Neither woman said my name.

I ended up working late. The books for the Mancini transition needed to be clean before I left, and I owed the operation that much, even if I owed Dominic nothing. It was past ten o'clock when I felt a weight settle across my shoulders.

"Olivia." Dominic's voice was low, close to my ear. He draped his coat over me. "Why didn't you respond to my messages?"

I didn't turn around. Instead, I reached for my phone and checked the screen. One message from him: What flavor of milkshake do you usually like?

Three years ago, during the first real heat of summer, I had asked him for a milkshake. Just that. Something cold and sweet on a day that felt endless. He'd looked at me the way he looked at associates who brought him problems instead of solutions. Pure disdain.

"Milkshake? You want me to order a milkshake for you? Olivia, you're almost 30. Don't make me sick with this childish crap."

Those exact words. I'd memorized them the way you memorize the location of a bruise so you stop pressing on it by accident.

But now, behind me, there he was. Bringing me a milkshake.

I kept my eyes fixed on the computer screen and ignored the sweating cup he'd set beside my keyboard. The sweetness of it reached me anyway, faint and artificial.

I could feel his expression shifting. The silence had a texture to it, the particular quality of Dominic Sloane realizing something wasn't going the way he expected.

"You used to beg me for this," he said. Confused. As if I were the one who had changed the rules.

"It's past ten. If I drink it now, I won't be able to sleep," I said, and my voice came out flat. Emptied of everything I used to pour into it when I spoke to him.

A pause. The kind of pause that, in the old days, would have sent me scrambling to soften whatever I'd said, to smooth the crease forming between his brows.

Then, cold: "I'm going to the bathroom. We'll go home together after."