This was their child.

And my baby, at this moment, was nothing but a cold corpse.

"Adriana, does your leg still hurt? Here, take a few of these for the pain."

The concern and tenderness in his eyes were exactly as they had always been, the same face the whole Family trusted, but all of it was just a lie meant to keep me numb.

I looked at the pills in his hand and remembered the words I'd just overheard through that door.

"Dominic, the medicine's too bitter. Can I take it a little later?"

You've already killed one of my children. At least leave me the right to be a mother, all right?

Dominic hesitated for only a second before he smiled and stroked my hair. "You're a mother now. How can you still act like a child? You worked so hard bringing him into this world, and now your leg hurts on top of it. It breaks my heart. I couldn't sleep all night. Adriana, take a little pity on your husband, won't you? I've got to be a good father to our son too."

"I put honey in the water. It's sweet. Come, let me feed you."

No. That's not my baby. That's yours and Vittoria's!

Dominic brought the pills to my lips, giving me no chance to refuse again. Somewhere in the quiet of the Family's private clinic, a soldier shifted his weight outside the door, and the small sound seemed enormous.

The blood ran cold through my whole body. I closed my eyes and swallowed the pills dry, without touching the honey water.

That kind of false sweetness, I didn't want it!

The drug took hold fast. My lower belly burned as if a fire had been lit inside it, as if a knife were carving me open, and blood flowed out from below.

"Adriana, what's wrong?"

Dominic called for the doctor. The pain dragged me under.

Through my fading consciousness, I heard the doctor say, "Don Falcone, the lining of her womb has been completely eaten away. She'll never be able to have children again."

Dominic let out a long breath of relief.

When I opened my eyes again, his eyes were rimmed red, and he looked at me with a face full of heartbreak. "Adriana, the doctor said you suddenly had a severe hemorrhage after the birth. You won't be able to have children anymore."

"Don't be sad. At least we already have Matteo. When he grows up, I know he'll take good care of you."

Matteo?

He'd already picked out a name for Vittoria's child, this fast?

Dominic turned away the nurse who offered to clean me up. Setting aside his own obsession with cleanliness, the thing every man in the Family knew him for, he carried in the warm water himself and washed away the blood.

He told me his mother wanted to see the firstborn heir of the bloodline, so the dowager had already taken the baby away to the estate.

By the time all of it was done, it was deep into the night. Beyond the clinic walls, the territory had gone silent, the way it did only in the small hours when even the enforcers slept.

I looked at the weariness on his face and forced a small smile. "I'm fine. You've had a long day too. Go rest."

Dominic kissed my forehead. "All right. If you need anything, wake me. Tomorrow I'll take you to bring Matteo home, and from now on the three of us will build a good life together."

Once he was fast asleep, I quietly picked up his phone.

To prove his loyalty to me, Dominic had never once locked his screen. A man with nothing to hide, or so the whole famiglia believed.

But what I'd never known was that he'd set up a hidden second system beneath it.

And the password to switch into it was Vittoria's birthday.

As the system switched over, the wallpaper changed to a photo of him and Vittoria together, young, from before any of this, before the alliance pact had ever bound his name to mine.

There was only one person in his messages too. Vittoria. When I opened the thread, a photo of Vittoria holding a baby stung my eyes.

"Dominic, look how beautiful our child is. When he grows up, he'll be just as handsome as you."

That baby was the exact one Dominic had brought to show me that evening.

The further up I scrolled through their messages, the colder my heart grew.

Through the eight months I was pregnant, Dominic had always been away, business for the Family, sit-downs in other cities, deals that could not wait. The days he'd actually spent by my side, I could count on two hands.

I hadn't wanted to get in the way of the Family's work, so I'd quietly endured the misery of morning sickness alone, going back and forth to the clinic for my checkups by myself.

Only now did I understand. So it turned out those so-called trips for the Family were nothing but his excuse to be at Vittoria's side, tending to her pregnancy.

Among the tens of thousands of photos, every moment of Vittoria's pregnancy and delivery had been recorded.

Every day, Dominic had cooked her food himself, the kind meant for a woman carrying the Falcone bloodline. He'd walked with her through the estate gardens, sent his men ahead to clear the shops so she could browse in peace, even cupped his palms to catch the sickness when it rose in her throat.

At every visit to the Family's private clinic, he'd stayed at her side, never straying a step, watching her the way a man watches something worth more than the whole territory.

I had begged Dominic so many times to give our child a name.

He always took forever to reply, the signet ring turning slow against his thumb.

"Adriana, a name is just a label. Pick any one, it doesn't matter. I have a sit-down to get to. We'll deal with it after he's born."

But the moment Vittoria Sabatini turned up carrying, Dominic had already dreamed up a hundred names for the baby in her belly.

"Vittoria, what do you think of Kingston for our boy? A name that promises great things."

"Or how about Bennett? Learned and far-reaching, a bright future ahead of him."

"No, let's just call him Matteo. I don't need him to rise above the rest. I only want him safe and sound, healthy for a hundred years."

After every visit to the clinic, he gave Vittoria a gift, either jewelry pulled from the Family's vault or a limited-edition car that never touched a public road.

"Our Vittoria made it safely through another checkup. We have to celebrate."

He even signed a villa on the coast into her name, to mark her smooth delivery.

And what did I ever get? Always the same single line:

"Adriana, thank you for all of this. I have a meet."

So this was how obvious love and its absence really were.

Heart gone cold, I set the phone down and bought myself a passage out of the country, a berth leaving in three days, far past the reach of the Family and its code.

Back in the clinic bed, I stared blankly up at the ceiling.

My chest full of desolation, I lay awake the whole night. Somewhere down the corridor a soldier shifted his weight against a wall, the faint creak of leather the only sound in a place too quiet to breathe in.

The next morning, Dominic, just as always, had his right-hand man carry in a tray of food built for a recovering woman.

Once, I would have been touched by his thoughtfulness, that even when he wasn't with me he still worried over what I ate.

But remembering how he'd stood in that kitchen last night in an apron, fussing over Vittoria, I finally understood it was nothing but a token gesture.

Tribute means nothing in the face of a true heart.

Seeing that I hadn't touched a bite, Dominic looked pained.

"Adriana, why aren't you eating? Is it not to your taste?"

"It's nothing. I miss the baby."

Dominic smiled.

"So you're missing Matteo. I miss him too. I didn't understand before, but now that I'm a father, I finally get it. I don't want to be apart from him for a single second. Our Matteo really is the most adorable child in the whole world."

"Mother's over the moon now that she has a grandson. She's holding a dinner at the old estate. We'll go collect Matteo shortly."

I said nothing. I'd already decided to walk away from the Family, so let him do as he pleased.

When the car brought us through the estate gates and I'd just stepped inside, I saw the dowager and Vittoria cradling Matteo between them, cooing over him.

Vittoria was dressed head to toe in limited-edition luxury, radiant, without the slightest worn look of a woman who'd just given birth.

Concetta doted on the child with one hand and spooned bird's nest broth into Vittoria's mouth with the other.

Top-tier treatment, truly, the kind reserved for the lady of the Family.

Vittoria spotted me and laughed a half-beat too fast, her fingers drifting to the hollow of her own throat as she said to the dowager in that snide, needling tone of hers:

"Godmother, you shouldn't be so good to me. People will start thinking I'm the daughter-in-law of this house. Adriana will get jealous. She's frail, so this broth should really go to her."

Concetta followed her gaze and looked me over, taking in the bloodstained clothes I was still wearing from the day it happened. Disgust crossed her face.

"Does my son not feed you or clothe you? Dressing like a bad omen at my table. Are you trying to disgrace this Family on purpose? Look at Vittoria. Both of you gave birth, and she's a hundred times the woman you are. Only you make such a scene."

"You couldn't sit still, running about while you carried our blood. How is it that fall didn't finish you? And you've still got the nerve to play the victim under this roof. Thank God my grandson's fine, or I'd have Dominic sever the alliance this instant."

"You knew perfectly well you had to nurse the bloodline heir, and yet you dared to take those pills. If Vittoria hadn't stepped in to nurse him, you, you jinx, would have starved my grandson to death." She smoothed the black lace of her sleeve, two slow flat strokes, before she went on. "I'm announcing it right here, before the Family. I'm taking Vittoria as my goddaughter. From now on, just like Dominic, she'll call me Mother."

I'd always known the dowager didn't like me. In Concetta Falcone's eyes I wasn't fit to stand beside her son, nowhere near as charming as Vittoria Sabatini, the pretty, sweet-talking girl from the cadet branch who'd been his childhood sweetheart.

It was only after Vittoria was married off and sent abroad, and I fell pregnant with the bloodline heir, that she grudgingly acknowledged me as the Don's wife, and only for the child's sake.

Even then, every time we sat at the same table, there was no shortage of cold jabs, no shortage of quiet mockery meant for me to hear.

Back then Dominic would always speak up for me, smooth a few words over. He was the one who'd insisted on taking me out that day, past the family's storefronts on the protected streets, saying he wanted to buy something for the child who was almost here.

But now his eyes were fixed on Vittoria, brimming with a tenderness he made no effort to hide.

Vittoria carried Matteo over to his side and looped her arm playfully through his.

"Dominic, did you hear? The dowager is taking me as her goddaughter. So, my dear big brother, don't you have a gift ready for your little sister?"

Dominic pinched her cheek, helpless and doting.

"You little troublemaker. Don't call me big brother."

That was what he said. Yet he had a soldier bring out ninety-two designer fur coats, jewelry already matched to go with each one, laid out across the long table like tribute.

"I know you love pretty things, but you're still recovering. You can't catch a chill. Winter runs three months, ninety-two days, so you can switch them out."

Vittoria kissed him on the cheek, delighted as a giddy young girl.

"Half of these are pieces from the house's next three years, limited editions too. You actually got them for me ahead of everyone. Dominic, you really are the only one who spoils me."

"But you've given me so much. Won't Adriana be upset?"

When she said my name, her fingers drifted to the hollow of her throat, and her laugh came a half-beat too fast.

Next to those gleaming, priceless furs, my clothes with the dried blood still on them made me look more and more like a clown.

Dominic paused, as if only then remembering I was still standing there, and said awkwardly,

"Adriana, it's not what you think. Vittoria's used to living abroad, you know how it is. The customs over there are more open."

"And these clothes. I heard she just had a baby too, with her husband away. We did grow up together, after all. I only wanted to..."

Before he could finish, Matteo suddenly started crying. Vittoria gasped,

"Oh no, is Matteo hungry again? Mommy will take you upstairs and feed you right now."

Then she turned to me with a show of apology.

"Adriana, don't get the wrong idea. I'm just so used to soothing my own baby. And every time I say it like that, Matteo calms right down and gets so happy."

She started toward the stairs with the child. In her arms, Matteo went utterly still and stared at me across the room, unblinking, the way he always did when I came near, until the two women nearest me shifted uneasily under that gaze.

Then Vittoria sagged into Dominic's arms, her voice going faint.

"Dominic, I feel a little dizzy..."

Dominic shoved me away at once and caught her, his face taut with alarm.

"How could this happen? It must be the weakness after the birth. I told you to rest properly at the clinic. Come, I'll carry you up."

My right leg was still bandaged. With that shove I went down hard, landing on the floor, pain shooting through me.

But Dominic didn't spare me a single glance. In front of everyone gathered, in front of the whole Family, he swept Vittoria up like a bride and carried her and Matteo up the stairs.

Every one of them looked at me with scorn, their voices thick with contempt and disgust.

"No wonder the Don dotes on Vittoria. Pretty as she is, and so kind too, willing to nurse someone else's child. Not like this useless thing. Shabby, not fit to be seen at his table, can't even stand a little pain in her leg, so she takes medicine while nursing. Selfish through and through."

"Someone like that deserves to be a mother? To me, Vittoria's the one who's more like Matteo's mother. She loves him more, and he even looks a bit like her. The child must be ashamed of Adriana too, doesn't want to take after her. Vittoria and Dominic suit each other so well. Such a shame the alliance never joined them back then."

The dowager not only refused to defend me. She looked at me with even deeper loathing, smoothed the black lace of her sleeve with two slow, flat strokes, and snapped,