"I have had your husband wrapped around my fingers, Elena. All those nights you spent waiting for him, Alessandro was with me." Ginevra's voice carried the casual cruelty of someone twisting a blade already buried to the hilt. "If it weren't for the protection he so carefully used, I would have been pregnant with his child long ago. Unlike you, who is most likely barren."
"What did you say?" The words barely escaped as a whisper. Tears carved hot lines down my cheeks, each one a betrayal my body committed against my will.
"You can never give birth to a child, can you, Elena?" Ginevra stepped closer, not a single flicker of guilt disturbing the polished surface of her face. "Alessandro is fed up with your useless, barren body. Unlike a stray like you, he is the acting Boss of the Leoni Family's American operations, raised in silk and blood. How can a man like that not wish for an heir?"
She closed the remaining distance between us, her hand finding mine with the gentle pressure of a sister's affection. The gesture was obscene in its tenderness.
"Worry not, sister. When I am pregnant with Alessandro's child, you will be the first to know."
"Ginevra!" The scream tore from somewhere deep in my chest, a place I had kept locked and buried for years. Every word she spoke drove into me like a stiletto between the ribs. "You are shameless! Even after ruining my entire life, are you still not satisfied?"
I swatted her arm away, and she crumpled to the floor with a cry of pain so theatrical it would have earned applause in a Neapolitan opera house.
"Elena!" Before I could process what had transpired, the sharp report of footsteps echoed against the marble. Alessandro came rushing through the doorway, his jaw set like granite, his dark eyes already delivering their verdict.
"What the hell are you doing?" He glared at me with such concentrated resentment, such undisguised disgust, that it froze the blood in my veins. I could not move. Could not breathe.
"It's alright, Alessandro." Ginevra's voice trembled with expertly calibrated fragility. Her eyes glistened, brimming with tears that caught the chandelier light like cut crystal. "Elena was a little angry. Please don't be mad at her. I'm fine."
Alessandro's teeth ground together. A muscle leapt in his jaw.
"I am asking you, Elena. Why the fuck did you harm Ginevra?"
"I didn't." My voice was barely audible, a thread of sound lost in the vast room. I trembled from head to toe. "I never pushed her."
I felt the weight of other gazes then, penetrating and contemptuous, as Alessandro's associates appeared at the threshold. Soldiers. Capos. Men who measured a woman's worth by the name she carried and the man who claimed her. They sized me from head to toe, and I saw nothing in their eyes but disdain.
My husband knelt and gathered my sister into his arms, lifting her protectively as though shielding her from a threat. From me. The sight sent a wrenching pain through my chest so violent that my knees nearly buckled. He cradled her against him, and I stood there, hollow, watching the man I had married hold another woman the way he had never once held me.
"Let's just leave, Alessandro." Ginevra pressed her face into the lapel of his suit, her voice cracking into a miserable sob. "Elena is my little sister. She has been a little stubborn since she was young. I don't want her to be humiliated." A shuddering breath. "We shouldn't make a scene."
Alessandro's gaze swept the corridor. Several of the guests had their phones raised, the small red dots of recording lights blinking like the eyes of rats in the dark.
"Elena. Follow me. Now."
His voice carried the tone of a man accustomed to absolute obedience. The tone of a Boss issuing an order that would not be repeated.
Surprisingly, Alessandro did not take Ginevra to her sprawling suite on the second floor of the Castellano estate, the room that had once belonged to the family's trueborn daughter. Instead, he turned a corner and unlocked a door I knew too well. My previous room. Not a bedroom. A storage closet at the end of the servants' corridor, where I had slept on the bare floor through winters that turned my breath to frost. The room where no one came to check if I was alive or dead.
It served as Ginevra's overflow storage now. Garment bags hung from a rod. Shoe boxes lined the walls. The air smelled of cedar and neglect.
"Sister, the first aid kit is kept at the back. Can you bring it for me?" Ginevra's voice floated from the hallway, sweet as poisoned honey.
"Why are you being so considerate to her?" Tears burned my eyes as I stared at my husband's rigid back. He had already turned away, walking ahead without waiting for a reply. "That's the least she can do after ruining your party. I shouldn't have brought her here."
Even after knowing what Alessandro had done to me, every sinew in my body obeyed him like a marionette on strings. My legs carried me forward. My hands found the kit. My mind screamed, and still I moved.
When I entered Ginevra's suite, a room decorated with the kind of luxury that the Castellano name afforded its favored daughter, she was already resting her head against my husband's chest, sobbing with the pitiful grace of a wounded dove. The silk of his shirt darkened where her tears fell.
Upon seeing me, Alessandro separated from her, but his anger did not cool. It redirected. His hand closed around my wrist in a bruising grip, his fingers pressing into the bone until white spots bloomed across my vision.
"Elena. Massage Ginevra's feet. Now." His voice was low, controlled, and merciless. "It's your fault. Do you have any idea how much you've hurt your sister?"
Over his shoulder, Ginevra looked at me. And smiled. A small, private curl of the lips meant only for my eyes.
"I will not do it." My heart had been trampled so thoroughly that death seemed a kinder alternative.
"What did you say?"
"I will not do it."
Infuriated by my defiance, Alessandro seized my shoulders and shoved me downward. My knees struck the cold marble floor at Ginevra's feet with a crack that sent pain shooting up my thighs. I clutched my belly instinctively, curling around it, and the horror of what might have happened, what could have happened to the children growing inside me, spread through every pore of my body like ice water.
I looked up at him. The man I had married. The man whose name I carried. He stared down at me with the flat, empty gaze of someone looking at something beneath him.
"Do you even know how to behave properly for once?" His voice rose, filling the room like a verdict read before a tribunal. "How dare you tell Ginevra that she stole everything from you when you aren't able to do one single thing right? Even if you had all of this, you would still end up being unloved."
"Alessandro!" The scream ripped from my throat, raw and ragged. Tears streamed freely now, and I made no effort to stop them. My husband had ground his heel into the last fragile chamber of my heart without a flicker of guilt. If the edge of the bed had not caught my weight, I would have collapsed entirely to the floor. The thought of what that fall could have done to the lives inside me turned my fear into something primal, something animal.
"Alessandro, how can you do that?" Ginevra's voice shifted to its most devastating register, the selfless martyr. "Elena is the trueborn daughter of the Castellano bloodline, and I am just an adopted child. I took Mamma and Papà's love. Even our brothers, Leonardo and Vittorio, they avoid her like a plague because of me. It's only natural for her to be heartbroken." She pressed a hand to her chest. "It's all my fault. What if she was hurt?"
"It's because she deserves all of it."
The words fell like a guillotine. My world stopped. Sound drained from the room. I sat there on the cold floor, dumbstruck, staring at the stranger I had called my husband for years. It was the first time I truly saw the kind of man I had married.
"Sister, are you alright?" Ginevra leaned forward, extending a delicate hand. "Please get up. Alessandro was too angry, just a spur of the moment. Don't misunderstand, Elena."
"Shut up." The words burst from my throat before I could cage them. "Just shut up with your fake crying!"
The crack of Alessandro's palm across my face echoed through the silent room. The sound bounced off the marble walls and the gilded ceiling and the crystal fixtures until it seemed to come from everywhere at once. My cheek burned white-hot, but the betrayal contained in that single strike cut deeper than any physical wound ever could. Deeper than a blade. Deeper than a bullet.
I raised my fingers to the spot where his hand had landed. The skin still seared beneath my touch.
