"Do you even understand how serious this is?" My voice cut through the low murmur of silverware against porcelain. "If the other Family has committed any crime on our watch, we would be held equally responsible. The Commission doesn't distinguish between partners when blood hits the pavement."
"Mia, I know you don't like me." Vanessa Lestari set down her wine glass with a delicate clink, her painted lips curling into something that almost resembled sympathy. "But please don't slander my Family like that."
I turned to look at Xavier, searching for some flicker of reason behind those cold grey eyes. Instead, he met me with a glare that could have frozen the Adriatic.
"Vanessa is right." His voice was flat, measured, the way he spoke when he'd already made a decision and considered the conversation beneath him. "You didn't even finish a proper education. You wouldn't know the first thing about how syndicate affairs work. How would you understand whether an alliance is beneficial or not?"
He reached for his glass of Barolo, swirling the dark wine without looking at me.
"It's better to leave the responsibilities of the Family to me. Vanessa served as Donna of the Argento Syndicate for more than three years. I cannot be biased in your favor when you are just an illiterate orphan girl with no name."
My body trembled. Not from the cold draft that crept through the dining room of the Salvatore estate, but from the precise, surgical cruelty of my husband's words, delivered in front of everyone at the table as casually as if he were discussing the weather.
The dinner turned to ash in my mouth. I did not speak a single word after that, and the silence from my end of the table seemed to unsettle Xavier enough that he glanced my way once, twice, searching my face for something he couldn't name. My mother-in-law, Jane Salvatore, showed no displeasure whatsoever at the argument. If anything, she grew more animated, leaning toward Vanessa with bright laughter and conspiratorial whispers, the two of them carrying on as though I had already left the room.
It was only when I reached for a small dish of spiced oysters that Jane's voice cracked through the air like a slap.
"Mia." She set her fork down with deliberate precision. "I understand that you didn't have any parents to teach you basic things, but are you just plain stupid? Eating something that spicy in your second trimester?" Her eyes narrowed, and the candlelight caught the diamonds at her throat. "Do you not care about the baby at all? No wonder Xavier has had to go to such lengths to protect you from yourself."
"Like he is protecting me right now against your relentless attacks?"
The words left my mouth before I could catch them, and the entire table fell silent. The clinking of glasses stopped. A fork hovered in midair. Jane Salvatore's mouth opened, then closed, her face draining of color as though no one had dared speak to her that way in the thirty years she'd ruled this household. Xavier froze beside me, his hand suspended over his wine glass, and when he finally turned to look at me, there was nothing in his expression but raw confusion.
"This was the oyster dish the nurse prepared for me specifically. For digestion." My voice was steady, though my hands were not. "I brought it here because you told me to hurry while I was having my lunch. You told me to bring food for everyone. But it feels like I am in too much trouble simply for sitting here amongst you."
I pushed my chair back from the table. The legs scraped against the marble floor, and the sound was obscenely loud in the silence.
"Coming here was a mistake."
"Mia!" Xavier's voice followed me, sharp with authority, as I rose and walked toward the arched doorway that led to the estate's rear courtyard. I heard his chair scrape back, heard his measured footsteps trailing me through the corridor lined with oil paintings of Salvatore patriarchs, their dead eyes watching from gilded frames.
The night air hit me like a wall. It smelled of wet stone and approaching thunder.
"Mia, Mom didn't mean it like that." He caught up to me on the flagstone path, his voice shifting into something that was meant to sound reasonable but landed closer to a command. "Come back inside with me. Right now."
I stopped walking but did not turn around.
"To tell you the truth, Xavier." The words tasted like iron on my tongue. "My parents are very much alive. And if I had listened to them in the first place, I would have never chosen such a terrible place for myself. A place where I have never once been welcomed."
Xavier's hands found my shoulders. He turned me to face him, and I watched the disbelief settle across his features like a mask. He shook his head slowly, the way one does when confronted with something too absurd to entertain, as though I were a grief-stricken woman inventing fairy tales to soothe her own wounds.
"Mia, let it go this once." His grip tightened, not enough to hurt, but enough to remind me of his control. "You have to be a good daughter-in-law. A good wife."
"Xavier!" The voice came from the doorway behind us, breathless and urgent. Colino Ferrara stood in the warm rectangle of light spilling from the house, his gaze darting between us with visible hesitation. "Vanessa is having trouble breathing. You need to come. Quickly."
Something shifted behind Xavier's eyes. A calculation. A choice being made in real time.
"Mia, come inside." He released my shoulders and took a half step toward the house. "It's going to rain heavily. I need to help Vanessa, so for the time being, please wait."
I looked at the man standing before me and did not recognize him. He was a stranger wearing my husband's face, speaking my husband's words, but hollow where it mattered. He hesitated, his jaw working as though searching for the right thing to say, some phrase that might bridge the distance between us. But nothing came. In the end, he simply squeezed my hand once, let it fall, and turned on his heel, disappearing back into the warmth and light of the Salvatore estate to tend to another woman.
My phone buzzed in the pocket of my coat. Jane Salvatore's message glowed on the screen.
You can come inside now. Earlier I just assumed things.
A second message followed almost immediately.
Let's not waste this dinner party.
I smiled through the tears that had begun to blur the words on the screen. A bitter, broken thing, that smile. Because in that moment I understood with perfect clarity that I had never once been welcomed in this household. Not truly. It had always been about status. About prestige. About what I could bring to the Salvatore name, and the answer, as far as they were concerned, had always been nothing.
Three years ago, I had been taken by mercenaries. Hired guns with no family allegiance, rogues who answered to no Commission and feared no code. They had snatched me from a car on a rain-slicked highway, and the world I knew had collapsed into darkness and concrete walls. My father, Don Vittorio Valducci, the Capo di tutti Capi, the most powerful man on the Eastern Seaboard, had torn the city apart searching for me. My brothers had not left a single stone unturned. Felix had personally ripped open the wreckage of a decoy vehicle with his bare hands, convinced I was inside. Giacomo had put a bounty on every mercenary crew from here to Chicago.
But my identity was never revealed. It couldn't be. To announce that the daughter of the Valducci Dynasty had been taken would have painted a target on my back that no amount of bodyguards could erase.
In the end, it was the young Don of the Jade Quarter, Xavier Salvatore, who found me. He and his men had raided the compound where I was being held alongside a dozen other captives, and he had carried me out into the daylight like something precious he'd pulled from the wreckage of the world.
My mother, Donna Elena, had wanted to repay him with a fortune. Enough money to elevate the Salvatore Family from a mid-tier syndicate to a genuine power. But I had stopped her. I told her I liked this man. That I wanted to be bound to him through the old blood-oath tradition.
My brothers had been completely against it. They had sat me down in the study of the Valducci Fortress, the room where all the most important decisions of the Dynasty were made, and they had told me the truth as they saw it. I was the only daughter of the most powerful Family in the underworld. I had never known hardship. I had never tasted cruelty from the people who were supposed to love me. And marrying a cold, ambitious man like Xavier Salvatore, a man who saw alliances before he saw people, would not fare well for me.
How foolish I had been. How impossibly, devastatingly foolish to believe that pure love could surpass all status, all rank, all the brutal arithmetic of power. Because today, my husband was the very person who had told me I was useless. That I was nothing. An illiterate orphan with no name.
The rain came without warning. Not a gentle drizzle but a violent downpour, the kind that hammered against the stone courtyard like fists against a door. It drenched me completely within seconds, plastering my hair to my face, soaking through my dress until the fabric clung to my skin like a second layer of grief. My phone buzzed again and again. Jane's messages. I ignored them all.
At that moment, standing alone in the rain outside the house of people who despised me, I felt profoundly, achingly stupid for ever having fallen in love with such a heartless man. And I was embarrassed. Not for them. For myself. Because what would I even say to my parents? How could I go home to the Valducci Fortress and face my mother's eyes, my father's silence, my brothers' vindicated fury?
Would they even accept me back?
The warmth came suddenly. Xavier's arms wrapped around me from behind, pulling me against his chest. He was soaked through as well, his white shirt transparent against his skin, and I could feel his heart hammering against my shoulder blade. He pulled me under the narrow awning of the garden shed, shielding us both from the worst of the downpour.
"Are you alright?" His voice was low, rough at the edges. "I'm sorry. I shouldn't have left you in this state." A pause. Then, quieter, almost confused by his own words: "But why don't you just follow orders and go inside?"
He pulled back just enough to look at my face, and something in his expression shifted when he saw the devastation written there.
"See, Vanessa is terribly sick," he continued, his voice softening into something that was almost tender, almost human. "She came because I invited her. I couldn't have just left her like that. But even then, she was the one who sent me out here to find you. You should learn something from her."
The words landed like a blade between my ribs.
"Mom has been trying to call you. She even messaged you to come inside." He exhaled through his nose, a sound caught somewhere between frustration and genuine concern. "Why can't you stop being stubborn for one moment?"
Then he saw my face properly. The pallor. The trembling. The way my lips had gone almost blue.
His demeanor changed instantly. He took my arm without another word and led me through the rain to a small boutique two blocks from the estate, one of the Salvatore-owned storefronts that lined the Jade Quarter's main avenue. He spoke briefly to the woman behind the counter, and within minutes I was in a back room, peeling off my soaked clothes and pulling on something dry and warm so that I would not fall ill.
When I emerged, Xavier was waiting by the door, his wet hair pushed back from his face, his shirt still clinging to his shoulders. He studied me with an expression I couldn't quite read.
"Are you alright, Mia?" He pulled out his phone. "I'm calling a car to take you home."
I shook my head slowly.
"Are you not coming back with me?"
"I have to handle some things first."
"Are you going to drive Vanessa back to her place?"
"What?" Xavier's head snapped up, and for a fraction of a second, genuine surprise flickered across his face. The surprise of a man who had not expected to be seen through so easily.
His expression shifted. The careful mask of indulgence crumbled, replaced by something caught between guilt and a slow-burning anger at being cornered. He chose his next words with the precision of a man defusing a bomb.
"I will be home right after. Please try to understand. Vanessa is a single mother, and she is genuinely sick. What if something happens to her on the way home? She has no one."
I cut him off before he could say another word.
"I understand." My voice was quiet, stripped of everything but the bare, terrible truth. "You want to drive her home because she is sick and cannot take care of herself. While I can very well go home by myself."
