"Again with your stupid accusations! It's nothing like that!"
"Then what is it?" Mia's voice held steady, though her hands trembled at her sides. "You and Teodoro both drove here tonight. Why does it have to be you, specifically, who takes her home?"
A flicker of irritation crossed Xavier Salvatore's face. He exhaled through his nose, the sound sharp in the dim foyer of the Salvatore estate, where the chandelier cast fractured light across the marble floor like scattered diamonds.
"Mia, are you jealous of Vanessa again?" He dragged a hand through his dark hair. "How many times do I have to explain this to you? I see her as a sister. Nothing more."
"She's completely alone here." His composure returned, voice dropping into the measured cadence of a man accustomed to giving orders. "Separated from Don Argento, raising a child on her own. How can you not feel sympathy for her? She is my oldest friend. I cannot leave her suffering like that."
"If she's truly separated from Don Argento, then why is she pushing to merge the Argento Syndicate's territory with ours?" Mia stepped back, pulling free of the hand he had placed on her arm. She did not like the way he held onto her while his mind so clearly orbited another woman. "Does she not understand how much trouble a merger like that could bring down on this family?"
Xavier's jaw tightened. The warmth drained from his expression before he forced it back, reaching for her again with practiced gentleness.
"You should stay home and focus on what you do best." His tone was the one he used to close negotiations, final and polished. "When the two families are joined, our territory expands across the entire Silver District. The advantages are enormous. This is business, Mia."
He stepped closer, pressing his lips to her forehead in a gesture meant to soothe, meant to dismiss. His fingers laced through hers. "Don't overthink it. You're going to be a mother. If you keep tormenting yourself with jealousy, how will you raise our child?"
Mia smiled. It was the thinnest, most brittle smile she had ever worn. She looked up at her husband of three years, this man who still did not know she had lost their baby because of his negligence. The words sat in her throat like swallowed glass.
"But wasn't it you," she said quietly, "who told your men, over drinks at the club, that since I'm an orphan with no family, I wouldn't know how to raise a child? And that Vanessa should help me?"
The color drained from Xavier Salvatore's face as though someone had opened a vein. His eyes went wide.
"Are you spying on me?" The accusation came fast, reflexive, before he caught himself. "That's a misunderstanding. I was drunk out of my mind that night. I didn't know what I was saying. I didn't mean it like that."
Mia opened her mouth to respond, but before a single word could leave her lips, Xavier's phone cut through the silence. The screen lit up in his breast pocket. Vanessa's name glowed against the dark fabric.
Xavier hesitated. Mia looked at the phone, then at him.
"Answer it."
He pressed the phone to his ear. The moment the call connected, a child's voice burst through the speaker, bright and oblivious and devastating.
"Daddy! I miss you so much! When are you coming to play with me and Mommy? When are you both coming back?"
Xavier's face turned to ash. His gaze cut to Mia, who stood perfectly still, having heard every syllable.
He swallowed hard and answered the boy with forced calm. "Mark. You should call me uncle."
"Why?" The child sounded genuinely confused. "Mommy told me I could call you Dad."
Xavier's throat worked. He answered quickly, his voice stripped of everything except the need to end the conversation.
"Your mother is here with me. We'll come back soon."
He hung up. The phone disappeared into his pocket.
"Mia."
She looked at her husband. She was too tired for more explanations. Too tired for more lies dressed in silk.
Her eyes were dead. Flat and dark as the obsidian floor beneath their feet.
She nodded once. "You can do whatever you feel like."
She turned and walked toward the corridor, but Xavier closed the distance in two strides and wrapped his arms around her from behind, pulling her back against his chest. His chin settled on her shoulder.
"You just need to learn how to adapt." His voice was low, almost tender, almost convincing. "I can't indulge you in everything. But from now on, I will be present. I'll take care of you and our baby."
He leaned in and pressed a gentle kiss to her cheek.
Mia said nothing. She let him hold her. She let him kiss her. And then she walked away.
She had not yet reached the Salvatore compound's main gate when her phone vibrated. A message from Teodoro Brasi, Xavier's most trusted associate.
Sister-in-law, Vanessa is very ill tonight, so Xavier won't be home tomorrow. He's staying to look after her.
Mia stared at the screen. The truth was simpler and uglier. Xavier was organizing a grand reception the following evening to formally welcome the Argento Syndicate's remnants into the Salvatore fold. A banquet to celebrate the merger she had spoken against. Since she opposed the alliance, it seemed her husband did not wish for her to attend.
Her hands trembled as she scrolled through her phone, some masochistic instinct driving her to open her social media feed. Vanessa Lestari's latest post glowed at the top.
"Shopping for tomorrow's party. Trying so hard to pick matching suits for both of my men."
The photograph showed Xavier Salvatore holding Vanessa's son in his arms. The boy clung to his neck. Vanessa leaned against Xavier's shoulder, her smile radiant and proprietary, her hand resting on his chest as though she had every right to place it there.
Mia's vision blurred. The tears came silently, rolling down her cheeks in the backseat of the black sedan as the city lights smeared past the window.
"Madam, get down!"
The driver's scream shattered the silence. Mia's head snapped up. Through the windshield, the grille of an eighteen-wheeler filled the entire world, headlights blazing white and merciless. The driver wrenched the steering wheel hard to the left, tires shrieking against wet asphalt, but it was already too late. The truck struck them with the force of a collapsing building. Metal screamed. Glass exploded inward. The sedan flipped, rolling once, twice, the world spinning into a roar of grinding steel and shattering bone before everything came to rest upside down in a cathedral of silence.
"Mom... Dad... elder brother."
The words fell from her lips like prayers. Fragments of memory surfaced through the pain: her mother's perfume, her father's voice at the head of a long table, Felix pulling her onto his shoulders when she was small enough to believe the world was kind. The images played again and again like a broken record, looping through the dark behind her eyelids.
She was faintly aware of the blood running down her shoulder, warm and steady, soaking into the crushed upholstery. Her fingers found her phone in the wreckage. She could barely see the screen through the blood in her eyes, but muscle memory guided her thumb to the contact she had not called in three years.
She pressed dial.
He picked up on the very first ring.
"What is it, Mia?" Don Vittorio Valducci's voice was stern, commanding, the voice of the most powerful man in the underworld. But beneath the authority, threaded so faintly that only a daughter would hear it, was concern. "How is it that you remember your father now?"
"D-Dad..." She could barely breathe. Each word cost her something vital, something she could feel draining out of her along with the blood. But she needed to say it. She had always needed to say it.
"Mia! Where are you?! What is happening?!"
"Dad, I a-am... s-so..." A wet, rattling cough tore through her chest. "...s-sorry to disa-appoint y-you and Mom. I love you all..."
The phone slipped from her fingers and clattered against the crumpled roof of the overturned car. The screen cracked. Her eyes drifted shut. She accepted death calmly, quietly, like an old friend arriving at the door. Not once did her fading thoughts turn to the people who had made her life so miserable.
On the other end of the line, in the fortified study of the Valducci compound where maps of territory lines covered the walls and the scent of aged Scotch hung in the air, the most feared man on the Eastern Seaboard gripped his phone so hard the casing cracked beneath his fingers.
"Mia! Mia!" His voice shattered. The mask of the Capo di tutti Capi fell away, and what remained was only a father. "Damnit! Where are you, my daughter?!"
