Liliana's POV
After they left, I managed to crawl to the door, but it was locked. I started banging on it with both fists, the sound swallowed by the tile and concrete.
"No, no, no," I mumbled, tears rolling down my cheeks.
My stomach hurt so badly as blood trickled down my thighs, pooling warm against the cold hospital floor.
I grabbed my phone and hurriedly opened it just as a voice note from Nadina popped up on the screen.
I tapped it and her mocking voice filled the restroom.
'Hey, bitch, so I mistakenly locked you up and put up a do not disturb sign. Oops, guess no one would find you now. Just bleed to death already and die!'
Immediately I finished listening to the voice note, it was automatically deleted.
Tears ran down my cheeks as I dialed Giacomo's number. He picked up on the fifth ring.
"Please, Giacomo, help me. I'm stuck in the bathroom. Nadina—"
"I know," Giacomo's cold voice sounded over the phone, interrupting me.
I paused as I stared at my phone, my mouth open in shock.
"You know she locked me up?" I asked, desperately hoping it wasn't what I was thinking.
"Yes, it's your punishment for trying to hurt her. Sleep on that cold dirty floor and reflect on yourself," Giacomo answered coldly.
Pietro's voice sounded immediately, "And don't come back if you aren't ready to beg for forgiveness!"
The line went dead immediately as I stared at my phone speechless.
The two people who had sworn a blood oath to protect me had just locked me up, leaving me in so much pain after the trauma I'd gone through in two days.
I was kidnapped, thrown from a moving car, lost my baby, all because of Nadina, and I'm the one who hurt her and should apologize.
That night I laughed so hard my cheeks hurt. My laughter sounded hollow, like someone who had lost her mind. The sound bounced off the tile walls and came back to me wrong, distorted, the laughter of a woman locked inside a room that smelled of bleach and her own blood in a building the Russo Family owned from basement to roof.
By morning, the cleaners found me passed out on the restroom floor. They took me to the Family doctor, who sighed when he saw me.
"What have you gotten yourself into, Liliana?" he asked me with a weary sigh.
I gave him a teary look. "I have no idea, doctor."
"You've lost so much blood, Liliana. You've been through a lot of stress. I'm afraid if you don't rest and recover, your body could face irreversible damage," the doctor advised me.
I nodded. "Thank you, doctor."
"Also, the nurse will bring the bill. You don't have coverage under any Family account on file with us," the doctor informed me.
I sat up on the bed, wincing and frowning. "What do you mean, doctor? I have coverage under my husband's account."
The doctor frowned as he tapped on his phone. "I'll call the nurse in accounting to come sort this out."
Shortly after he left, the nurse stepped inside holding a laptop.
"Miss, please, what's your husband's name?" she asked.
I felt bile rise in my throat. I hated acknowledging him now, but I had no money to pay for my bills.
"Giacomo Russo," I answered.
The nurse tapped furiously on her keyboard and then looked up at me with a frown.
"I'm sorry, there's no record of you in our system. The person recorded under Giacomo Russo's account is Nadina Greco and their daughter, Angela Russo," the nurse informed me.
For a moment I forgot how to breathe as I stared at the nurse with my mouth hanging open.
"W…what?" I stuttered.
My husband had registered someone else under his account, leaving me out to dry. As if I had never existed inside that house. As if the years I spent in the Russo compound, cooking their Sunday dinners, pressing his shirts before sit-downs, waiting up past midnight while he conducted Family business, had simply never happened.
"How do you intend to pay for your bills, Miss?" the nurse asked impatiently.
I gulped softly. "Credit."
She glared at me and nodded. Immediately she left, I grabbed my phone ready to call Giacomo and yell at him, but I thought against it.
If he didn't see me as his wife, then I would end this sham of a marriage.
I limped out of the clinic despite the doctor and nurses protesting for me to rest and recover. I hailed a cab on the avenue outside Russo territory and went straight to a consigliere's office downtown, a man who handled civil matters for families outside the old law.
I sat down in the reception area, patiently waiting for the consigliere to call me in. The office was quiet, wood-paneled, the kind of place where men came to dissolve things legally that could never be dissolved any other way.
Thirty minutes later, the consigliere called for me. I entered his office and sat across from him, my eyes filled with determination.
"How may I help you?" the consigliere asked.
"I'd like to file for dissolution of my marriage and erase all ties with Giacomo Russo," I answered.
The consigliere nodded and started typing on his computer when he frowned.
"Are you Nadina Greco? You'd like to dissolve your union with Giacomo Russo?" he asked me.
I frowned. "No, I'm Liliana Russo. I've been married to Giacomo for four years."
The consigliere frowned. "According to the official records, that's incorrect. There's no record of a Liliana Russo married to Giacomo Russo. The only marriage record here is the one for Nadina Greco and Giacomo Russo, blood-bound two years ago."
I frowned, shaking my head. "That's impossible, Sir. We had a ceremony, witnesses, all of it."
I showed him the picture of the marriage certificate on my phone, but he just shook his head.
"That's a fake, Miss. See for yourself."
He pushed the computer toward me and my heart stopped.
Right before my eyes was the legal proof that Nadina and Giacomo had been blood-bound for two years, and Pietro had witnessed it.
And the date? It was the exact date my car had broken down in the middle of a storm. I had called Giacomo and Pietro begging them to come pick me up, but they didn't answer my calls and claimed they were in a sit-down.
That night I took a shortcut through a stretch of contested territory and was robbed and stabbed twelve times and almost bled out in an alley, except for a stranger who saved me.
I was nine months pregnant then. I lost my baby and had eighteen stitches.
So two years ago, when I almost died, my husband was binding himself to someone else, which made him too busy to save me.
My chest clenched so violently, I couldn't sit still.
I stood up, but the ground spun. My knees gave out. I hit the floor, sobbing, gasping for air.
"No… it can't be."
The consigliere rushed to my side.
"Miss, are you alright? Should I call an ambulance?"
His voice echoed like it was underwater.
I curled into myself, rocking back and forth. My nails digging into my arms. The pain was suffocating. The room smelled of old paper and polished wood and none of it was real, none of the four years had been real, and the floor was cold against my cheek the way the restroom floor had been cold, the way the pavement had been cold the night they threw me from the car.
"No, it can't be. No, it can't be. No, no, no—"
