The disgust in his eyes was unmistakable, sharpened to a blade's edge when his gaze dropped to the swell of my belly, to the stretch marks that mapped the months I had carried his blood. He looked at me the way a man looks at a debt he resents paying.
For the sake of the life I carried, I had taught myself to look past these things. I had swallowed every flinch, every cold turn of his shoulder in the dark, and told myself the same lie on a loop: everything will settle once the child is here. Everything will be fine. In a world where a made man's woman learned to keep her silence as faithfully as any soldier kept Omertà, I had made my peace with smaller and smaller pieces of myself.
But now, in this private room thick with cigar smoke and the sour-sweet reek of spilled liquor, he was using the very sacrifice I had made to grind me down. I had bled my body into shapes I no longer recognized to bring his heir into the world, and he turned that suffering into a punchline for the men lounging on the leather banquettes.
I understood, suddenly and completely, that I could not keep bartering away my dignity for a man who placed no value on his own child.
"Lorenzo Castellano, let's dissolve the union."
His indifferent expression froze. Whatever heat the wine had put in his face drained out of it, but his arrogance never so much as flickered. He smoothed his palm down the slick of his dark hair, once, slow and deliberate, the way he always did when he meant to salvage his pride. "And where would you go, cara, swollen with my child and cast out of my house? No family would touch you. No man would have you. Behave yourself and the name Castellano stays yours."
Then he caught the grief carved into my face, and something in him recalculated. His tone gentled into the velvet he used on men he wanted to disarm before he buried them. "Be obedient. I give you my word. The Castellano bloodline will come from no womb but yours."
His word. The only currency that meant anything in our world, and he spent it like a counterfeit bill, smiling as he did it.
Beside him, Gianna twisted at the waist in a slow, theatrical curve, her crimson gown catching the low light. Her fingers drifted up to the diamonds at her throat, the necklace he had fastened there not an hour ago, and she stroked the stones like a charm against everything she did not yet possess. "Lorenzo," she purred, voice thick with false reluctance, "don't quarrel with the lady of the house over me. She's still carrying your baby, after all."
He pinched her bare waist, playful, possessive, a man marking what he believed was his. "That one?" He didn't even look at me. "Pregnant or not, she's only being dramatic. She always is."
The two of them flirting in the open, in front of me, as though I were a piece of furniture too old to throw out yet, was more than my body could hold. The room tilted. Heat surged up from my stomach in a wave I could not stop and did not want to.
"Ugh. Blergh."
Everything I had carried in me came up at once, and the two of them standing closest were caught in the splash. Gianna most of all. The pale fabric of her coat went dark with the sour mess of it, the gleam of expensive wool ruined in an instant.
She tore the coat off her shoulders, her eyes gone red and wet with rage, and spat at me, "You wretched bitch. Did you do that on purpose?"
Something that had been wound tight in me for seven months snapped clean.
I struck her across the face, hard enough that the crack of it cut through the laughter in the room. "Who are you calling a bitch?"
For one breath the men on the banquettes went still, glasses paused halfway to their mouths, the way a crew goes quiet when something has shifted and no one yet knows which way the boss will turn. Gianna staggered, her hand flying to her cheek, and then she shoved me back with everything she had, both palms slamming into my chest.
"Lorenzo, you have to stand up for me!" she shrieked, clutching at the diamonds again, knuckles white around the stones as though they alone could anchor her in a place she had never earned. "My New Year's coat, your gift to me, it's ruined!"
A waiter materialized at the edge of the room with a hot towel and the careful blank face of a man who had learned that in rooms like this you see nothing, hear nothing, remember nothing. He moved toward the mess with his eyes lowered.
And Lorenzo turned to me at last, his voice dropping into that low, level register the whole crew knew to fear, the one that came right before someone learned the cost of crossing him.
"Catherine. That's enough."
