I lingered in the shadows of the city until the evening bled into night.
Purchased a new phone from a discreet vendor who knew better than to ask questions. Filed a report with the local precinct—a formality, nothing more. The cops in this territory were bought and paid for, but paperwork left a trail, and trails could be useful.
Then I finalized my arrangements with a contact who specialized in moving people across borders quietly. Washington territory. Genovese protection. A flight in ten days.
I would study while I healed. Rebuild what remained of my life in a place where the Volpe name held no power over me.
By the time I returned to the safe house, the grandfather clock in the foyer was striking seven.
The rooms had been only half-cleared, yet dust had already begun to settle over the surfaces like a funeral shroud. The air tasted of abandonment—stale, cold, untouched.
I knew then. He had never come back. Not once.
After forcing down a simple meal I could barely taste, I resumed sorting through his belongings. Silk ties. Monogrammed cufflinks. The detritus of a life I had shared but never truly inhabited.
The door clicked open.
Nico.
He stood in the threshold, his dark eyes sweeping over the half-packed boxes, the neat stacks of his possessions. His expression hardened into something cold and unreadable—the mask of the Young Don, the face he wore for enemies and strangers.
He seemed to sense something different in me. Something shifted. But he couldn't place what had changed.
He didn't pause to ask.
He walked straight past me toward the bedroom, his footsteps deliberate against the obsidian tile.
The sounds that followed were violent—drawers wrenched open, cabinet doors slamming, the rustle of fabric being torn aside.
Then he stormed back out, tearing through the clothes and personal effects I had already folded with care. His hands moved with desperate fury, scattering everything across the floor.
"What are you doing?"
I stepped forward.
But his arm shot out like a blade, catching me across the chest. The force sent me sprawling to the ground.
"Where's the voice recorder?"
His voice.
Dio mio, his voice.
How long had it been since he'd spoken to me directly? How many months of silence, of cold shoulders, of messages typed on screens because he couldn't—or wouldn't—spare me the sound of his words?
"What voice recorder? I didn't take anything."
I looked down at my right hand. Crimson was seeping through the fresh bandages again, blooming like roses against white linen.
He resumed his frantic search, overturning boxes, ripping through garment bags.
I looked up at him.
I had never seen Nico Volpe like this.
Drenched in sweat, his tailored shirt clinging to his chest. His silk tie yanked loose, hanging like a noose around his throat. His cashmere coat—worth more than most men earned in a month—was covered in dust and debris.
Disheveled.
Desperate.
Unraveling.
"Where is the voice recorder!"
He stopped his destruction and turned on me, towering over my crumpled form like a dark angel of judgment.
"I told you I haven't seen it!"
I had never been this defiant. Never raised my voice to the heir of the Volpe bloodline.
I braced my left hand against the cold floor and struggled to my feet, forcing myself to meet his gaze. To stand before him as something other than the dutiful wife, the silent shadow, the woman who had sacrificed everything and received nothing in return.
He seemed lost. Unmoored from the iron control that defined him.
Anger churned beneath the surface of his features—a storm building behind those dark eyes.
His fists clenched and unclenched at his sides.
Then—crash.
His fist slammed into the glass sliding door.
Shards exploded across the floor like scattered diamonds, catching the dim light as they fell.
"My voice recorder. Where is it."
He closed the distance between us, his voice strained and unraveling at the edges. The words came out rough, broken—nothing like the smooth commands of a man born to lead.
Blood dripped from his right hand, one drop at a time, spattering against the marble like a metronome counting down to something terrible.
I had never seen him this unhinged. This human.
I summoned every ounce of courage left in my battered body and shoved him away.
Dragging my injured leg behind me, I tried to escape through the front door. Tried to flee this mausoleum of a marriage, this beautiful prison I had decorated with my own hands.
That's when it happened.
"I'm Nico Volpe. I'm eighteen years old. I want to confess my feelings to Massima."
The voice burst into the silence like a gunshot.
Young. Earnest. Full of hope.
A voice I had never heard—because by the time I entered his life, he had already stopped speaking.
"Massima, today marks our second anniversary. I hope we'll always be together."
"Massima, we've been together for three years now. My wish this year is still the same—to be with you forever."
"Massima... why did you leave?"
"Massima, I've decided to get married."
Something clattered to the ground behind me.
A worn voice recorder—the kind from another era, before digital files and cloud storage—rolled out from a corner where it must have been dislodged during his frantic search.
Its red light blinked on and off like a dying heartbeat.
Playing its contents for the empty room.
They were love letters. Confessions he had recorded for her, starting from when he was barely more than a boy. Year after year of devotion, captured in magnetic tape. A shrine to the woman who had abandoned him.
"Goodbye, Massima. I hope I'll see you again."
"Goodbye."
The recorder seemed to be broken. Damaged, perhaps, from years of obsessive handling.
It kept repeating those two words.
Goodbye. Goodbye. Goodbye.
He lunged forward and snatched it up, cradling it against his chest like a wounded animal.
His fingers fumbled desperately at the buttons, trying to silence it.
It wouldn't stop.
My footsteps halted at the threshold.
I turned slowly.
Leaned against the mahogany shoe cabinet by the door—a piece I had selected myself, back when I still believed this house could become a home.
Tears fell, one drop at a time, tracing hot paths down my cheeks.
"Nico."
I said his name.
The name I had whispered in the dark when he lay beside me but a thousand miles away. The name I had written on medical forms and emergency contacts. The name that had become synonymous with my own slow destruction.
"You never loved me. Why did you marry me?"
His throat worked visibly.
As if he wanted to say something. As if, for once, he might break his silence and offer me the truth.
But in the end, he stayed mute.
Omertà—the code of silence. He had kept it with me more faithfully than any oath sworn to the Family.
My phone screen lit up in my pocket.
A message from him.
Let me explain, Isabella.
I closed my eyes.
Forced myself to stay calm.
Pushed down the bitterness rising in my chest like bile, like blood, like all the words I had swallowed for three years of this blood-bound union.
"Leave."
My voice came out steady. Cold. The voice of a woman who had finally found the edge of her endurance and stepped over it.
"Take all your things and get out of my house."
His lips pressed into a thin line.
His hand gripped the recorder—still repeating goodbye, goodbye, goodbye—as if it were the only thing keeping him tethered to this world.
He walked past me without another word.
The door closed behind him with a soft click that echoed like a death knell.
My phone screen lit up one last time.
I'm sorry.
