Slowly, I was pushed to the edge of collapse.
I started fighting back the same way he did.
I took a young man under my wing. Maeve Vitale. A quiet-blooded son of the Vitale Family, still finishing his years at the university, the kind of face that turned heads across every room he entered.
At first, it was nothing but spite.
But he would call me sorella in that gentle voice. He would coax me back from the ledge with patience I had forgotten existed. And when I was at my most helpless, he was the first one through the door.
The car accident. I lay in a hospital bed in a private clinic the Vitale family kept off the books, and he sat beside me, eyes rimmed red, staying through every follow-up examination without once being asked.
He was clean. Pure. Like a shaft of light that carried no impurity at all.
Over time, my heart, torn and riddled with wounds, was mended by him piece by careful piece.
I had offered him a house. Money. Whatever I could give.
He wanted none of it.
He wanted only a name. A place beside me that the world would recognize.
"Sorella, divorce him. Try me."
He looked at me, his gaze clear and steady, as though his eyes had room for only one person. And in those eyes, the woman reflected back was not the wretched, humiliated version of myself I had come to accept. She was glowing.
In that moment, something finally clicked into place.
When a thing is broken, you replace it. Even a child understands that. Yet I had wasted years grinding myself down inside this alliance.
Everything between Dante Moretti and me had only ever been slow self-destruction.
So I said yes.
Yes to being with Maeve Vitale.
And yes to ending, once and for all, a marriage that lay in ruins around my feet.
Dante had barely left the estate when my phone lit up with Maeve's video call.
On the screen, he wore a clean white shirt, moving through a kitchen with quiet efficiency. A few strands of dark hair fell across his forehead, and his lashes were long, giving him that look that was both gentle and disarming.
"Sorella, is it done? The divorce?"
I was older than him. I had lived through things he could only imagine. And still, every time I saw that face, my pulse quickened against my will.
I cleared my throat, forcing my voice to stay even.
"The agreement is signed. One more month, and he and I have no connection left."
He listened, and slowly the corner of his mouth curved upward. His voice dropped low, threaded with a pleasure he could not quite contain.
"Since there's no connection anymore, then for this month, sorella, you don't let him touch you."
The words were soft, but underneath them ran a possessiveness that left no room for argument.
"When the time comes, I'll be checking."
I hadn't expected Maeve to say something like that. Heat crept across my cheeks, but I kept my expression flat and scolded him with all the composure I could manage. "Don't talk nonsense."
On the other end, he watched me, his gaze carrying an undisguised hunger he reined in a heartbeat later, his tone shifting to something wounded and clinging. "Sorella, the only thing small about me is my age. Everything else… isn't small at all."
My chest tightened. I cut him off before the conversation could slip any further, coaxed him with a few gentle words, and finally got him to hang up like a good boy.
This young man was everything I could want. Except that he clung to me like a vine.
The moment the call ended, I went out and bought a calendar.
For the month that followed, I lived by tearing off pages, counting each day on my fingers.
From October first to the tenth, Dante did not come back to the compound once.
But where he went, who he was with, what he was doing. I knew all of it with perfect clarity.
His new woman, Serena Bellucci, was a hostess at one of the Moretti-owned clubs. A girl who had started as an intern of sorts in the family's legitimate front. Every day she would post something on her social media, carefully casual, dropping hints about the two of them. As if she were marking territory.
An afternoon spent at a private dining room in the kind of restaurant where the maître d' never wrote down a reservation. An evening at the golf course the family kept for entertaining judges and politicians. Standing on the terrace of a hilltop villa, looking down at the city lights. Sharing a private hot spring at a resort that only took guests with the right last name.
Strange, really. With Dante's habits, he never lingered on one woman for long. The ones who came and went before had held his attention for a month at most before he grew bored.
