He shook me off coldly, his expression filled with irritation.
"I've never noticed you being this difficult before. Now that Serafina is here, suddenly you're afraid of heights? Are you pretending?"
"But I really am afraid…" I tried to explain, my voice breaking.
"Enough," he snapped. "Bianca, let me tell you, I'm doing this after weighing the pros and cons."
The next second, he pushed me.
I fell.
That scene never even showed my face in the final broadcast. The casino's grand reopening footage, the promotional reel Serafina needed for the front. A woman plummeting from a rigging platform three stories above the stage floor, and the camera caught only the body, never the face.
To this day, the neighborhood faithful still praise Serafina's nerve, calling her fearless, saying she never lets anyone double for her when the Family needs a spectacle.
That one stunt made her. She became the golden face of every Bellandi front, the chanteuse whose reputation drew crowds and kept the legitimate money flowing.
And me?
I broke my right leg from that fall. I spent more than half a year lying in a private clinic on Family payroll.
During that entire time, Dante only came to see me once.
And even that wasn't for me.
Serafina had been scratched by her pet cat, and he brought her to the clinic to get her finger treated. My room was right next to hers.
But Dante never stepped inside. Not even once.
Perhaps he was afraid it would dirty his shoes.
Back in the present, Dante stood frozen, unable to respond to my words.
The room fell silent. The kind of silence that settles over a sit-down after someone says the wrong name. The guards outside the door would have felt it through the walls.
Without saying anything more, I took out the divorce papers I had prepared earlier. I placed them neatly on the coffee table in front of him.
Then I looked at him calmly and said, "Dante, let's get a divorce."
Hearing my words, Dante froze where he stood. His expression turned blank, as if he couldn't process what he had just heard. His signet ring sat untouched on his finger. Still.
"What did you say? Bianca?" he asked, his voice low but tense.
I didn't answer immediately. Instead, I calmly picked up a pen and signed the sealed marriage papers one page at a time. After that, I pressed my fingertip against my lipstick and left a clear red fingerprint beside my signature.
Then I pushed the papers toward him.
"I said, I want a divorce," I repeated, my tone steady.
Dante tugged at his collar, clearly irritated. His brows furrowed tightly.
"Bianca, are you out of your mind? Who would want you, a middle-aged woman, after leaving me?" he sneered.
So in his eyes, a woman who had just turned thirty was already considered old. Already discarded. Like a soldier who'd given his best years to the Family and then found himself without a chair at the table.
My thumb found the inside edge of my wedding band. I held it there for a breath. Then I let go.
I tossed the pen toward him and let out a faint, almost amused breath.
"Haven't you heard the saying, a woman blossoms at thirty?" I said lightly. "But Dante, after the divorce, I won't be your fixer anymore. I'll need a few days to hand over your book to whoever replaces me."
My calmness seemed to provoke him even more.
Dante let out a mocking laugh. He pointed at me, his eyes filled with impatience and anger.
"Bianca, you're playing with fire. And you're going to get burned."
Just as his words fell, Serafina's distinctive ringtone suddenly rang out.
Dante didn't pick up. Instead, he stared at me, his gaze turning sharp and threatening. The signet ring still hadn't moved. Mercy had left the room long before I'd pulled out the papers.
He spoke again, his tone laced with mockery. "Didn't you always say you wanted to have a baby before turning thirty? I know you're ovulating these days. Bianca, I'm giving you three seconds to take back what you just said."
Last year, on my twenty-ninth birthday, I had made a wish. I even calculated my ovulation days and treated them like a fixed task between us, hoping we could finally have a child together. An heir that might have made me real in his world instead of invisible.
But what he didn't know was that I had already stopped ovulating since last month.
The ringtone continued to echo through the estate's living room, sharp and repetitive, like a ticking time bomb counting down the end of everything between us.
Three seconds passed.
In that silence, whatever connection we still had shattered completely.
"Bianca, you've got guts. Let's see how long you can keep this up!" Dante snapped before storming out of the compound.
The door slammed shut behind him. The chandelier above the dining table swayed once from the force, sending a faint tremor of light across the marble floor, and then everything was still.
As soon as the sound faded, I picked up my phone and calmly scheduled an abortion appointment for the day after tomorrow.
When I lay on the operating table, the doctor glanced at the ultrasound and hesitated.
