He Froze His Pregnant Wife for His Mistress

Eight months heavy with the Falcone bloodline, I carried the ledgers up to Damiano's rooms at the social club myself.

The air inside was thick enough to choke on, the radiators hissing like something alive. Just as I reached for the vent to bleed off the heat, his personal courier stepped into my path.

"Signora," she said sweetly, one fingertip resting at the corner of her lip, "it's my time of the month. I chill so easily. Please, leave it off."

I looked at her sideways. My child was growing inside me, and heat like this could kill a woman in my condition. Without a word, I turned the vent open anyway.

That evening Damiano came back from a sit-down and threw the door wide, already burning with temper.

"Alessandra, Vittoria was bleeding! Do you understand that thirty-eight minutes and nineteen seconds of cold air put her in a hospital bed, doubled over in agony?"

I stared at him, disbelief cold in my chest.

"Damiano, are you mocking me because I don't bleed the way she does? I am eight months carrying your child. If I take a fever from that heat, that isn't discomfort. That is two lives gone. Are you drunk?"

He curled his mouth into that mocking little smile and inclined his head. "You're right. That was foolish of me."

That night he comforted me the way he always had, murmuring soft nothings against my hair until I slipped under.

But when I woke, I was no longer in our bed. I was inside a walk-in freezer, glass on every side, the kind they kept behind the kitchens of the Family's front restaurants.

Beyond the glass, a crowd of the assembled crews' sons lounged and pointed, laughing. Damiano stood among them, his arm curled around Vittoria's slender waist. They looked at me and chuckled.

"Afraid of the heat?" he sneered. "Then let's cool you down properly tonight."

My heart sank.

Calmly, I drew out my phone and photographed every face beyond the glass. Then I dialed a number.

"Papa," I said, my voice level as ice, "I don't want a single one of these people to see the sunrise tomorrow."

——

Silence on the line. Then I hung up.

The laughter around me detonated.

"Alessandra, your father was dumped into open water and fed to the sharks six months ago. Have you frozen your brain solid? Or were you always this stupid?"

"Still playing la principessa of the Falcone name? You wouldn't dare dream that even in your sleep anymore."

Damiano watched with pride as his crew tore into me. He shrugged off his fur coat and settled it gently over Vittoria's shoulders, then walked slowly toward the freezer.

He tapped the glass once with his index finger, and smiled without any warmth in it.

"Alessandra. Are you cold now? Do you understand your mistake?"

The red thermometer bolted outside the glass read fifty below.

I was shaking violently, dressed only in the thin nightclothes I'd worn to bed. Where my skin met the iced floor it had gone blue and numb. The cold went through me like knives.

Trembling, I dragged myself to the glass wall and drove a fist against it.

"Damiano, what did I do wrong? It was scorching in that room. I turned on the air, nothing more! A woman carrying a child cannot bear that heat. If I had collapsed, it would have been two lives lost!"

Pain twisted through my belly, sudden and cruel.

I clutched my stomach and folded down, my eyes bloodshot as I glared up at him.

"Damiano, let me out. You know exactly what I suffered to carry this child. I cannot lose him!"

Something flickered through his eyes.

He, of all men, knew the price I had paid.

An accident years ago had left Damiano unable to father a child. For eight years I had endured thousands of injections, needles the length of my forearm, just to draw viable eggs from my own body. Only after all those years had we finally conceived.

Eight months of careful bed rest. I had done everything a woman could do to protect this baby.

I still remembered the day a serving girl brought me sugared water that hadn't been warm enough, and how he broke her arm for it.

And now, for Vittoria's monthly bleeding, he had locked me inside a freezer without a moment's hesitation.

My chest tightened with a bitter, hollow despair. Just as I opened my mouth to speak again, Vittoria slid the fur coat from her own shoulders and pressed close to his arm, tears welling in her eyes.

"Damiano, let your wife out," she said softly, one fingertip grazing the corner of her lip. "She's delicate, fragile. She won't survive this. Not like me. I'm only a poor girl, used to hardship. I've fainted in freezing rooms before, and I never even dared to complain..."