Serena POV
Grant swept his gaze across the dining room, and a dark decree hung in the air, silencing the last of the laughter.
He did not raise his voice. He simply tapped the blade of his silver butter knife with a single knuckle. The light that glinted from it flashed across the faces of several men at a neighboring table, and the chairs that had begun to scrape back from the floor fell silent.
They fixed their eyes upon their plates, a feigned study of porcelain and parsley.
Nobody was going to cross the acting Boss of Chicago over a civilian wife.
Whispers rippled through the crowd again, a low murmur about Grant's blatant favor for his mistress, for all recognized the lethal finality in his tone.
My composure, a thing I had held together with thread and wire, finally snapped.
I pushed my chair back and lunged, my hand catching the sleeve of his jacket.
I demanded to know if he had orchestrated this entire spectacle of public degradation just to please his whore.
Grant's reaction was immediate. He tore his arm from my grasp and the back of his hand struck my face.
The sound was a sharp, wet crack in the dead quiet of the room.
My head snapped to the side, and a pain like a swarm of hornets exploded across my cheek.
To strike a wife of the Family in public was a grave taboo in our world, a line a man of honor did not cross.
But Grant no longer cared for honor.
He admitted without a trace of apology that he had done all of this to avenge his secretary.
I reeled, the metallic tang of my own blood sharp on my tongue.
Memories of our three-year marriage, acid-etched and unwelcome, rose before my eyes.
I remembered his broken vows, and the late nights I had spent cleaning up his messes.
I didn't marry into his syndicate for blood money or power.
I married him because, in my folly, I had loved him. My father, on his deathbed, had asked me to find a man who could love me without knowing the weight of my name. I had chosen Grant Caldwell—a hungry soldier with fire in his eyes—and given him three years to prove himself worthy of the truth I carried in silence. Tonight, I had planned to finally tell him who I really was. Tonight, he had answered my question before I could ask it.
Grant reached into his pocket and produced a crisp, linen napkin. He wiped the hand that had struck me, his gaze full of a pure, uncomplicated disgust.
He accused me of overstepping my station, of forgetting my place.
He let the napkin fall into a puddle of spilled wine.
Then he turned to the restaurant manager and issued a chilling, unthinkable threat.
He ordered the manager to have me stripped of my clothes and thrown onto the cobblestones should the bill remain unsettled.
The room erupted in a chorus of jeers, a sound of pure sadism.
The gathered mobsters fed on the cruelty, their bodies leaning forward in their seats with a greedy anticipation.
An older, corpulent Capo near the back of the room showed a row of yellowed teeth in a smile that was purely predatory.
His tongue, thick and wet, slicked across his lips as his gaze crawled over the tear in my dress.
I swallowed, the taste in my mouth like ash and bile, and reached into my purse for my telephone.
The screen was black.
Grant had swapped it this morning.
He had ensured I would have no access to aid. He thought he had cut every lifeline. He had no idea that the only lifeline I needed was the one I had been holding in silence for three years—the one that connected me to an empire that made his look like a street corner operation.
