"I'm sorry, Giovanna. I was wrong. I wouldn't dare dream of marrying Tomasso anymore. I'll take the baby and go far away. Please, I'm begging you, just stop hurting us, okay?"
"What are you doing? Putting on another act?"
The pain in my abdomen was getting worse. A dark premonition crept through me, cold and certain, the way you feel the air change before a storm rolls in off the harbor. Terrified that something was actually happening to my baby, I moved toward the door to find a doctor, but it swung open before I could reach it.
A crowd stood in the doorway. Soldiers. Associates. The inner circle of the Rossetti household, still dressed in the dark suits they wore to every formal occasion, still carrying themselves with the quiet vigilance of men who lived inside a world where doorways were always dangerous. And at the front, Tomasso.
The moment he saw Catarina and the baby on the floor, the infant screaming in raw, bloodcurdling wails that bounced off the sterile hospital walls and filled the corridor beyond, the color drained from his face. He dropped the bowl of porridge in his hands without a second thought. The ceramic shattered against the tile, and not a single man behind him flinched. He rushed over and scooped the baby up, cradling the child against his chest with hands that had broken bones and signed death warrants and never once trembled the way they trembled now.
"What happened? We were gone ten minutes. What the hell happened?"
"Tomasso..."
Catarina lifted her face. The handprints across her cheek were vivid and unmistakable. Three of them, layered, the kind of marks that told a story all on their own.
She was trembling, tears streaming down her face. She tucked her hair behind her left ear with a slow, deliberate motion, and when she spoke, her voice cracked in exactly the right places. "It's my fault. I never should have come to you for help. If I weren't so afraid my baby would grow up without a father, I'd never have degraded myself like this!" She turned her wet eyes toward the men gathered in the doorway, making sure every one of them could see. "Donna Rossetti, if you didn't want me and Tomasso to register the marriage and bring the baby into the Family name, then why did you pretend to agree and then turn around and try to force us out? Hitting me was one thing. But throwing a newborn on the floor?"
Her shrill sobs and accusations sent a chill through the room. The silence that followed was the particular silence of made men recalculating. I could feel it. The shift. The weight of judgment settling onto me like a physical thing, pressing the air from my lungs.
Everyone turned to look at me. "Giovanna, you..."
"Giovanna!"
Tomasso walked toward me with the baby in his arms and slapped me across the face.
The blow sent my vision black. I nearly passed out. The sound of it was worse than the pain. A sharp, flat crack that echoed in the small room, and behind it the absolute stillness of men who had watched their Don strike his wife and understood that no one was permitted to react.
I was already unsteady on my feet. My body crumpled and I hit the floor. My knees struck the cold tile first, then my palms, and the shock of it traveled up through my wrists and into my shoulders. The fluorescent light above me buzzed. Someone's shoe leather creaked. No one moved to help me.
The pain in my abdomen sharpened. I pressed both hands against my stomach, hard, while cold sweat beaded across my forehead and rolled down my temples. The room tilted. I could hear the baby crying, could hear Catarina's practiced sobbing, could hear the low murmur of the men by the door. All of it reached me as if through water.
"I thought you were actually being generous when you agreed to the divorce! How can you be this two-faced? The baby is so small. He isn't even a day old, and you threw him on the ground!" His voice was a blade, each word precise and final, the voice of a Don delivering a sentence. "You're going to be a mother yourself. Aren't you afraid your own child will pay for what you've done?"
My cheek burned. I turned my head slowly and saw the hatred carved into his face. I could barely process what I'd just heard.
For the sake of Catarina's child, he had cursed ours.
The man I had loved for seven years. The man whose syndicate I had built from nothing, whose alliances I had secured with my own blood name, whose enemies I had kept at bay by being a Valente. He stood over me on that hospital floor with another woman's child in his arms and cursed the baby growing inside me.
"Yeah, Giovanna, how could you do that? She just gave birth. You shouldn't have hit her!" One of the soldiers' wives, someone who had eaten at my table, who had kissed my cheek at Sunday dinner.
"No wonder the Don says he's more comfortable with Catarina. Giovanna's temper is way too much." Another voice. Quiet, but not quiet enough.
They all talked over each other, a chorus of noise that split my skull open. My breathing turned shallow and ragged. The room pressed in. Every face was turned away from me or turned against me, and I understood, in that moment, how completely Catarina had constructed this. She had given them exactly the story they wanted. The jealous wife. The innocent widow. The helpless child.
I pressed my hands harder against my stomach and forced myself to speak.
"Enough! All of you, shut up!" My voice tore out of me with a force that startled even me. I saw two of the soldiers step back. "'Giovanna' and 'Catarina'? Do none of you have any sense of right and wrong? This isn't the old country. A man doesn't get to keep a wife and a mistress under the same roof and call it honor! Tomasso cheated. That's on him! And even if I did hit Catarina, she had it coming!"
My outburst stunned the room into silence. Real silence. The kind where men stop breathing because they are not sure what happens next.
"Tomasso was only kind to me and the baby because of my late husband!" Catarina sobbed, crawling to Tomasso's legs. She pressed her face against his knee, and the gesture was so perfectly calibrated, so precisely the image of a grieving widow seeking protection from her fallen husband's blood-brother, that I almost admired it. Almost. "The baby fell from a height. I don't even know if he'll survive. Tomasso, please, don't waste any more time. Call a doctor!"
"Don't be scared. I won't let anything happen to him." His voice dropped low, tender, a register I hadn't heard him use with me in years. He cradled the child closer.
Tomasso turned to leave with the baby in his arms.
And in that moment, I felt something warm and wet sliding down between my legs.
The sensation froze me with terror. Everything else disappeared. The voices, the faces, the fluorescent hum, the smell of antiseptic and spilled porridge. All of it fell away, and there was only the warmth spreading beneath me and the cold that followed it, a cold that started in my chest and moved outward until my fingers went numb.
I looked down. A shock of red was spreading beneath me. Bright against the white tile. Impossible to mistake for anything else.
"Tomasso, my baby... our baby!"
He didn't turn around. He didn't even slow down. His soldiers parted for him in the doorway, and not one of them looked back at me on the floor.
"Giovanna, I've never been more disappointed in you. Get yourself home. I'll be staying at the hospital with Catarina and the baby for the next few days." He paused in the doorway. The light from the corridor caught the edge of his jaw, and I could see the muscle there working, tightening. "And you'd better pray her child is all right. Because if he's not, I won't let you off."
Every last one of them followed him out the door. The room emptied the way rooms empty after a Don has spoken. Completely. Without hesitation. Without a single backward glance.
I stayed on the floor. The blood kept spreading. The fluorescent light kept buzzing. Somewhere down the hall, I could hear Catarina's voice rising in fresh sobs, and the low reassuring murmur of Tomasso answering her, and the quick footsteps of a doctor being summoned.
No one summoned a doctor for me.
I pressed my hands against my stomach and held on to what I was losing, and the tile beneath me grew warm and then cool and then warm again, and I understood, with a clarity that cut through everything else, that I was alone. That I had been alone for a very long time. That the name Valente, which had protected everyone in this building, could not protect the one thing I needed it to protect most.
