For five years of marriage, every time Dante and I were intimate, he would go off afterward to apologize to his "one true love."
I saw it all but never stopped him.
Then, at a family gathering, he showed up holding that woman’s hand. To prove his love for her, he publicly forced me to take a contraceptive pill.
That was the breaking point. For the first time, I, a filial daughter-in-law of the family, stood up for myself.
"Let’s divorce. If you stay with me, you’ll be buying me pills for the rest of your life. My body can’t take it anymore."
My mother-in-law caught the meaning behind my words. She slapped him across the face and, in front of everyone, ordered him to go upstairs with me to “make a baby.”
But I never let him touch me again.
……
Downstairs, the lively atmosphere had returned. Laughter leaked through the floorboards of the Luciano estate, the clink of Barolo glasses and the low hum of conversation rising from the dining hall where made men and their wives carried on as if nothing had fractured behind closed doors. The scent of roasted garlic and fresh rosemary still hung in the stairwell, warm and familial, a bitter contrast to the cold silence waiting on the second floor.
Dante came out of the shower reluctantly, water still beading along the hard line of his jaw. He tossed the monogrammed robe onto the upholstered chair by the window and stood there, bare-chested in the low amber light, waiting for me on the edge of the bed as though this room still belonged to him. As though I still belonged to him.
"Bianca, you must be thrilled right now," he sneered. His voice carried that particular tone I had learned to dread over five years of marriage, the one that meant he had already decided I was guilty of something and was simply choosing which punishment to enjoy.
I said nothing. My thumb brushed the inside of my left wrist where my wedding bracelet used to sit, that narrow band of white gold the Luciano jeweler had sized for me the morning after our ceremony. The skin there was smooth now, bare, faintly paler than the rest. I let my hand fall still.
Instead, I handed him the severance papers.
The document was heavy in the silence between us. Two copies, prepared by a lawyer who operated from a windowless office on neutral ground, a man who understood that dissolving a union with the Luciano family required more than a signature. It required courage that bordered on stupidity. I had found both.
"Sign these and you can go book hotel rooms with Viviana as openly as you like."
Dante's expression darkened. The lamplight caught the shift in his jaw, the way his fingers moved instinctively to the signet ring on his right hand, rubbing its edge with his thumb as though the heavy gold could grind my words into dust. His voice dropped into the register he used with men who owed him money.
"I've always treated her like a Blackwood. Don't twist everything in your head to make it dirty."
I gave a bitter smile.
The room was too quiet. Beyond the heavy oak door, the muffled sounds of the gathering below continued, oblivious. Somewhere down the hall, a soldier shifted his weight against the wall, leather creaking. In this house, someone was always listening.
"Dante, do you really think I don't know what you've been doing with your so-called 'Blackwood'?"
My voice was steady. I had rehearsed this steadiness in the bathroom mirror, in the back seat of cars, in the dark hours between three and four in the morning when the bed beside me was cold and smelled of someone else's perfume.
"Five years of marriage and every time you dreamed beside me, you called Viviana's name. Even on our honeymoon, you ditched me halfway to go see her."
That honeymoon. A villa on the Amalfi Coast, paid for with laundered cash funneled through one of the family's hospitality fronts. Three days into what should have been a private beginning, I had woken to an empty bed and a note that said only Back by Tuesday. He had driven six hours north to Milan because Viviana had called crying about a landlord. He hadn't come back until Thursday, and when he did, he smelled of her shampoo and wouldn't meet my eyes.
Dante froze for a couple of seconds. His thumb stopped moving on the signet ring. The stillness that followed was the kind I recognized from sit-downs gone wrong, that breathless interval where a man decides whether to keep lying or to draw blood with the truth.
He chose truth. Or rather, he chose cruelty, which for Dante had always been the same thing.
"Yes, I love her." The words fell into the room like a hammer on marble. "If it weren't for all your pandering to my mother over the years, why on earth would I stoop to marrying some outdated girl from the old neighborhood?"
Ten years of silent love. Five years of marriage. I poured my heart and soul into serving the Luciano family. I worked tirelessly in the front businesses, kept the books clean when the accountants were too afraid to ask questions, honored my in-laws at every Sunday dinner and feast day and memorial mass, and catered to Dante's every whim as though devotion alone could reshape a man who had never wanted me.
I thought he'd eventually feel something for me.
Clearly, I was wrong.
In his heart, there was only his first love, Viviana. The socialite with her delicate wrists and her careful fragility, the woman who drifted through mob-adjacent circles like smoke, always near enough to warm herself by the fire of Luciano money but never close enough to burn. To Dante, I was just a shallow, conniving woman after status, a nobody from the old neighborhood who had used his mother's fondness as a ladder.
He had never seen me. Not once.
