In the third year of their marriage, Dorothea found out that Jimmy Valente had been lying about Kim Burganger being their surrogate.
Over the past three years, Kim's pregnancies had nothing to do with IVF. Jimmy himself had been the one getting her pregnant every time.
Outside the hospital's fire exit, Dorothea overheard him talking with Burt Costello, his oldest associate and the only man in the Family's orbit who still spoke to Jimmy like a friend rather than an heir.
Jimmy let out a chuckle. "That stuff you got me works really well. Get me more. I want Kim's third baby to be another girl."
Burt paused, clearly taken aback, before voicing his confusion. "I honestly don't get you. You love Dorothea so much, so why do you keep building a family with Kim? And if IVF would've done the job, why insist on sleeping with her? You've even kept pushing for daughters, dragging things out instead of finishing the agreement."
"Don't tell me you actually fell for that nursemaid."
Silence hung in the air for a brief moment. The kind of silence that settled over rooms in the Valente compound when something unforgivable was about to be spoken aloud.
Then, Jimmy let out a scoff. "So what if I did?"
"I used to think of her as nothing really more than a surrogate."
"But now, every time I think about her leaving, I dream about her at night."
"I can't lose Dorothea. But I also don't want Kim gone."
Outside the door, Dorothea felt like she had been plunged into an icy abyss. Even her heart seemed to freeze solid.
Her left hand drifted to cover her right knuckles. She pressed them against her sternum without knowing she'd moved.
Back then, after she'd injured her uterus saving Jimmy's life from a botched assassination attempt and learned she could no longer conceive, she had brought up divorce once. A dissolution of their blood-bound union. She had said the word carefully, the way one handles a loaded weapon, knowing what it meant in a family like the Valentes.
Jimmy had dropped to his knees in front of her, his eyes full of devotion, and made a solemn promise. "Dorothea, you're the only one I want in this life. If you leave me, I'd rather die."
And yet, in just three years, every promise he had made had dissolved into nothing.
In that moment, something inside her died completely.
Since Jimmy had betrayed her love, she would leave him for good. She would disappear from his life and give him exactly what he seemed to want: freedom.
Later, after she truly disappeared from his world, she heard from friends that Jimmy had gone nearly insane scouring the world for any trace of her, trying to win her back. He had poured the Family's resources into a recovery operation that spanned three continents. Soldiers were dispatched to cities she'd never visited. Favors were called in from allied families who owed the Valentes blood debts going back decades. He visited her cenotaph every day, a grave with no body, and knelt on the cold stone like a man performing penance for a sin he still couldn't name.
Unfortunately for him, it was far too late.
…
Everyone knew that Dorothea was the woman Jimmy Valente cherished most.
He had pursued her so passionately that the entire Eastern Seaboard knew about it. Every confession he made caused a sensation, from the private concert he'd arranged at Carnegie Hall to the time he shut down an entire restaurant in Manhattan because she'd mentioned she liked the bread there. The heir to the Valente crime family, a man whose name made judges go pale, had courted a pianist with the single-minded intensity of a man waging war.
But no one knew that just three years into their marriage, the words she heard most often were about another woman.
"Wait here. I'm going over to Kim's place."
Kim Burganger was once the nursemaid of the Valente household. A girl of no Family blood who had been hired to care for the compound's children and had stayed, somehow, long after her duties should have ended.
Back when Dorothea saved Jimmy, she had given him a kidney after the botched hit that nearly killed him. The surgery damaged her uterus beyond repair, and she lost her ability to bear a child. She had traded her body for his life without hesitation, and the debt that created should have been sacred. In their world, blood given was blood owed. Forever.
But the Valentes were desperate for an heir. The Family needed a bloodline continuation, and that pressure landed squarely on Jimmy. His parents wanted him to sleep with another woman and continue the line. Olga Valente, the Matriarch, the woman who truly ran the empire from behind her son's name, had delivered the ultimatum herself.
Jimmy endured seven days and seven nights of relentless punishment from his family. Locked in the room beneath the compound. No food. No water after the third day. The kind of discipline that even violent men recognized as crossing a line. He would rather lose his inheritance and the Family name than give in.
"Dorothea, it's okay. They can punish me all they want. I can endure it."
He knelt there with his back straight despite the blood staining the floor beneath him. His shirt was ruined. His lip was split. But his voice never wavered, and his eyes never left hers.
She couldn't watch him like that. The guilt ate her alive. He was bleeding because of her. Because her body had failed. Because she had given him a kidney and it hadn't been enough. In the end, she gave in.
That was how the Matriarch chose the then-young nursemaid to become the surrogate. A blood arrangement, the Family's way of ensuring an heir when nature failed.
According to the agreement, once Kim gave birth to a boy for the Valentes, she would be given five million and sent away permanently. Relocated. A clean break. No further contact with the Family, the compound, or the child.
Legally, the child would belong to Dorothea.
"I promise you, Dorothea, nothing will happen between me and Kim. The baby will be conceived through IVF."
"Once the baby's born, you'll be the only mother."
Unfortunately, the first baby was a girl.
Jimmy told Dorothea to wait again until Kim gave birth to a boy. He said it gently, the way he said everything back then, with his hand on her cheek and his thumb tracing the line of her jaw. As if patience were a small thing to ask. As if time cost nothing.
Not long after Kim's postpartum recovery, she got pregnant again.
This time, Dorothea personally waited outside the delivery room while Kim gave birth to the second child. The hospital was private, paid for by the Family, staffed by doctors who knew better than to ask questions. Two of Jimmy's soldiers stood at the end of the corridor, their presence so constant that Dorothea had stopped noticing them months ago.
Inside, Kim's cries of pain echoed through the door. Soon after, the sound of a newborn's crying followed.
Cheers and congratulations then filled the room.
The door opened, and a nurse stepped out, her face full of excitement.
Dorothea quickly stood up to approach the nurse, only to hear, "Congratulations, Ma'am. It's a baby girl!"
The words hit her like a thunderclap.
Her world spun, as if the sky itself had collapsed.
The nurse hurried to steady her. "Ma'am? What's wrong? Are you feeling unwell?"
Dorothea took a deep breath and leaned against the wall until she steadied herself. The hallway lights buzzed faintly overhead. Somewhere behind her, one of the soldiers shifted his weight, leather creaking. "I'm fine. Go ahead and get back to work. I'll let Jimmy know."
With that, she stepped forward and slowly made her way out.
As she passed by the fire exit in the hallway, she heard Jimmy and Burt Costello talking. Their voices carried through the gap in the door, casual and unguarded in the way men speak when they believe no one is listening. She heard the clink of a lighter. The soft exhale of cigarette smoke.
"Congrats, bro! Another baby girl! Just what you wanted!" Burt's voice. The faint sound of bourbon swirling in a glass.
Jimmy chuckled. "That stuff you got me really works. Get me more. I want Kim's third baby to be another girl."
"Don't tell me you've fallen for that nursemaid?"
Silence hung in the air for a brief moment. Through the gap in the fire door, Dorothea could see the orange ember of Jimmy's cigarette, motionless between his fingers. He wasn't smoking it. He was holding it like a man deciding how much truth to let out of his mouth.
Burt sighed. "Aren't you afraid Dorothea will find out? You know her. If she does, she'll never come back."
Jimmy scoffed. The sound was thin, dismissive, the sound of a man who had inherited power instead of earning it and had confused the two for so long that the difference no longer registered. "She won't. After marrying into my family, she's lost her family and her job. How would she survive without me? Besides, she loves me too much to actually leave."
Her back was against the hospital wall. The fluorescent light above her flickered once, casting her shadow long and then short and then long again. Her left hand had found her right knuckles again, pressing so hard the damaged joints ached, and the pain was the only thing keeping her upright.
She remembered. She remembered that back then, when she learned she couldn't get pregnant because of her injured uterus, she had once brought up divorce. A dissolution. The word that was nearly unheard of in the Valente family, requiring the Matriarch's authority and carrying the weight of a death sentence on the marriage bed.
His so-called "surrogacy" had been nothing but an excuse. He had slept with Kim himself, gotten her pregnant, and built a second family with her. A shadow family, hidden inside the walls of the one Dorothea had sacrificed everything to belong to.
The love story everyone once admired was nothing more than a meticulously staged deception. The heir and the pianist. The man who shut down Manhattan for a woman. The woman who gave a kidney to save his life. It was a story people told at Sunday dinners across the Eastern Seaboard, proof that even men in their world could love purely. And all of it was a lie.
With a click, the fire exit door swung open.
Jimmy froze at the sight of her pale face. Panic instantly broke across his expression. The cigarette fell from his fingers and hit the concrete floor, still burning. Behind him, Burt went very still, the bourbon glass motionless in his hand. "D-Dorothea… what are you doing here?"
Dorothea raised her hand and struck him without hesitation. The sound cracked through the stairwell like a gunshot. One of the soldiers at the end of the corridor took a half-step forward, then stopped, uncertain. No one intervened when the heir's wife struck the heir. Not in this family. Not when the look on her face said what it said.
"I heard everything. Jimmy, I want a divorce."
He frowned slightly. His hand moved to his jaw where she'd hit him, and then dropped. His thumb found the signet ring on his right hand, the Valente family crest, and began to turn it in a slow, deliberate circle. He didn't know he was doing it. He never did. "Hey, if you're upset, you can hit me or yell at me all you want. But don't talk about divorce."
"I know what you're worried about. Don't worry. You'll always be my only wife."
"Kim? She's just someone I keep on the side for fun. The one I love most is still you, Dorothea. Nothing will ever change that."
Dorothea's heart felt like it was being torn apart. Her cold eyes stared at him in disbelief. "I won't accept that! You fucking promised, Jimmy! I'm the only woman you'd love forever!"
Her voice echoed in the concrete stairwell. Somewhere below them, a door opened and closed. Footsteps retreated. Even in a hospital paid for by the Valentes, people knew when to disappear.
He met her gaze coldly. The ring kept turning. "Dorothea. Stop being unreasonable."
But she insisted, "Jimmy, let's get a divorce."
The next second, he pulled out his phone, his voice calm and cruel. "Smash that old piano in my wife's room and throw it out."
Before they got married, Dorothea had been a pianist. Not just any pianist. A prodigy. Conservatory-trained, competition-winning, destined for concert halls in Vienna and London and Tokyo. Her dream had been to become a world-class performer, and every person who had ever heard her play knew the dream was not a fantasy but a certainty delayed.
But after their wedding, Jimmy had made her give that dream up, saying he didn't like her being in the public eye. The wife of a Valente heir did not perform on stages. She did not travel without security. She did not have a life that existed outside the compound walls. He had framed it as protection. As love. As the necessary cost of belonging to the Family.
That piano in her room was a keepsake from her mentor and one of the last ties she had to her music. A Steinway grand, older than their marriage, older than their love, the one object in the compound that belonged to the person she had been before she became Dorothea Valente.
She grabbed Jimmy's arm tightly, her face drained of color. "Jimmy, you can't do this!"
"Dorothea," he said, his voice carrying a trace of gentleness, the kind of gentleness that made her skin crawl because she knew now what lived underneath it, "tell me. Do you still want a divorce?"
Her whole body turned cold. She stared at him stubbornly, unable to utter a single word. The stairwell was silent. Burt had pressed himself against the far wall, his glass held close to his chest, his eyes on the floor. He would not intervene. No one would.
Holding the phone, Jimmy spoke to the servant in a low voice. "Do it."
The next second, Dorothea heard a loud bang through the phone, followed by the heavy, muffled sound of the piano breaking apart. Wood splintering. Strings snapping with a discordant shriek that sounded almost human. The hammer falling again and again.
That was when her composure shattered. "No!" she cried. "I won't divorce you! I won't! Jimmy, don't touch my piano!"
Finally, he smiled in satisfaction. The signet ring stopped turning. He reached out and ruffled her hair, the gesture so tender and so monstrous that Burt looked away.
"If you stay obedient like this, honey," he murmured, "you'll always be my wife."
Jimmy still wasn't fully reassured even after Dorothea gave him her word.
He had soldiers escort her home to the compound, and guards were stationed outside the villa gates, two at the front, one at the service entrance, as if he really feared she might leave him. As if love and imprisonment were the same thing and he had simply never learned the difference.
The moment she stepped inside, she bolted straight for the room where the old piano was kept.
What she saw made her stop cold.
The piano had been smashed to pieces, violently destroyed with what looked like a hammer. The keys were shattered across the floor like broken teeth. The lid had been cracked in half. The strings curled out of the wreckage like exposed nerves, still vibrating faintly, still humming with the ghost of every note she had ever played on them. Splinters of lacquered wood lay scattered across the Persian rug. The bench was overturned. The music stand had been snapped clean in two.
Suddenly, it felt like the entire world had been muted.
Her eyes widened as she stared at the scene in front of her. A metallic sweetness gradually rose in her throat.
The next second, a mouthful of blood burst from her lips, staining the carpet beneath her.
Her vision went dark, and she collapsed to the floor.
When she regained consciousness, she was still lying in the same position. The carpet was damp beneath her cheek. Not far from her was the ruined piano, its corpse filling the room with the sharp scent of varnish and broken wood. The light through the window had shifted. Hours had passed. No one had come to check on her. The soldiers outside the gate had not moved. The household staff had not entered. In the Valente compound, a closed door meant a closed door, and what happened behind it was no one's concern.
Pulling out her phone, she dialed Olga Valente.
The Matriarch answered on the second ring. She always did. Olga Valente did not let phones ring. Unanswered calls were unanswered questions, and unanswered questions were vulnerabilities.
"Mom, back when I risked my life to save Jimmy, you said you'd grant me one request, no matter what, as compensation."
There was a brief pause on the other end. Dorothea heard the faint, deliberate click of reading glasses being set down on a table. The sound was quiet. The silence after it was deafening.
"Right. What do you want, dear?"
"I want a divorce from Jimmy," she said, her voice rough, scraped raw from the blood and the screaming and the hours of unconsciousness on the floor. "And I need you to prepare a new identity for me. I have to make sure that after the divorce, he will never be able to find me again."
She knew Jimmy's obsessive nature all too well. There was no way he would let her go so easily. Not the heir to the Valente Family. Not a man who had been raised to believe that what belonged to him belonged to him forever, that possession and love were synonyms, that a wife who left was not a person exercising freedom but a piece of property in need of recovery.
It wasn't enough to just leave him. She had to make sure he could never track her down and drag her back into this gilded cage. And the Valente Family had resources that made ordinary escape impossible. Soldiers in every major city. Contacts in law enforcement. Allied families who would report a sighting as casually as mentioning the weather. To disappear from Jimmy Valente, you didn't just need distance. You needed to stop existing.
The only person capable of making that happen was his powerful mother. The woman who ran the empire. The woman who had arranged the marriage and who now, hearing the wreckage in her daughter-in-law's voice, understood that her son had proven himself unworthy of the gift he'd been given.
"Alright," Olga replied. Her voice was steady, measured, carrying the weight of a woman who had restructured lives before and would do so again without trembling. "I'll do it. But it will take a month to prepare everything."
A month. Thirty days inside the compound with the man who had destroyed her piano, her trust, and the last three years of her life. Thirty days of smiling when he touched her hair. Thirty days of sleeping in a house where soldiers guarded the exits not to protect her but to keep her in.
If enduring one more month meant Dorothea could escape this hell and finally break free from the web of lies Jimmy had so carefully spun, then it was worth it.
She ended the call. Set the phone on the floor beside her. And lay there in the wreckage of her piano, her left hand pressed against her right knuckles, listening to the silence of the compound settle around her like a sentence she had not yet finished serving.
