"Jimmy, I don't know what you're talking about." Dorothea turned to face him.
His expression darkened, his voice cold as ice. "Dorothea, I know you're upset. But I've already made it up to you. If the Bel Air villa isn't enough, just tell me what you want."
"But you crossed a line going after my child. You knew Chrisette has a severe pollen allergy, and you still hid pollen under the sheets?"
"She's three years old, Dorothea. Three." His voice dropped to something low and measured, the way he spoke when he wanted the soldiers outside the door to hear him being reasonable. "How could you do something so cruel to her?"
At his words, Dorothea felt her blood surge backward and something stab viciously into her heart.
So the moment something happened to his mistress's daughter, the blame could be pinned on her without proof, just like that. No investigation. No sit-down. No evidence weighed by anyone with the authority to weigh it. Just Jimmy Valente's word, delivered as verdict.
The compound's surveillance system ran twenty-four hours. The hallway cameras had caught soldiers moving furniture for Kim two days ago. They could settle this in minutes. But he wasn't interested in settling it. He was interested in punishing her.
Furious, she let out a cold laugh. "Jimmy, if I had really wanted to hurt Chrisette, do you think she'd still be alive today?"
The words hung in the air between them. In any other house, it would have been hyperbole. In the Valente compound, where the medicine cabinet held enough to stop a man's heart and the kitchen staff answered to whoever held authority, it was a statement of fact.
"Dorothea! How dare you still try to argue your way out of this?" Seeing that she still refused to admit it, Jimmy's anger only flared hotter, his eyes frighteningly cold. His thumb found his signet ring and began its slow, deliberate rotation. The Valente crest turning, turning, turning against his skin.
"Whether I'm lying or not can be proven." She kept her voice level, the way you kept your voice level when a man with that look in his eyes was standing between you and the door. "There are surveillance cameras in our bedroom. They're on all day except when we're asleep. If someone really harmed Chrisette, one look at the footage will tell us who did it."
Dorothea let out a mocking laugh and was just about to pull out her phone to check the bedroom footage when a slender figure suddenly rushed into the guest room and charged straight at her.
Kim lunged at her like she'd gone mad, knocking the phone out of Dorothea's hand so that it shattered on the tile floor, while her nails raked across Dorothea's cheek and she screamed hysterically, "I know you're unhappy that I moved in, and I can accept that! But why would you go after my child?!"
"My child is my life! Were you trying to kill me too?!"
Her emotions spiraled out of control, and her vision went black as she nearly collapsed.
Jimmy caught her from behind.
He pulled her tightly into his arms, holding her as if she were something rare and priceless. His hand cradled the back of Kim's head, his fingers threading through her hair, and his body turned so that he was a wall between Kim and the rest of the room. The gesture was total. Absolute. The kind of protection that in the Valente world was reserved for blood.
Meanwhile, blood was running down Dorothea's cheek where Kim had scratched her, and he didn't even spare her a glance.
She pressed a hand to her face and repeated, "Jimmy, I'll say this one last time. I didn't do it."
"That room used to be yours," Kim said through tears, crying even harder on cue. One hand drifted to the hollow of her throat, fingers resting there like a woman afraid of being struck. The gesture was perfect. Practiced. The two soldiers stationed at the hallway entrance shifted their weight, instinctively straightening. "Who else would deliberately hide pollen under the sheets to trigger Chrisette's allergy? If you didn't want to give up the master bedroom to me and Chrisette, you could've just said so. There was no need to do something like this to Jimmy's child and me."
Jimmy gently wiped away Kim's tears, then lifted his eyes toward Dorothea, his gaze dark and vicious, every word bitten out through clenched teeth. "Dorothea, the facts are right in front of us. I'll give you one last chance. If you still refuse to admit it, then don't blame me for what I do next."
The compound was silent around them. No footsteps in the hallway. No murmur from the kitchen below. Even the soldiers seemed to have stopped breathing, the way men stopped breathing when the heir's voice took on that particular edge. Everyone in this house understood what "don't blame me for what I do next" meant when a Valente said it.
It felt as if something had clenched tightly around her heart, and all the color drained from her face.
The man standing in front of her was no longer the same man who had once stepped forward to defend her when others falsely accused her of stealing, the same man who had once stood by her side and proved her innocence. That man had carried her out of a restaurant when she couldn't breathe. That man had torn apart anyone who questioned her character. That man was dead, or had never existed, and the one wearing his face held his mistress like a reliquary and looked at his wife like she was something to be managed.
She lifted her eyes, the rims red, and cut him off. "Jimmy, I'm telling you. I will never admit to something I didn't do!"
Since none of them believed her, she no longer had the strength to keep arguing. The truth was the truth, and as for those who refused to believe her, she would never love them again.
Without waiting for a response, Dorothea turned around and was about to leave this ugly scene behind.
Whatever patience Jimmy had left finally snapped.
"Dorothea, you've really disappointed me. You're being far too disobedient."
The word landed in the room like a sentence. Disobedient. In the Valente household, disobedience was not a marital complaint. It was a classification. It was the word used before correction.
He lifted a hand and gestured behind him. "Do it. Let her experience what an allergic reaction actually feels like."
The moment the words fell, two soldiers immediately stepped forward, wrenching Dorothea's arms behind her back and pinning her down by force. Their grips were professional, efficient, the holds of men trained to restrain people who fought back. She wasn't fighting back. She couldn't. They outweighed her by a hundred pounds each, and they moved with the mechanical obedience of men who had stopped thinking the moment the heir gave the order.
She couldn't fight them off and was held there helplessly, while another two soldiers walked over carrying a large basin of peanut juice, stopped in front of her, grabbed her jaw hard, forced her mouth open, and poured the entire basin down her throat.
Dorothea clenched the hem of her clothes so tightly that her fingertips turned white.
The liquid was thick and sweet and wrong. It coated her tongue, her throat, the inside of her cheeks. She gagged. They held her jaw shut until she swallowed. Then they poured more.
She didn't understand. His phone could just as easily pull up the surveillance footage and reveal the truth, so why wouldn't he believe her? Why wouldn't he even bother to check? There was only one answer. Because in his eyes, there was only Kim and Chrisette now. Dorothea was not the woman who had given him a kidney when the bullet fragments were killing him from the inside. She was not the woman who had sacrificed her ability to bear children so that he could survive. She was an inconvenience. A prior claim on a life he had already redistributed.
Dorothea was severely allergic to peanuts. Even a palmful was enough to leave her body covered in hives and her breathing labored. The soldiers in this house knew it. The kitchen staff knew it. Every person who had ever prepared a meal in the Valente compound knew that peanuts were banned from the premises, by order, because of her.
And now four of those same soldiers held her down and poured it into her.
She didn't know how much peanut juice they had forced down her throat. She only felt the world spinning around her and her consciousness slipping away. Her skin was already burning, the hives rising fast, her airway tightening like a fist closing.
Through the haze, a memory surfaced. Their first date. She had accidentally eaten peanuts and gone into a full-body allergic reaction.
Jimmy had run three red lights just to get her to the emergency room. He had carried her through the doors himself, shouting at the nurses, refusing to leave the room. His hands had been shaking. She remembered his hands shaking. The heir to the Valente empire, the man groomed to inherit a dynasty built on blood, and his hands had been shaking because she couldn't breathe.
From that day on, not a single peanut had ever appeared in the villa again.
And now, he was standing not far away, holding Kim in his arms, watching all of this with cold, indifferent eyes.
Kim's face was pressed against his chest. Her hand still rested at her throat. She did not look away from Dorothea. Not once.
Only when Dorothea's body broke out in hives, her breathing turning shallow and strained, on the verge of suffocation, did the soldiers finally let go.
Dorothea collapsed onto the floor, too weak to even sit up. The tile was cold against her cheek. Her lungs made a sound like wet paper tearing with every breath. Her left hand, without conscious thought, drifted to cover her right knuckles, the shattered ones, pressing down against the bones as if holding herself together from the outside.
Through her blurred vision, she saw Jimmy supporting Kim as they walked out, his voice softening as he said to her, "Let's go. Chrisette just woke up at the hospital. She's asking for you."
He did not look back.
Dorothea watched as his figure disappeared completely from sight. The hallway swallowed them. The soldiers followed. The door to the guest room stayed open, because no one had thought to close it. She was not worth the gesture.
No. She couldn't die here from an allergic reaction. Not on the floor of a guest room in the compound that her sacrifice had helped preserve. Not while Kim walked out on the arm of the man whose life Dorothea had purchased with her own body.
She had to live. She had to get out of the Valentes alive.
Biting down hard on her lip, she forced herself to stay conscious. The taste of blood mixed with the residue of peanut in her mouth. With trembling hands, she dialed emergency services. Her fingers could barely hold the phone. The new one, the one Jimmy had not yet replaced, was shattered on the floor across the room. She used the room's landline. It took her three tries to hit the right numbers.
When she woke up again, she was in a hospital room, an IV drip feeding anti-allergy medication into her veins. The fluorescent light hummed above her. The room smelled of antiseptic and, faintly, of the cologne Jimmy wore. He was here.
Jimmy sat beside the bed, carefully applying ointment to the exposed areas of her skin. His touch was precise, almost clinical. The same hands that had gestured for the soldiers. The same fingers that had wiped Kim's tears.
When he saw her eyes open, he said flatly, "You're awake? Don't move. I'm not done applying the ointment yet."
He continued what he was doing as he spoke, his tone the tone of a man settling accounts. "I know you feel wronged, but Chrisette's allergic reaction was too severe. And Kim just had a baby. She's extremely emotionally unstable while she's recovering. If I hadn't been harsher with you, this wouldn't have blown over."
"I've already called in the best specialists in New York. You'll be fine soon."
"Once you're discharged and feel better, whatever you want, I'll give it to you."
"This is the new phone I bought for you. I already had the tech people transfer all the data and information from your old phone."
He set the phone on the bedside table the way he set everything down. Deliberately. A gift and a leash at the same time. Here is your connection to the outside world, restored by my generosity, controlled by my people, filled with data that my team has already combed through.
A mocking sneer rose inside her, but on the surface, she only nodded obediently. "Okay. I understand."
The very next second, Jimmy received a phone call and hurriedly left, using work as an excuse.
How could Dorothea not know? He was going to accompany Kim and Chrisette. But none of that mattered anymore. From beginning to end, all he had ever wanted was to keep her confined, controlled, possessed, and toyed with. She was not a wife. She was a holding. An asset in the Valente portfolio that he maintained out of habit and vanity, the way the Family maintained properties they no longer used but refused to sell.
Soon, the day she would truly leave would come, and since she had no way to take revenge on him for now, then when that day came, she would send them both straight to the abyss.
With a cold smile, she pulled up the bedroom surveillance footage on the new phone, wanting to see who had scattered the pollen under the bed, only to discover that part of the recording was blank. A clean gap in the feed. Professional. The kind of deletion that required access to the compound's security system, which meant either Kim had help from someone inside the household, or she had learned to work the system herself.
Kim really was good at this. But Dorothea would not let her off so easily. One day, she would get hold of Kim's weakness. In this world, everyone had one. You just had to be patient enough to find it, and ruthless enough to use it.
Dorothea spent an entire week in the hospital. During that week, Jimmy hardly showed up, which suited her just fine. The silence was a mercy. She used the days to let her body recover and her mind sharpen. She memorized passages of music in her head, running her fingers across the hospital blanket as if it were a keyboard, rebuilding the neural pathways that three years of silence had dulled. Her left hand still ached. It always ached. But it moved.
A week later, her condition had finally improved enough for her to be discharged, but Jimmy never came to pick her up.
She returned to the compound alone. The soldier at the gate nodded to her without meeting her eyes. The front door was unlocked. The house smelled of Kim's perfume and something cooking in the kitchen, garlic and basil, a domestic scene layered over a crime scene like fresh paint over bloodstains.
But the moment she pushed open the guest room door, she found Kim standing right in front of her.
Dorothea frowned, instantly on edge. Her left hand drifted to cover her right knuckles before she even registered the movement.
"Why are you in my room? Aren't you supposed to be staying in the master bedroom?"
Kim gave a small smile, her tone deliberately gentle. The voice of a woman who had rehearsed this conversation.
"I heard you were getting discharged today, so I came to wait for you. About what happened last time, I was too emotional. I wanted to apologize to you."
She paused, then added, "You can't be a mother, so you probably don't understand how scared to death I was…"
The words were surgical. You can't be a mother. Said softly, said with sympathy, said as though it were a neutral fact and not the direct consequence of Dorothea donating the kidney that saved Jimmy's life. Kim knew exactly what that sentence cost. That was why she'd chosen it.
Her words were suddenly cut off by a child's laughter coming from inside the room.
Dorothea pushed past her and froze at the sight that shattered her completely.
The guest room was a mess. All her belongings had been dragged out and scattered everywhere. Drawers emptied. Clothes on the floor. Her suitcase overturned.
Chrisette sat on the bed, surrounded by pages. It was Dorothea's handwritten sheet music from the past three years. Three years of compositions written in silence, in secret, in the margins of a life that had tried to erase her. Three years of proof that she was still a pianist, still an artist, still someone beyond the walls of this compound. Every page was a bridge back to the world she had lost.
One by one, the little girl tore the pages apart, crumpled them into balls, and tossed them to the small dog crouching nearby.
The dog wagged its tail excitedly and ran over to grab the paper balls in its mouth.
"Chrisette! What are you doing?!"
Dorothea rushed forward, her voice shaking with anger.
Chrisette looked up at her with wide, innocent eyes. The uncomplicated certainty of a child who had been taught that everything in this house was hers. "Oh, you're back, Auntie Thea! Mommy said I could play in your room. These scrap papers are so fun! Even the dog likes them."
Behind Dorothea, in the doorway, Kim's small smile did not change.
