Elena POV
"He’s breathing," I whispered.
The words tasted like ash on my tongue.
"That’s all that matters. Dio, he’s alive."
My hands were shaking in my lap.
I clasped them together, squeezing until my nails bit into the skin, trying to ground myself in the pain so I wouldn't fall apart.
Beside me, Rocco shifted in his seat.
He reached for the door handle, his other hand drifting toward the gun holstered beneath his jacket.
"I should go get him," Rocco growled, his voice vibrating with restrained violence. "I should drag him back to the car. The Outfit has been bleeding without him."
"No."
My voice was sharper than I intended.
"Look at him, Rocco."
We watched Dante open the passenger door of a rusted sedan for the woman.
He helped her in with a reverence that made my stomach churn.
"That isn’t the Underboss of Chicago," I said, bitterness coating my throat. "That is a man named Arthur. Or whatever she calls him."
Rocco hesitated.
"Elena, he is your husband."
Husband.
The word echoed in the suffocating silence of the car.
I closed my eyes, and the image of our wedding day flashed behind my lids.
It had been a strategic alliance.
The Vitiello crime family of New York and the Moretti Outfit of Chicago.
We were the royalty of the underworld.
I had worn white lace that cost more than this entire town.
He had worn a black suit and a look of lethal boredom.
But that boredom had turned into obsession.
He had claimed me.
He had marked every inch of my skin with his touch, possessing me completely until the day he was deployed to handle a dispute with the Russians.
They told me it was a car bomb.
They said there was nothing left to bury.
I had collapsed when the Consigliere brought me his bloodied jacket.
I had spent three years lighting candles in the family chapel.
I refused to take off my ring.
I refused to let anyone else sit in his chair at the head of the table.
Now, looking at him, I realized the cruelest joke of all.
I was dying from a heart that refused to beat without him.
And he was living a life where I didn't even exist.
A tear slipped down my cheek.
I wiped it away angrily.
"He looks... peaceful," Rocco said, his voice low.
"He looks domesticated," I corrected, spitting the word like a curse.
Dante walked around to the driver's side of the sedan.
He paused.
Suddenly, his head snapped up.
His eyes locked onto our black SUV.
Even from this distance, through the tinted glass, I felt the impact.
His gaze wasn't soft anymore.
It was cold.
Calculating.
It was the look of a predator spotting a potential threat.
For a second, hope flared in my chest, hot and agonizing.
Maybe he remembered.
Maybe he felt the pull of the bond we shared, the blood oath we took.
But then he looked away, dismissing us as passing traffic, and slid into the car with the woman who carried his child.
