Elena POV
"Thank you for keeping him alive," I said.
The words were heavy, sitting on my tongue like river stones.
Mia looked at me, her eyes wide and searching beneath the flicker of the dim porch light.
She tucked a loose strand of blonde hair behind her ear.
"You said you're family," she ventured softly. "But you didn't say how."
I gripped the wooden railing until a splinter dug into the soft flesh of my palm.
The sharp bite of pain was grounding.
It was the only thing keeping me from screaming the truth that was clawing its way up my throat.
I am his wife. I am the woman he promised to burn the world for.
But looking at the closed door behind us, where Dante slept without screaming for the first time in years, I knew I couldn't say it.
The truth would shatter the fragile glass of his mind.
The doctors had warned us about the fragility of his memory, the trauma that had rewritten his very existence.
If I forced him to remember the blood, the torture, the empire he ruled, it might kill the man he had become.
And I loved him too much to kill him twice.
"I am Elena," I said, my voice steady and detached. "I am a cousin. A distant relative of the Famiglia."
Mia let out a long, shaky breath.
Her shoulders slumped as the tension left her frame.
"Oh, thank God," she whispered. "I was worried... I thought maybe you were an ex-lover."
She laughed nervously, her hand drifting to rub her swollen belly.
"I know how that sounds. Insecure. But he doesn't remember anything before the river, and when I saw you... you look like someone who belongs in a magazine. I'm just a nurse from a one-stoplight town."
She looked down at her hands.
They were rough, chapped from years of scrubbing and work.
"I was afraid he belonged to someone else."
"He doesn't," I lied.
The falsehood coated my tongue like ash.
"He belongs to you now."
Mia looked up, hope warring with fear in her expression.
"But his parents... the family you mentioned. Will they accept me? I'm nobody, Elena. I don't have money or status."
I looked at her.
She was innocent.
She was soft.
She was everything Dante used to despise.
He had once called civilians sheep waiting to be slaughtered.
Now he had become the shepherd protecting one.
"He chose you," I said. "In our world, loyalty is currency. He is loyal to you."
"But will they like me?" she pressed.
I looked away, staring into the suffocating darkness of the cornfields.
"You saved the Heir," I said. "The Family will treat you like royalty."
I didn't tell her that royalty in our world usually ended up dead or widowed.
I didn't tell her that by entering the Moretti estate, she was stepping into a cage gilded in gold and drowned in blood.
Mia smiled, a genuine, radiant thing.
"Thank you, Elena. I'm glad you found us."
She reached out and squeezed my hand.
Her skin was warm, alive.
Mine felt like ice, dead.
"We should sleep," I said, gently pulling my hand away. "We have a long drive tomorrow."
She nodded and went back inside.
I stayed on the porch.
I listened to the chorus of crickets.
I listened to the slow, steady beat of my own failing heart.
I had just given my husband to another woman.
And the worst part was, I knew he would thank me for it.
