Eight months pregnant, I risked my life and unborn child to carry the package through the freezing night, believing it would save my husband.
The message had screamed urgency. Deliver it. Now, or he dies.
But when I reached the warehouse on the south dock, there was no rescue, only three men. Bratva. Unaffiliated. Their eyes gleaming with cruel malice and lust as they scanned my body greedily.
"Poor girl, walked right into our trap. Did you really think your husband was in danger?" one laughed.
It was then, alarms flared inside my head in panic.
I turned to flee when rough hands pinned me down, sending white searing pain through my swollen belly.
"Let me go!" I screamed. "My husband will kill you—"
The name full of trust died on my lips instantly. As if a sharp lightning had struck my soul, I saw a familiar figure through the rusted grating of the loading bay.
Serafina. My half-sister, naked, straddling a man as lewd moans filled the surroundings.
And tangled in her arms was Nico Graystone.
My husband who went 'missing' right before our wedding ceremony at Saint Catherine's.
I laid in pain, completely frozen as he kissed her, the child in my belly completely still as if he understood the silence better than I did.
"Nico…" Serafina purred, voice trembling with feigned innocence as her satisfied eyes met my wide devastated ones across the dark expanse of the warehouse floor. "What about sister Bianca? She is your wife."
"Wife?" Nico laughed like the word disgusted him. "I don't marry beneath me. That farce of our 'love' ended the moment she proved useless to the Family. She is an embarrassment to the Graystone name."
The package slipped from my fingers and hit the concrete.
Every memory of Nico came crashing down all at once. Our childhood together, this very waterfront where he first kissed me and took me to bed before the marriage was formalized, the trials I went through to win his love.
"Just because she warmed my bed doesn't make her the Lady of this House. At most she has to accept the title of my mistress."
So this is what I was to him.
Not his wife.
Not his partner.
Not even a woman worth protecting.
Just a body that once obeyed.
One of the Bratva men's mocking laughter filled my ears. "A Graystone wife? It looks like she is just a slut discarded by the Boss."
I withered, my body thrashing as they licked my neck lewdly, crushing my belly under their weight.
"Tonight we will make you miscarry your baby and then leave our seed in your belly. When you get pregnant, come to us brothers for protection."
They laughed at my tears as two of them held my hands while another straddled me ready to make me abort the child.
I screamed.
I screamed until my throat burned, until my voice broke apart, until terror scraped me hollow.
"For the sake of all these years please save me, Nico!"
Far away, Nico's body froze, his gaze turning towards the darkness as my scream reached him.
"Who is there?" For a heartbeat, his eyes caught movement. A flash of pale skin, the outline of a woman desperately struggling under three filthy unaffiliated thugs as they muffled her cries.
Serafina's voice followed, rushed.
"Who would come here so late? Probably some Bratva whore trying to lure men for attention."
Nico hesitated, eyes flicking towards the cries when Serafina's hand slid up his chest, her voice purring seductively. "Nico… don't tell me you pity a whore's cry in the dark?"
There was a pause before Nico's words echoed off the concrete walls.
"Whoever wanders here at this hour deserves what's coming. Let them have her."
At that moment everything stopped. My breath, my heartbeat, the desperate thrashing, and my entire world collapsed.
The man I had loved all my life was close enough to end this nightmare.
Instead, he let them break me.
Every sound was a cruel symphony.
My sobs.
Their laughter.
And his silence.
My world shattered as they shoved me down, recording videos on their phones as their hands roamed every inch they could reach.
Pain faded into a ringing numbness and at the same moment I was going to be raped, Nico was having sex with another.
This body no longer felt like mine.
If I stayed inside it, I would shatter.
Through the haze, I heard Serafina's laughter as she brushed her fingers along Nico's chest, her voice lilting like silk dipped in poison.
"Nico…" she whispered, smiling faintly. One hand drifted to her collarbone, her eyes shimmering with tears that gathered but never fell. "Will you allow sister Bianca to give birth this time? Didn't you ask the Family doctor to sterilize her?"
My lips quivered as molten tears trailed down in horror.
"A weak woman breeds weak heirs. It's better if I also have the child in her womb taken care of now." Nico's lips brushed her throat. Between his fingers, an unlit cigarette rolled once, twice, then stopped.
"I will never let that thing carry my name. All Bianca can have now is a little place in my heart if she behaves."
Serafina's eyes glistened with those perfect, practiced tears. "But didn't sister already lose a child before? What if she learns the truth and leaves you—"
"Leave me?" Nico laughed, cold as the harbor water lapping against the pilings. "I am her everything, her entire world. She can die but can never leave me. Even if Bianca knows, she must understand that it was for the sake of this Family. That our previous newborn was offered as collateral to the Volkov Bratva Boss."
The air turned to frost around me.
Offered…?
Three years ago, I remembered kneeling on the cold tile floor of the clinic, my hands empty, my ears ringing as they told me my child hadn't survived.
I remembered how I couldn't cry at first, how the grief sat in my chest like a boulder crushing my heart.
Nico had held me that night so protectively. Please don't hurt yourself, Bianca. We will have more children.
Now, I couldn't understand how those moments of being loved that felt so real.
How could they all have been fake?
My fingers drifted to the hollow of my throat where my mother's locket should have hung. Nothing. Just skin and the frantic drumming of my pulse. My hand dropped and my jaw set, but the iron wouldn't come. Not this time. There was nothing left to harden.
My tears mixed with blood as I laid limp in horror, shock and betrayal. I awaited a death worse than an animal when a dangerous aura filled the warehouse. Something older than the Graystone name. Something that made the three Bratva men go still before they understood why.
In the next second a figure cut through the shadows like a blade.
A single suppressed gunshot. One man's neck snapped sideways from the impact. Two more rounds, precise and unhurried. The others dropped before they could reach their weapons.
Hot blood splattered across my chest, dripping down onto the crushed package.
And then the impossible happened.
The man stepped into the slant of light from the dock lamps, and I saw the signet ring on his hand. The crest I had only ever seen in Commission photographs. Valente.
He turned toward me, his suit jacket dark with blood, eyes cold and absolute as his gaze locked on mine.
Not wild or reckless but ancient. The authority of a man whose family had held power before the Graystones existed.
My lips trembled as I weakly reached toward my savior. "Y-you're hurt…"
I pressed my shaking hand against the gash along his ribs where a blade had caught him. "Please… let me help… my repayment."
For a heartbeat, his expression shifted. Something fractured behind those controlled eyes.
When he crouched beside me, I could only stare. The man before me wasn't like Nico Graystone.
His presence was heavier, colder, his gaze almost burning, feral and regal under the fluorescent dock light.
The moment my lips parted to thank him with my last breath, ruination, betrayal and utter agony burning in my heart, his hand slipped to the back of my neck, drawing me closer.
The kiss was not gentle. It was hungry and unforgiving. My last kiss.
And before the world faded, the last thing I felt was him sliding the heavy signet ring onto my finger, pressing it into place like a brand.
The Don of Dons claimed me as his.
And with my last consciousness I took an oath. Nico. Serafina. Pray that I die. For if I lived, I would pay back this humiliation hundredfold.
