My Husband's Greatest Surgery Was Me

Then, when the world had finished with me and turned its back, Lorenzo Falcone came.

He was Underboss of the Falcone Family, heir to a throne, a man whose name alone emptied the air out of rooms. His people had promised him to no ruined girl. He defied every one of them to take me. He married me against the wishes of his own bloodline, and he treated me as though I were something precious salvaged from a fire. He cherished me. He looked at me the way a man looks at the one thing he refuses to let the world touch. For three years I let myself believe I had been saved, that out of all that blood one true thing had grown, that I was his treasure and he was mine.

Three years into that union, I found the video.

I had not gone looking for it. His computer sat open in his study, that room of cold marble and leather where the household soldiers never lingered and the door was always closed, and the file simply lay there waiting for me like something that had been patient a long time. I meant only to close the screen. Instead I watched.

It was footage of a surgery. The Family's back-room infirmary, the sterile white of it obscene against everything I knew Lorenzo to be. And it was Lorenzo's hands moving in the frame. Lorenzo's face bent low over a body on the table.

He was holding my sister's hand.

He held it tenderly, the way I had believed he only held mine, his eyes soft and full of that affection I had staked three years of my life upon, and he leaned down to her and murmured the words that would gut me more surely than any blade the kidnappers ever raised.

"Nadia, don't be scared. Serafina is your twin. Her womb is a perfect match for you. With me doing the cutting, once it's done, you'll finally be able to carry your own child."

Then the screen shifted.

And I saw myself.

……

The night before I was to be given away in a blood-bound alliance union, my twin sister and I were taken.

It was not the work of some careless street crew. Whoever they were, they knew the movements of the Valente compound, knew the hour the gates changed hands, knew that two daughters of the bloodline would be traveling that road with too few soldiers around them. My betrothed and my parents shut themselves in the study with the shutters drawn, and I have imagined that room a thousand times since. The grandfather clock ticking against the silence. The smell of my father's Turkish tobacco going stale in the air. Vera Everett, Don of the Valente Family, tapping his ring against the arm of his chair while he counted what the bloodline could bear to spend.

They wracked their minds. They emptied what safes they were willing to empty. But when the sum was set upon the table, it was only enough to buy back one girl.

They chose her.

Once Nadia was carried home, wrapped in someone's coat and weeping prettily for the cameras that were not there, she stepped into the place that had been mine. She married the man I had been promised to. She wore the union like a gown tailored to her body, and she smiled the smile the whole territory adored, and she behaved as though the abduction had been nothing more than a bad dream from which she alone had woken.

As for me, the daughter no one would pay to free, I was butchered.

They cut my uterus out of me while I was still breathing. There was no gentleness in it, no mercy, no drug to carry me under. They took what they had been sent to take and then they dumped me in a gutter at the edge of Falcone territory, soaked in my own blood, barely alive, a discarded thing left for the rats and the Feds to argue over.

Word travels faster than blood in this world. Within days every Family from the docks to the hills knew the shape of my ruin, and the whispers hardened into a verdict. A barren woman. A hollow thing. A daughter stripped of the one worth a bloodline ever grants a girl. They laughed behind their wine, the wives and the made men alike, and I learned that there is no cruelty quite as clean as the cruelty of people who have already decided you no longer matter.

Then, when the world had finished with me and turned its back, Lorenzo Falcone came.

He was Underboss of the Falcone Family, heir to a throne, a man whose name alone emptied the air out of rooms. His people had promised him to no ruined girl. He defied every one of them to take me. He married me against the wishes of his own bloodline, and he treated me as though I were something precious salvaged from a fire. He cherished me. He looked at me the way a man looks at the one thing he refuses to let the world touch. For three years I let myself believe I had been saved, that out of all that blood one true thing had grown, that I was his treasure and he was mine.

Three years into that union, I found the video.

I had not gone looking for it. His computer sat open in his study, that room of cold marble and leather where the household soldiers never lingered and the door was always closed, and the file simply lay there waiting for me like something that had been patient a long time. I meant only to close the screen. Instead I watched.

It was footage of a surgery. The Family's back-room infirmary, the sterile white of it obscene against everything I knew Lorenzo to be. And it was Lorenzo's hands moving in the frame. Lorenzo's face bent low over a body on the table.

He was holding my sister's hand.

He held it tenderly, the way I had believed he only held mine, his eyes soft and full of that affection I had staked three years of my life upon, and he leaned down to her and murmured the words that would gut me more surely than any blade the kidnappers ever raised.

"Nadia, don't be scared. Serafina is your twin. Her womb is a perfect match for you. With me doing the cutting, once it's done, you'll finally be able to carry your own child."

Then the screen shifted.

And I saw myself.

I saw Lorenzo standing over me with a scalpel in his hand. My eyes were bound. There was no drug in my veins, nothing to dull the world, nothing to carry me away from what he was about to do. I was screaming. I was sobbing in a terror so complete it had no bottom to it. And he made the cut anyway, his hand steady, his precision absolute, the hand of the Family's Knife opening me while I begged.

The room tilted.

A pain tore through me then, sharp and gut-wrenching, ripping outward from somewhere so deep inside I had thought it long since emptied and gone. It was not memory. It was the thing itself, alive again, the blindfold and the cold and the scream that had shredded my own throat. My body began to shake. I clamped a hand hard over my mouth to keep the sound in, the way I had learned to keep every sound in, and the tears came anyway, spilling hot and silent down my face while the truth crushed the air from my lungs. I nearly blacked out where I stood.

So the abduction had been his.

His plan. His design from the very first breath of it. Not the work of some greedy crew who knew our roads by luck, but a thing he had built, brick by patient brick, so that he could take what he needed from me and hand it, warm, to Nadia.

But that was the part I could not make lie still. If he had already carved out of me everything he wanted, then why the rest of it? Why the years of tenderness? Why marry me, why cherish me, why let me believe he was the one merciful hand in a world that had thrown me to the gutter, when all along he was the very hand that had destroyed me?

My thumb found the empty band of skin at the base of my finger, the place where a ring should have sat and never truly had, and I pressed against it hard, that phantom mark of everything taken from me, as though the pressure might hold me upright.

A crushing weight spread through my chest and would not lift.

And then, into that silence, the computer chimed.

A ChatUs notification bloomed across the still-open screen. A voice message, waiting to be played, sent by one of the men who moved in Lorenzo's inner circle. It sat there blinking, patient as the video had been, patient as everything in that house had been patient, and I stared at it with my hand still pressed to the hollow where my life had been cut away, knowing with a cold and certain dread that whatever I had already learned tonight was not yet the whole of it.