Crack.
I backhanded Domenico across the face.
"My bigger mistake was believing your promises. Seven wasted years."
"It's over, Domenico. Divorce."
I turned to leave, swallowing against the dense, needling pain in my chest.
Without warning, hands shoved me from behind. My stomach slammed into the corner of the wall.
The old wound—the one I'd earned taking a knife for his mother—screamed to life. The pain dropped me to my knees, cold sweat soaking through the back of my shirt.
"I've been too lenient with you. That's why you think you can act like a shrew. Hitting me, hitting my woman. You—"
He stopped mid-sentence when he saw the state I was in. Something flickered across his face, and he crouched down, looking almost lost.
"I only wanted you to kneel. I didn't mean to hurt you. Is it your stomach?"
His palm settled instinctively over my abdomen, fingers working in a gentle, practiced massage.
Every time it rained, the scar—once deep enough to show bone—would ache without mercy. The old assassin's blade had caught me just below the ribs when I threw myself between the hitman and Patrizia. The wound had never healed cleanly. It never would.
Domenico had taught himself therapeutic massage just so he could ease the pain for me.
The same hands that once brought me comfort now made my skin crawl.
I shoved him away. "Worry about yourself. I'd suggest you get a blood test, because you're very likely infected too."
"Enough!"
His eyes went dark. "Whether Giuliana is clean, I know better than anyone. Shut your mouth."
"Oh, Domenico, don't waste your breath on that old hag." Giuliana clung to his arm, voice dripping with a spoiled sweetness. Her fingers found his bicep, curling there like she had a right to it. "If she wants a dissolution, let her have it. She's the one who can't produce an heir. She's the one at fault. Make her leave with nothing."
I watched the greedy excitement flickering behind Giuliana's eyes, and laughed coldly.
"Someone is leaving with nothing. According to the Blood Oath Compact, the party at fault is the one who broke the marriage pact. That's Domenico. And the one forfeiting all Corsetti assets is him."
The room went very still. Somewhere beyond the closed door, a soldier shifted his weight, leather creaking.
"You wouldn't dare."
Domenico glared at me.
I glared right back. "Why wouldn't I?"
His answer was a kick driven by pure rage.
I hit the floor, hands clutching my stomach, face drained of color. But there was no pity left on his face. Only fury. "I never knew you were this calculating. Have you been scheming to take my assets this whole time?"
A bitter laugh scraped out of me. "You're the one who insisted on signing the Compact. You said it was my safeguard. Swore it before the Commission. If you hadn't broken the pact, who could have schemed against you?"
Time really was a cruel magician, twisting love beyond recognition.
Giuliana seized the moment. She stepped forward and raised her stiletto over my lower abdomen, ready to bring it down.
At the last possible second, a figure lunged toward me.
"Stop it, all of you! No one touches a member of my family!"
My mother-in-law. The woman who had treated me like her own daughter.
Giuliana yanked her foot back in fright.
The wire holding me together finally snapped, and the tears I'd been forcing down for so long spilled free.
But Patrizia Corsetti didn't even glance at me. She stepped right over my body on the floor, took Giuliana's hand, and held it.
"Giuliana, sweetheart, you texted me that someone was bullying you, so I rushed right over. Who's got the nerve?"
Her rosary beads hung silent at her wrist. Still. Perfectly still.
Giuliana's smugness returned instantly. She pointed down at me, crumpled on the ground. "Her."
I lifted my head, humiliated, and through the blur of tears met my mother-in-law's ice-cold stare.
That was when it hit me. Domenico's affair. She'd known all along.
The "member of my family" she'd come to protect was Giuliana.
Something thick lodged in my throat, and when I finally spoke, my voice was barely a rasp. "…Why?"
I had saved Patrizia's life twice.
The first time was her recurrent ovarian cancer. A surgery so difficult no one else in the world could perform it. No hospital would touch it. No surgeon would risk their name. So it fell to me, in that quiet clinic where the Families sent the cases that could never see the light. I stood at that operating table for sixteen straight hours and dragged her back from the edge of death.
