When I made it back to the room, Nico was standing in the doorway.
He looked at me with a furrowed brow, then let out a cold laugh.
"Done putting on the pity act?"
"Running around right after giving birth. You're clearly healthy enough — guess you don't need any postpartum rest after all."
"I'm moving Gianna into the compound. She's young and delicate, doesn't know how to lift a finger around a house. So check yourself out of the hospital and come home to be our maid."
He stepped closer as he spoke.
A cruel smile on his face.
"That look of pain you get. It's my favorite turn-on in bed."
He stared at me, waiting for me to crumble, to cry, to give him what he came for.
All he got was a face so calm it bordered on numb.
Bored with me, Nico turned and stopped a young nurse passing by.
"Where's the baby? Boy or girl? Bring it here."
The nurse went pale.
"Your grandfather took the baby," I said flatly.
Nico opened his mouth to say something else, but his phone rang.
The moment he answered, his face changed completely.
Then he slapped me across the face.
"Sera, what did you do to Gianna? If anything happens to her, I swear I will make you pay."
Already weak, I lost my footing and slammed backward into the hallway railing.
The nurse rushed forward to catch me.
"Mr. Valente, your wife just gave birth. You're going to kill her like this!"
Nico didn't hear a word.
He was already gone, racing off to tend to Gianna.
The nurse looked at me, her eyes full of pity.
My face was white, but there was nothing on it to pity.
Every last trace of love, hate, and everything in between had been ground out of me over seven years.
After the examination, the doctor ordered me to rest.
I finally learned what had set Nico off.
The baby was dead. Aldo, grief-stricken and furious, had made a single phone call and Gianna was blacklisted from every connected venue, every nightclub, every associate-run business in the city. Her social accounts went dark overnight. The Family's reach was quiet, thorough, and total.
Gianna assumed it was my doing and ran to Nico with a wildly embellished version of the story.
That was why he hit me.
But that wasn't all.
Nico stripped me of my seat at the Family's table. Whatever nominal standing the blood-bound marriage had given me within the Valente organization, he signed it away to Gianna as casually as a man writing a check.
To cheer her up, he bought an entire gold mine and named it after her.
In an interview, Gianna showed off the diamond ring on her hand, preening. She touched the hollow of her throat as she spoke, that quick, almost flirtatious gesture she wore like a habit.
"I've never considered myself the other woman. If a wife can't hold on to her husband's heart, she deserves to sit at home alone."
"Besides, the current Mrs. Valente only married into the Family for money. I'm different. Everything I have for Nico is real."
The comments section split down the middle.
A swarm of her rabid fans tagged my account.
Insults, slurs, demands that I step aside for Gianna.
I scrolled through it all and felt nothing but the irony.
After all these years, Nico's playbook for winning women over hadn't changed one bit.
He'd done the exact same thing to me, once.
When he found out I'd grown up poor and never had a birthday party, he gave me twenty gifts the year I turned twenty.
A gold baby locket for age one, all the way up to a villa on the coast for age twenty.
To make up, he said, for every year of hardship I'd ever known.
I still remember that night, standing under a sky full of stars, his hand around mine.
"Sera, I lost my parents young too. My grandfather raised me. I understand what that's like."
"From now on, I'll treat your grandmother like my own. I'll build the happiest family you've ever had."
I melted in those tender eyes.
Believed, naively, that I'd found the person I would spend my life with.
Then the novelty wore off.
