Dominic followed the doctor into the private office to collect the prenatal report. Serafina, however, murmured something about needing the restroom and lingered in the corridor.
Once both of them had disappeared behind the door, she finally spoke, her voice a slow, venomous drawl. "You can come out now. You've been standing there watching long enough. Haven't had your fill?"
I stepped from the shadow of the alcove without a word. My face betrayed nothing.
My silence seemed to irritate her. Her gaze sharpened, glittering with open mockery beneath the sterile fluorescent light.
"What, no shame left at all? You knew Dominic never loved you, yet you still insist on holding on to the title of Donna Moretti?"
I let out a cold laugh, the sound barely reaching my own ears. "And you don't find it shameful to be the other woman, fully aware he's blood-bound to someone else?"
Serafina's lips curled into a slow, deliberate smile. The kind a snake might wear before it struck. "I knew Dominic long before you did. If I hadn't gone overseas, you'd never have had the chance to stand at that altar with him."
She rested one hand lightly against her belly, her fingers splayed in a gesture that was equal parts possessive and theatrical. "But I'm back now. And I'm carrying his child. So I'd say it's time for you to step aside."
From the moment I had entered this blood-bound union with Dominic Moretti, I knew there was a woman who occupied a sacred chamber in his heart. The woman he believed had dragged him from the flames of the arson hit that nearly ended his life. His savior. His obsession. But I had never truly understood the depth of that fixation, the absolute permanence of the altar he had built to her memory, until I stood face to face with her in this corridor and saw the certainty in her eyes.
The pain that tore through my chest nearly buckled my knees. My fingers tightened instinctively around the folded report in my hand, the paper crinkling under the pressure.
Serafina noticed. Her eyes dropped to it. Before I could react, she snatched it from my grip with the quick, practiced hands of a pickpocket.
She scanned the conclusion. Her lips parted. And then she laughed. Wild, gleeful, utterly unrestrained laughter that bounced off the clinic walls like something feral.
"Cancer." She said the word like she was tasting it. Savoring it. "So tell me, what do you think? Will you live long enough to push out that bastard child, or will you both die together?"
Her laughter drilled into my skull, shrill and relentless, and something inside me fractured. A wire pulled taut for months, for years, finally snapping clean. I stepped forward and struck her across the face. Hard. The crack of my palm against her cheek echoed down the empty corridor.
Serafina staggered backward with exaggerated theatricality, then crumpled to the ground in a heap. The wail that tore from her throat was pitch-perfect, the cry of a wounded dove.
"Adriana, I didn't mean to keep this from you! But I'm pregnant! How could you hit me like that?"
Enormous tears rolled down her cheeks, catching the light. Her performance was flawless. And before I could even draw my next breath, before I could process the grotesque theater unfolding in front of me, a violent force slammed into my back. My balance vanished. My body pitched forward and my swollen belly struck the cold tile floor with a sickening impact that sent white light exploding behind my eyes.
Dominic's hand closed around my arm like a vice and hauled me upright. I was still reeling, still trying to pull air into lungs that had forgotten how to work, when his voice hit me like a fist.
"Are you out of your mind?!" His face was inches from mine, contorted with a fury I had never seen directed at me with such naked contempt. "How could you push Serafina? She's pregnant!"
I stared at him. My lips parted, but no sound came.
From the floor, Serafina's voice rose, trembling and fragile as spun glass. "Dominic, please don't fight with Adriana because of me. I shouldn't have asked you to come to the appointment. This is my fault." She pressed a hand to her stomach and looked up at him with glassy, brimming eyes. "As long as the baby's okay, she can slap me. I can take it."
She was a portrait of tragic martyrdom. The wronged woman. The innocent. Her lower lip quivered with a precision that belonged on a stage.
Dominic's jaw tightened until the muscle beneath his ear twitched. He turned back to me, and his voice dropped to something low and lethal, the tone he reserved for men who had broken the code.
"You've crossed the line, Adriana." The words fell like stones into still water. "Apologize to Serafina."
The absurdity of it struck me with such force that I laughed. The sound was bitter and broken, scraping against my own throat.
"You want me to apologize?" My voice came out hoarse, barely above a whisper. "Dominic, do you know what this is?"
I shoved the cancer report into his chest with both hands. My fingers were shaking so violently I could barely control them. My throat constricted around the words I couldn't say, the ones that would have sounded like begging.
He didn't look at it.
He took the paper, tore it cleanly in half, and let the pieces flutter to the floor between us. His eyes never left mine, and in them there was nothing. No curiosity. No concern. Only cold, unforgiving rage.
"I don't care what that says. All I know is you've gone too far." His voice rose, sharp enough to cut. "God, you're nine months pregnant, Adriana. How could you be this cruel to another woman?"
Tears slid down my cheeks. Hot. Silent. Tracing paths along skin that had gone numb. My entire body trembled, not from the pain still radiating through my abdomen where I had struck the floor, but from a fury so vast and so pure it left no room for anything else.
Dominic saw the tears. For the briefest instant, something flickered across his face. A crack in the granite. His tone softened, shifting to something that might have passed for tenderness in a world where tenderness still meant something.
"Alright. Can you just apologize? I know I haven't been giving you attention these past few months. But I promise, once the baby's born, I'll make it up to you."
Then, without a trace of shame, he placed his hand against my back and pushed me toward Serafina.
She looked up at me from where she still knelt on the floor. Her eyes, still wet with manufactured tears, glinted with the cold, unmistakable light of triumph.
I looked at Dominic. I searched his face, the face of the man who had once stood before me and sworn a blood oath. The man who had slid the Moretti ring onto my finger and promised me his name, his protection, his life. I searched for any trace of that man and found nothing. Only a stranger, hollowed out and rebuilt around the myth of a woman who had never saved him from anything.
I drew in a long, steadying breath. The air tasted like antiseptic and something final.
"No." My voice was quiet. Absolute. "I won't apologize."
I held his gaze for one last, unflinching moment.
"And Dominic, you've truly disappointed me."
Then I turned and walked away. My heels struck the tile in a steady, measured rhythm, and I did not look back.
