The moment I pushed through the heavy oak door of the compound, I heard it. A sound drifting from the nursery wing, faint but unmistakable, and every nerve in my body caught fire.
Dominic had commissioned that room the day the doctor confirmed I was carrying his child. He'd overseen every detail himself, a thing so unlike him that even Marco Santini had raised an eyebrow. The hand-carved Florentine crib, imported from a workshop outside Siena. The cashmere blankets monogrammed with the Moretti crest. The stuffed animals lined along the windowsill like tiny sentinels, each one chosen by a man whose hands had ended lives selecting softness for the life he'd helped create.
That room was sacred. It belonged to our child.
And now he wanted to hand it to Serafina Greco.
Fury tore through me like a blade drawn across silk. I moved down the corridor, my swollen body protesting every rapid step, and threw the nursery door open so hard it cracked against the wall.
Serafina lay curled inside the crib. Inside the crib. Like a cat that had found the warmest spot in the house and claimed it. Her dark hair fanned across the pillow meant for my baby's head, her lips curved in a half-smile even in rest, as though she could feel the destruction she was causing and it pleased her.
I grabbed her arm and hauled her upright before my mind caught up with my body. Rage burned white-hot behind my ribs, and I opened my mouth to say something, anything, but Dominic's hand clamped around my wrist first.
He wrenched me back from her with the kind of force he usually reserved for men who owed him money.
"What the hell is wrong with you?" His voice was low and dangerous, the voice he used in sit-downs when someone had crossed a line. "You walk through the door and immediately start acting like a goddamn lunatic."
But then he saw the tears. They must have been falling without my permission, because his jaw tightened and his grip on my wrist loosened. Just barely. Just enough for me to feel the hesitation before he buried it.
"Are you really giving her this room?" My voice came out shredded. Raw. Like something had reached into my throat and torn strips from it.
Dominic's brow furrowed, and he glanced back at Serafina, who had sunk onto the edge of the crib with wide, wounded eyes. The performance of a woman who had perfected the art of looking fragile.
"Serafina said she liked it." He turned back to me, his expression already hardening. "It's not a big deal if she stays here for a while."
"Do you remember what you said when you—"
"Enough, Adriana." The words cut through the air like the snap of a round being chambered. His irritation was a living thing, filling the room, pressing against the walls. "Everything you've done these past few days has been a disappointment. Every single thing. If you keep this up, I'll have to reconsider whether this union should continue at all."
He paused. Let the silence do its work. Then his eyes dropped to my stomach, and when they rose again, they were cold as the marble floors beneath our feet.
"You don't want the child inside you to be born without a father's name, do you?"
There it was. The threat. Not a gun, not a blade, but something far more precise. Annulment. Dissolution of the blood-bound union that tied the Moretti name to the Valente line. He wielded it like a stiletto, sliding it between my ribs where it would do the most damage.
I stared at his face. At the sharp angle of his jaw as he turned away, the way he always turned away once he'd decided a conversation was over. As though I were a soldier dismissed from his study. As though I were nothing.
The memories came apart like wet paper. Every promise. Every whispered word in the dark of our bedroom, his mouth against my temple, his hand spread wide across my belly. This room will always belong to our child, Adriana. Always. And later, quieter, as though confessing something that cost him: I'll treasure you both for the rest of my life.
Ash. All of it. Reduced to ash in a matter of months, and the woman lying in our baby's crib was the match.
I said nothing else. There was nothing left to say to a man who had already stopped listening. I turned and walked out of the nursery, my spine straight, my face a mask carved from the same stone the Valente women had been carved from for generations. My hand found the curve of my belly instinctively, and I felt it. That faint, stubborn flutter. A kick. A pulse. Life insisting on itself despite everything.
"Don't worry, little one," I murmured, so quietly the words barely existed outside my own breath. "We don't need that room. I'll build you a better one. One that's truly ours."
Behind me, I felt Dominic's gaze. He stood in the nursery doorway, watching me walk down the corridor, and for the second time since the hospital, something crossed his face. Guilt. Sharp and involuntary, like a flinch. It surfaced for half a heartbeat before he drowned it.
Then Serafina's voice floated from behind him, soft and plaintive, calling his name the way a child calls for comfort.
He turned. He walked back to her. He always walked back to her.
Later, alone in the master bedroom suite, I sat on the edge of the bed that still smelled faintly of his cologne. My phone buzzed against the nightstand. Then again. Then again.
A string of voice messages from Serafina Greco.
I should not have opened them. I knew that even as my thumb pressed play on the first one. But the wounded animal inside me needed to see the wound clearly, needed to understand the full shape of its destruction, and so I listened.
Dominic's voice filled the room. Warm. Tender. The low, careful tone of a man discussing nursery colors, feeding schedules, the proper way to swaddle an infant. He laughed in one of the recordings. Laughed. The sound was so foreign to me now that it might as well have belonged to a stranger.
And then I understood.
Every moment of supposed devotion over the past nine months had been a rehearsal. Every cup of bone broth he'd insisted I drink. Every gift that arrived at the compound with a card in his handwriting. Every late-night conversation where he'd sat beside me and talked about what kind of father he wanted to be. All of it. Practice. A dry run performed on me and my child so that when it mattered, when it was Serafina's turn, he would already know exactly what to do.
The nourishing soups. The imported blankets. The parenting books stacked on his desk that I'd thought were so endearing. He hadn't been learning for our baby. He'd been learning for hers.
Even the nursery. That beautiful, sacred room he'd built with such care. It had never been for the child growing inside me. It had been prepared, from the very beginning, for the child in Serafina Greco's womb.
I was the rehearsal. My baby was the prop. We were tools used to smooth out his learning curve so that Serafina would never have to suffer through a single imperfect moment of his care.
I listened to the messages again. And again. The pain swelled inside my chest like a tide with nowhere to go, pressing against my lungs, my throat, the backs of my eyes, until something broke and I laughed. Not because any part of this was amusing. Because the agony had reached a pitch so absolute that my body could no longer tell the difference between grief and madness. Everything I had clung to since the day I learned I was pregnant, every scrap of warmth I had hoarded and protected and replayed in the dark to keep myself sane, had been counterfeit.
Dominic's tenderness toward my child did not even cast a shadow next to what he gave Serafina and hers.
I clenched the phone until my knuckles went white and my hand trembled against the cold metal. Breathing hurt. Each inhale felt like swallowing broken glass. All I could do was whisper it to myself, over and over, a prayer to whatever saint still bothered to listen to a Valente woman bleeding out in a Moretti bedroom.
It's okay. It's okay. It's okay.
It was okay. Because soon we would be free of him. Soon there would be no more compound, no more corridors that smelled of his cigars and her perfume, no more nursery that belonged to someone else's child. Just me and my baby. And we would be fine. We would be more than fine. We would be Valente.
The baby kicked. Hard. As though he could hear me through skin and blood and bone. As though he understood every word and was answering the only way he knew how.
I wrapped both arms around my belly and held on.
I stayed that way for a long time. The light shifted across the bedroom floor, moving from gold to amber to the deep bruised violet of evening. The compound settled around me, its old bones creaking, its silence thick with secrets and surveillance and the distant murmur of soldiers changing shifts at the gate.
I held my child, and I breathed, and eventually the shaking stopped.
Eventually, I could breathe again.
