"Let me take you to the Nurse first. You're already fragile, and yesterday I... nothing else can happen to you."
Damiano did not look at me once when he said it. His voice carried through the hallway of the Mancini compound like something rehearsed, something he had decided on the walk down the corridor, and his eyes stayed fixed on the woman draped against his chest as though she were the only living thing in the room. The hallway's pendant lights threw long shadows across the marble, and I could hear the faint creak of a soldier shifting his weight outside the stairwell door, pretending he had not witnessed any of it.
Luciana clutched the front of his shirt, her voice small. "But what about Serafina..."
"I'll come back for her."
He carried Luciana out without looking back. His footsteps faded down the hall, each one precise, unhurried, the stride of a man whose authority meant he never had to rush. Somewhere below, a car door opened and closed. An engine turned over. Then nothing.
I was the only one left, lying on the cold floor.
I stared at the ceiling. The crown molding up there was hand-carved, old money made visible, and the plaster had a hairline crack running from the chandelier mount to the far wall. I watched it the way you watch something meaningless when your mind is trying to leave your body. My vision blurred, slowly, then all at once.
I laughed.
It came out hoarse and hollow, the sound swallowed by the empty corridor before it could echo. If the soldier outside heard it, he did not come.
My hand found my stomach. My fingers were shaking.
"Baby, did you see that?"
"Your daddy doesn't love Mommy. He doesn't love you either."
"How could Mommy... ever dare bring you into this world."
The words left me in a whisper meant for no one alive enough to hear them. I pressed my palm flat against my abdomen and felt the nothing there, the terrible quiet of a body that had already made its own decision while the man who should have cared was carrying someone else down the stairs. The floor beneath me was cold and smooth, imported stone that the Mancini Winslow had paid a fortune to lay, and it held no warmth for anyone.
I don't know how long I lay there before my phone buzzed beside me.
The ride I'd called earlier had arrived.
I pressed my palms against the floor and pushed myself up, inch by inch. My body felt like it had been taken apart and put back wrong. Every movement sent tremors of pain through me. The stairwell banister was close enough to reach, and I locked my fingers around it, the wrought iron biting into my grip. The compound was silent the way it always went silent when the heir left and the household staff scattered to their posts, pretending the night had not happened.
But I stood up.
One step at a time, I walked toward the door.
Blood ran down my legs. I couldn't feel it anymore. The driver waiting outside the compound gate did not ask questions. In this neighborhood, on this block, you did not ask questions about a woman leaving a Mancini property in the small hours with blood on her dress. You opened the door and you drove.
By the time they wheeled me into the operating room, my consciousness was already slipping. The Nurse was not the private Mancini clinic. It was a public emergency ward, fluorescent-lit, the curtain around my gurney a thin blue barrier between me and a hallway full of strangers who did not know my name or which Winslow's compound I had just crawled out of. Voices drifted in and out.
"Miscarriage... she needs a D&C..."
"Where's her Winslow?"
"There's no Winslow."
The words landed somewhere distant, on the other side of a pane of glass I was slipping behind. No Winslow. The phrase should have stung, but it was only true. The Bellandis had never claimed me, not really, and the man who had promised to had just carried my sister out of the house while I bled on the floor. I let my eyes close. The surgical light above me burned white through my lids, and then there was nothing at all.
I don't know how much time passed before I opened my eyes again.
Before I could figure out where I was, the door slammed open.
"Serafina!"
Damiano stormed in, breathing hard. His jacket was gone. His sleeves were rolled to the forearm, and there was a smear of something dark along his cuff that might have been Luciana's blood or the residue of the surgical wing's antiseptic. The overhead light caught the face of his watch, and even from the bed I could see how tight the leather strap was cinched, the skin beneath it blanched white. That sound, the creak of the strap adjusting against his wrist, had become a language I understood better than Italian. Someone was about to pay for his mood.
He crossed the room in three strides and seized my wrist. His grip was so tight I thought the bones would splinter. The IV stand rattled. The heart monitor beside me spiked once, a sharp digital protest that neither of us acknowledged.
"You have the nerve to just lie here?"
His voice was low, but the fury in it was unmistakable. It was the voice he used in back rooms when a capo brought bad numbers, the voice that made soldiers step out of doorways to give him space. He used it on me like I was one of them, like I was someone who owed him something and had failed to deliver.
"Luciana's spleen ruptured because you pushed her. Massive hemorrhaging. She's in emergency surgery right now. You're the same blood type. You're giving her a transfusion."
The fog in my head cleared instantly.
What he was accusing me of was so absurd that for a moment I forgot the pain entirely. My mind replayed the stairwell in a single flash: Luciana's fingers rising to the pearls at her throat, the pivot of her body as she misjudged the step, the sound of her falling that came before I ever moved. I had been standing three steps above her. I had not touched her. And yet here stood Damiano Mancini, heir to a syndicate built on omertà and witness corroboration, choosing to believe one woman's silence over another's words because belief was not the point. Control was.
"I didn't push her." I wrenched my hand free, my voice raw and cold. "Damiano, have you lost your mind? You want me to give blood? I just had a—"
"You're still denying it!"
He cut me off, his eyes darkening with something vicious. The strap on his watch creaked again, louder now, and the fluorescent light above us hummed as if the room itself were bracing for what came next.
"I saw it with my own eyes. You pushed her down those stairs. Luciana is the one covering for you because she's too kind, afraid I'd blame you. She protected you, and you won't even save her life?!"
I watched him construct his own version of reality and convict me with it. It was so ridiculous I almost laughed. In the Mancini house, truth was whatever the heir decided it was, and everyone else arranged their faces accordingly. "Who asked for her kindness? I didn't do it, and I didn't do it!"
"If something happens to Luciana, how are you going to keep your place in the Bellandi Winslow? Is that what you want? For them to disown you? Would that make you happy?"
He wasn't listening to a single word I said. His brow furrowed like he genuinely believed he was looking out for me, like threatening me with the Winslow that had never wanted me was an act of mercy.
"You and Luciana have the same blood type," he said. "You're donating. Consider it your apology."
Something lodged in my chest. I couldn't breathe. The Nurse room was small and the walls were close and Damiano filled whatever space was left with the force of a man who had been raised to believe his presence alone settled arguments. My thumb found my wedding band and turned it once, a motion so slight he would never have noticed it. But I felt it. The cool metal rotating against skin. I had stopped hoping. I had started deciding.
"I told you. I didn't push her." Every word was deliberate. "And I just—"
"Stop pretending to be sick." Damiano's frown deepened, his patience visibly fraying. "Serafina, when did you become like this? You won't own up to what you did, and now you're playing the victim?"
I lost every last shred of desire to communicate with him.
When someone has already decided you're guilty, nothing you say will ever be the right thing.
