Damiano grabbed me and dragged me off the bed, hauling me toward Luciana's operating room. The IV line ripped free. A thread of blood traced down the back of my hand where the catheter tore loose, and the pain was so minor against everything else that my body barely registered it. The hallway stretched ahead of us, antiseptic white, and a DeSanti flattened herself against the wall as Damiano passed, her eyes dropping to the floor. Even here, outside Mancini territory, people recognized what he was. Power had a scent, and his was fury.
A doctor stood by the entrance to the surgical wing. The moment he saw Damiano, he hurried over, the kind of hurry that said he already knew which Winslow was paying for the woman on the table inside.
"Draw her blood." Damiano didn't waste a single word.
The doctor glanced at me, hesitation flickering across his face. His gaze traveled from the Nurse gown hanging loose on my frame to the pallor of my skin to the dried blood I had not been cleaned of. "But this young woman's complexion..."
"She's fine." Damiano cut him off. "Draw it."
The doctor's mouth opened once more, then closed. He looked at me the way men in this world looked at women who belonged to someone more dangerous than conscience. Then he reached for a tourniquet.
I was pushed into a chair. My sleeve was rolled up. When the needle pierced the vein, the cold spread up my arm like ice water filling my veins. I watched the dark red line travel through the tubing, leaving me drop by drop, each milliliter a small death I could see happening in real time.
I'd just had a miscarriage. I had no strength to fight back. All I could do was let my head fall against the chair and stare up at the white light overhead, watching the halo pulse and expand, pulse and expand. The edges of the room went soft. The hum of the fluorescent tube above me became the only sound in the world, a thin vibration that seemed to live inside my skull. My blood left me with the patience of something that had been waiting to go.
My consciousness began to drift.
Damiano suddenly took my hand. His grip was different now, not the bone-crushing seizure from before but something gentler, almost careful, as if the same fingers that had dragged me down a hallway could become tender simply because he had decided the crisis was passing. The shift should have been comforting. Instead it made my skin crawl with a recognition I could not yet name. His voice softened.
"Sera, as long as Luciana pulls through, everything that happened these past two days... we'll pretend none of it ever happened."
I didn't look at him.
"I know you have a problem with her. It's because she has feelings for me."
"But I've told you so many times. What I feel for Luciana is the bond of growing up together. She's no different from a little sister to me."
"My wife will only ever be you."
"Once you're feeling better, we'll register the marriage. I'll give you the grandest wedding."
"So, Sera, be good. Stop making trouble."
His words fell into the silence of that surgical corridor like coins dropped into an empty well. Each one sounded rehearsed, polished to a shine, and each one landed with the hollow ring of something that had never been real. I stared at the tubing running from my arm and let him talk, because stopping him would have required a kind of energy I no longer possessed and a kind of faith I had already buried on the floor of his compound.
A sister he'd slept with and still called pure?
What if Luciana got pregnant with his child?
Still a sister then?
But those thoughts barely flickered through my mind. They were gone almost as soon as they came. Like smoke through a cracked window, they passed and left nothing behind them but the faint smell of something that had already burned out.
None of it mattered anymore.
I was leaving.
Seven years of propping Damiano up, plus this blood I was giving now. Seven years of standing behind the Mancini heir while he climbed, translating his ambitions into the kind of quiet, invisible labor that no one in the Winslow ever acknowledged. Keeping his books clean. Smoothing his reputation. Being the woman he came home to when the public-facing world had wrung him dry. All of that, plus this blood draining from my arm into a bag destined for the woman he had chosen over me. That was more than enough to repay the debt of him pulling me out of Saint Rosalia's.
After this, whoever Damiano loved, married, or took to bed had nothing to do with me.
When the transfusion was over, I could barely stay on my feet. My vision went black. I nearly collapsed right there on the floor, and my hand shot out blindly and caught the arm of the chair, the vinyl creaking under my grip. The hallway listed sideways, then righted itself, then listed again.
But Damiano didn't notice. He was already gone, checking on Luciana. The surgical wing doors had swung shut behind him, and through the narrow window I could see his silhouette leaning over the gurney, his hand on Luciana's forehead, and the gentleness in that gesture was the last thing I would ever allow myself to witness from him.
I pulled out my phone. My fingers trembled as I sent my location to Caterina.
"Can you come get me?"
The reply came almost instantly.
"On my way."
Two words. No questions, no conditions, no demands for explanations. In a world built on leverage and obligation, Caterina Valente's reply carried the weight of something I had almost forgotten existed: unconditional rescue. The Valente matriarch moved the way old-money power always moved, without noise, without delay, with the quiet certainty that her resources would arrive before anyone thought to stop them.
I turned and walked back to my Nurse room.
I left the miscarriage report on the bed. The document sat there on the thin Nurse pillow, its clinical language spelling out in black ink what Damiano had never paused long enough to learn. Let him find it. Let him read it. Or let it yellow and curl in an empty room that no one ever returned to. It did not matter which.
All I took was my ID, my personal documents, and the broken watch that had belonged to Adrian Ricci, the directress of Saint Rosalia Home. The watch had not kept time in years. Its crystal was cracked and its hands were frozen at twenty past three, the hour of some long-forgotten afternoon when Adrian Ricci had smoothed a child's hair twice before telling her something hard. I closed my fingers around it and felt the sharp edge of the cracked glass press into my palm.
One step at a time, I climbed to the Nurse rooftop.
A private jet was already waiting. The Valente crest was not displayed on the fuselage, because families like the Valentes did not advertise their movements, but the crew stood at attention in a way that said everything a painted emblem would have. The cabin door opened. A doctor Caterina had arranged stood inside and rushed over the moment she saw me, checking my vitals with efficient hands and an expression that said she had been briefed and was not going to ask me to explain a single thing.
Clouds churned outside the window.
I pressed my forehead against the glass and watched the city where I had spent seven years shrink to a grid of lights, then to a glow, then to nothing. The engines hummed. My blood pressure was low enough that the doctor kept a hand near my wrist, monitoring my pulse with two fingers, and the steady rhythm of her counting was the closest thing to comfort I had felt in days.
When I arrived at the private clinic in America and saw my new husband lying there in his coma, the first thing I did was hold our ring-bearing hands together, take a photo, and post it to social media with a caption:
"Taken."
The ring on my finger was the Valente seal, old gold, heavy, unmistakable to anyone who knew the families. Posting it was not sentiment. It was a declaration. In the language of this world, a woman wearing a Valente ring and using the Valente name was no longer available for negotiation, claim, or retrieval. She belonged to another house now. And any man who tried to pull her back would have to answer not to her, but to every soldier, every capo, and every silent partner who had sworn loyalty to the Winslow crest on that band.
From that moment on, Damiano Mancini had nothing to do with me.
