After finalizing the details of the asset division with Enzo, I saw the message Dominic had sent.
"Something urgent. Come to the club."
I thought it over. If something happened to Dominic, fine. But if something happened to the operation, my share of the settlement would shrink.
I'd barely reached the front entrance of the social club when I heard a burst of laughter.
A cluster of girls working the front were giggling as they called out to Valentina.
"You were so right, Valentina. All you have to do is send a message from Don Mancini's phone and she comes running like a little lapdog."
A moment later, Valentina stepped out from the back hallway.
"Serafina! Here to see Don Mancini? He's busy. No visitors. Especially not outsiders."
She leaned hard on the word outsiders.
In everyone's eyes, Valentina was the woman Dominic had publicly claimed.
I was just the worn-out wife. The outsider.
I pointed at the group that had just been laughing at me. "All of you. Pack your things and get out."
My father's dowry had built this empire. I held a blood-right stake in every front business the Mancini name touched. Cutting loose a handful of low-rank associates was a single sentence.
Valentina's face hardened instantly.
"Who gave you the right to throw your weight around here? Decisions about who stays and who goes are between me and Don Mancini."
I didn't bother arguing. I was about to call Dominic when I saw him walking over from the back office, two soldiers trailing at a respectful distance.
"What are you doing here?"
I expected him to be angry. Every other time I'd come to see him, he acted like I was embarrassing him, barely hiding his irritation.
But this time, there was something like smugness in his voice.
Valentina rushed in first, voice already trembling with tears.
"I don't know what got into her. She barged in screaming that we were seducing you, threatening to throw all of us out."
"Serafina." Dominic's face went cold.
"I can live with you being stupid. I can live with you being plain. But this paranoid, suspicious act. It disgusts me."
He sighed. "I really regret being with you."
The girls at the front covered their mouths, stifling their laughter. The two soldiers behind Dominic kept their eyes fixed on the floor.
Valentina watched me with the look of someone who'd already won.
But the strange thing was, I felt nothing.
Or maybe it wasn't strange at all. I'd known exactly what Dominic would say.
Back when the affair with Valentina first started, men in the neighborhood had tried to talk sense into him. You don't abandon the wife whose family bankrolled everything you have.
He'd said: "You have no idea how suffocating she is. Any man would cheat on a woman like that. She deserved to be abandoned. Even her own family threw her away."
"She tries to control everything except her own body. A woman who lets herself go like that is a failure."
I'd gained weight because I was attending his sit-downs and Family dinners on his behalf, eating what was placed in front of me so no one would question the strength of the Mancini table.
After I found out what he'd been saying, I lived in a fog of shame and self-doubt.
The sight of food made me gag.
That's how the stomach problems started.
Eventually I stopped going to dinners. Stopped going out at all.
The weight came off, but the damage to my stomach never healed.
My health stayed fragile. One illness after another, year after year.
"Nothing to say? Guilty conscience? No wonder you couldn't hold on to Gioia. A woman like you doesn't deserve to be a wife or a mother."
At the mention of our lost child, the pain hit like a blade between my ribs.
Every fight, Dominic found the deepest wound and twisted the knife.
He'd goad me until I snapped, then stand there with that I knew it look, watching me fall apart like it proved his point.
But this time, I was calm.
"Then let's not force it anymore. The dissolution papers are ready. Let's end this."
I handed the agreement to Dominic, then casually plucked a long, brownish-gold curl from his jacket lapel.
His eyes flickered. His index finger twitched toward the whiskey glass on the counter beside him, but there was no glass there. Not here. Not in front of everyone.
"It's not what you think…" He recovered fast, even managed a sigh. "Stop humiliating yourself. I really don't have the patience to forgive you again and again."
I kept my gaze fixed on him and watched the composure crack, watched him start to panic.
Then, keeping my voice steady, I said the words I'd been carrying for longer than I could bear.
"You don't get to say Gioia's name. I already know what you were doing the day I lost her."
The room went quiet. Not the polite quiet of people minding their business. The dead quiet of men who understood that something had just shifted and would not shift back.
The day of the miscarriage was the turning point of this blood-union.
It was also where Dominic and Valentina's story began.
I'd been running from that truth for a long time. Now I had to face it and cut clean.
"Serafina!" Dominic's composure shattered completely.
I held the pain down. My thumb pressed hard into the inside of my left wrist, right over the pulse.
"Do you want me to say it right here? In front of all these people?"
