This was their child.
And my baby, at this moment, was nothing but a cold corpse.
"Adriana, does your leg still hurt? Here, take a few of these for the pain."
The concern and tenderness in his eyes were exactly as they had always been, the same face the whole Family trusted, but all of it was just a lie meant to keep me numb.
I looked at the pills in his hand and remembered the words I'd just overheard through that door.
"Dominic, the medicine's too bitter. Can I take it a little later?"
You've already killed one of my children. At least leave me the right to be a mother, all right?
Dominic hesitated for only a second before he smiled and stroked my hair. "You're a mother now. How can you still act like a child? You worked so hard bringing him into this world, and now your leg hurts on top of it. It breaks my heart. I couldn't sleep all night. Adriana, take a little pity on your husband, won't you? I've got to be a good father to our son too."
"I put honey in the water. It's sweet. Come, let me feed you."
No. That's not my baby. That's yours and Vittoria's!
Dominic brought the pills to my lips, giving me no chance to refuse again. Somewhere in the quiet of the Family's private clinic, a soldier shifted his weight outside the door, and the small sound seemed enormous.
The blood ran cold through my whole body. I closed my eyes and swallowed the pills dry, without touching the honey water.
That kind of false sweetness, I didn't want it!
The drug took hold fast. My lower belly burned as if a fire had been lit inside it, as if a knife were carving me open, and blood flowed out from below.
"Adriana, what's wrong?"
Dominic called for the doctor. The pain dragged me under.
Through my fading consciousness, I heard the doctor say, "Don Falcone, the lining of her womb has been completely eaten away. She'll never be able to have children again."
Dominic let out a long breath of relief.
When I opened my eyes again, his eyes were rimmed red, and he looked at me with a face full of heartbreak. "Adriana, the doctor said you suddenly had a severe hemorrhage after the birth. You won't be able to have children anymore."
"Don't be sad. At least we already have Matteo. When he grows up, I know he'll take good care of you."
Matteo?
He'd already picked out a name for Vittoria's child, this fast?
Dominic turned away the nurse who offered to clean me up. Setting aside his own obsession with cleanliness, the thing every man in the Family knew him for, he carried in the warm water himself and washed away the blood.
He told me his mother wanted to see the firstborn heir of the bloodline, so the dowager had already taken the baby away to the estate.
By the time all of it was done, it was deep into the night. Beyond the clinic walls, the territory had gone silent, the way it did only in the small hours when even the enforcers slept.
I looked at the weariness on his face and forced a small smile. "I'm fine. You've had a long day too. Go rest."
Dominic kissed my forehead. "All right. If you need anything, wake me. Tomorrow I'll take you to bring Matteo home, and from now on the three of us will build a good life together."
Once he was fast asleep, I quietly picked up his phone.
To prove his loyalty to me, Dominic had never once locked his screen. A man with nothing to hide, or so the whole famiglia believed.
But what I'd never known was that he'd set up a hidden second system beneath it.
And the password to switch into it was Vittoria's birthday.
As the system switched over, the wallpaper changed to a photo of him and Vittoria together, young, from before any of this, before the alliance pact had ever bound his name to mine.
There was only one person in his messages too. Vittoria. When I opened the thread, a photo of Vittoria holding a baby stung my eyes.
"Dominic, look how beautiful our child is. When he grows up, he'll be just as handsome as you."
That baby was the exact one Dominic had brought to show me that evening.
The further up I scrolled through their messages, the colder my heart grew.
Through the eight months I was pregnant, Dominic had always been away, business for the Family, sit-downs in other cities, deals that could not wait. The days he'd actually spent by my side, I could count on two hands.
I hadn't wanted to get in the way of the Family's work, so I'd quietly endured the misery of morning sickness alone, going back and forth to the clinic for my checkups by myself.
Only now did I understand. So it turned out those so-called trips for the Family were nothing but his excuse to be at Vittoria's side, tending to her pregnancy.
Among the tens of thousands of photos, every moment of Vittoria's pregnancy and delivery had been recorded.
