Quinn's POV
I thought I was finally free. But the universe, it seemed, had reserved its cruelest punchline for me. Because before I even reached the iron gates at the edge of the Montecchio compound, two enforcers materialized from the darkness beneath the old stone archway. I barely had time to register the bulk of their shoulders, the practiced silence of their approach, before they seized me — one gripping each arm — like I was some disloyal associate fleeing a sit-down.
"We have to bring you back, Mrs. Montecchio. Don Zane's orders. He needs your blood."
"What? No! Let me go!" I struggled against them, not for myself, but for the life quietly forming inside me. My heart slammed against my ribs, each beat a warning siren my body already understood before my mind could catch up. "Why would he want my blood?"
Why, God? Why him? Why this fate? I had given everything. My body. My loyalty. My future. I had surrendered every part of myself to this marriage, to this family, to the blood oath I'd sworn before the old Don himself. Was that not enough? What kind of merciless design was this — to be bound to a man who saw me as nothing more than a resource to drain and discard?
And now he wanted more. Always more.
I wasn't sure which terrified me more — that he would discover the baby, or that he wouldn't care even if he did.
The next thing I knew, I was strapped to a steel chair in the estate's private medical suite, cold restraints biting into my wrists hard enough to leave bruises. The room smelled of antiseptic and old money — polished chrome, bleached tile, the faint metallic tang of instruments laid out on a sterile tray. I tried to lift my head and saw Zane standing with his arms crossed, watching me the way a man watches something beneath him. Something inconvenient.
"You really dragged me back for this? To drain me like some sacrificial animal?"
Zane didn't flinch. Not a muscle in his jaw moved. "Stop being dramatic. You're helping. Be useful for once."
I let out a bitter laugh, the sound scraping raw against the silence of the room. "Useful? Is that all I ever was to you? A convenient blood bank with a wedding ring and a Donna's title?"
"You're being emotional, as usual," he said, his voice flat, clinical. "You always did have a flair for victimhood."
"Says the man bleeding his wife dry while his precious comare rests on silk sheets."
He closed the distance between us in two steps and wrapped his large hand around my jaw, fingers pressing into the hollows of my cheeks. His grip was precise. Not enough to bruise. Just enough to remind me that he could. "Watch your mouth. Or else—"
"Or what?" I met his eyes, and for once, I didn't look away. "You'll toss me down the mountain next, like you did my dignity?"
He sneered, his lip curling with a contempt so practiced it might have been rehearsed. "You're alive, aren't you? You should be thanking me."
"You have her," I snapped, my voice cracking at the edges despite my best effort to hold it together. "You have your heir. Why am I still the one in this chair?"
The irony of it was a knife twisting between my ribs. His precious Nina slept soundly on silk pillows in the master suite — my suite — while I bled out for her and the child she carried. Meanwhile, my own unborn baby clung quietly to life inside me, unknown and unprotected.
But I wouldn't give him that truth. He didn't deserve it. He would weaponize it, manipulate it, twist it into something ugly — just like he had twisted everything else about me, about our marriage, about the oath he had sworn before God and the Family.
So I kept it buried deep. Like the rest of me.
I stared at the ceiling, the sterile fluorescent lights blurring behind a film of unshed tears, and my voice came out hoarse, barely above a whisper that somehow filled the room. "This is what I get for loving you? For defending your name at every sit-down? For stitching your wounds with my own hands like a wife, not a servant? I should have run the moment you put that ring on my finger."
"Then why didn't you?" he hissed, leaning closer. His breath was warm against my face, and it smelled like expensive whiskey and something rotten underneath. "You were too desperate. Too easy."
"And you were too much of a coward to divorce me," I said, the words low and dangerous in a way I hadn't known I was capable of.
He smirked. That cold, asymmetric curl of his mouth that I used to find devastating and now found revolting. "Why bother? You always come back."
That was when the needle drove in.
It was too thick. More like a blade than any medical instrument. I felt the sharp prick first — a bright, precise point of pain — then the slow, spreading burn as it pierced deeper, invading my skin, finding the vein beneath. The room seemed to contract around that single point of entry, every sound sharpening: the hum of the fluorescent tubes, the faint drip of saline, the creak of Zane's leather shoes as he shifted his weight.
But I didn't flinch. I would not give him the pleasure.
Still, a cold sweat broke across the back of my neck, and my fingers trembled against the restraints, knuckles whitening as they curled into fists around nothing.
Every ounce they drained from me felt like a piece of my past being ripped away — our first sit-down together, the way the old capos had nodded at me with grudging respect; the night I had stepped between Zane and a rival's blade without hesitation, taking the cut across my forearm so he wouldn't have to; the sleepless nights I had sat by the bedroom door, listening for his footsteps, waiting for him to come home to me instead of to her. I bled not just from my veins, but from the last fragments of the bond I had once held sacred. The blood oath. The marriage. The lie.
And through it all, he just stood there. Arms crossed. Jaw set. Watching me like I was nothing more than a container to be emptied.
"Don Zane," Rowan said carefully, his voice tight with the kind of restraint that comes from years of serving dangerous men, "Quinn's heart has always been delicate. Drawing too much blood could—"
"Keep going," Zane snapped, not even glancing at the doctor. "She's stubborn. She'll survive."
My vision dimmed at the edges, the room softening into watercolor.
I bit down on the inside of my cheek, hard enough to taste copper, just to stay conscious.
Eight hundred milliliters. That was how much they took from me. And the worst part — the cruelest, most pathetic part — was that I believed it was over. That this was the extent of the indignity.
Then someone coughed behind the curtain at the far end of the room. A single, delicate cough. And that one sound snapped Zane to attention like a dog hearing its master's whistle.
"Double it. Nina needs more blood."
I froze. The words landed in my chest like a bullet, and for a moment, the room went perfectly, terrifyingly still. Even the fluorescent lights seemed to hold their breath.
So I was being bled as a forced sacrifice for the shameless woman who had destroyed my life.
"You're draining me for your mistress?" I spat, and my voice didn't sound like my own anymore. It sounded like something cornered. Something with teeth. "You're bleeding your own wife to save the woman who broke our marriage? God, Zane!"
"She needs it," he said. Cold. Final. As if those three words were an entire moral philosophy.
I laughed — a raw, broken sound that scraped out of my throat like glass. Even as tears burned hot trails down my temples and into my hair. "And what about me? What about your Donna? Your wife? The woman who swore a blood oath to you before your own grandfather? You'd bleed me dry before lifting a single finger to help me!"
His expression didn't change. Not a flicker. Not a shadow of remorse or recognition. And that blankness, that absolute emptiness where something human should have been, told me everything I would ever need to know about Zane Montecchio.
Nina coughed again from behind the curtain, louder this time — more theatrical. "Zane!" she whimpered, her voice a practiced tremor of helplessness.
And like she had cast some kind of spell — like she had slipped something into his veins the way she had slipped into his bed — he moved. I was a near-unconscious mess strapped to a chair, my blood filling bag after bag, and he was already halfway across the room, drawn to her like a man under chemical compulsion.
I didn't know whether to laugh or cry. What a husband. What a Don. I was dying in the chair, and he was worried about a tickle in her throat.
Rowan's hands trembled as he adjusted the IV line. His face had gone the color of old parchment. "Don Zane, if we draw more blood, the baby in her—"
"Do it," Zane barked without turning around, his voice cracking through the room like a gunshot. He threw a glare over his shoulder at Rowan that carried the full, suffocating weight of his authority — the kind of look that ended careers, ended lives. "Otherwise, I'll personally throw you into the holding cell. Do you understand me?"
Rowan stiffened. I watched the war play out across his face — the oath he had taken as a physician fighting against the oath he had taken to the Family. His throat worked. His hands shook. But he nodded.
"Yes, Don Zane."
I wanted to scream. I wanted to beg him to stop, to tell him what he was about to destroy, to claw the needle from my arm and run. But my consciousness was dissolving, the edges of the world going soft and dark, and the last thing I felt before the blackness took me was a faint, terrible cramping low in my abdomen — like something letting go.
When I opened my eyes again, everything was blurred, as though I was looking at the world through water. I was no longer in the chair. I was lying on a narrow cot, covered by a thin blanket that smelled of starch and disinfectant.
Rowan sat beside me. His eyes were red-rimmed, bloodshot, the skin beneath them bruised with exhaustion and something worse. Something that looked like grief.
"You're stable now, Mrs. Montecchio," he said quietly. "Your vitals are normal. Your body is healing faster than I expected. It must be your natural resilience."
I blinked slowly, trying to pull the room into focus. "That sounds like good news," I rasped. My voice was a ruin. "So why do you look like someone just died?"
Rowan's lips parted slightly, as if the words had formed but refused to leave his mouth. He hesitated. His hands, folded in his lap, clenched and unclenched. Then he bowed his head, and when he spoke, his voice was barely audible.
"Because someone did."
I didn't understand at first. I stared at him, my sluggish mind trying to assemble the pieces — the blood, the cramping, the darkness, the look on his face. Then the understanding hit me like a freight train, and my hand flew to my stomach.
"No... no, no, no..."
"I'm so sorry," he whispered. "When Don Zane ordered us to double the blood draw... the baby didn't make it."
The scream that tore out of me was not a human sound. It came from somewhere deeper than my throat, deeper than my chest — from the hollow, shattered place where my child had been alive only hours ago. I thrashed on the cot, kicking the sheets off, knocking over the metal tray beside me. Instruments clattered to the tile floor. The IV stand swayed and crashed. Every instinct I possessed — every buried, suppressed survival reflex I had spent years smothering beneath duty and obedience — erupted at once, raw and feral and annihilating.
I shoved myself upright, ignoring the vertigo that turned the room into a spinning carousel of white and chrome, and staggered toward the door. My legs buckled. I caught myself on the doorframe, nails digging into the wood.
"ZANE!" I screamed into the empty corridor. My voice echoed off the marble floors, off the portraits of dead Montecchio patriarchs, off the silence that was the only answer I would ever receive. "You killed my baby! YOU MONSTER!"
He wasn't there. Of course he wasn't. He was probably holding Nina's hand in the master suite, murmuring reassurances against her hair, while I lost everything in a sterile room that smelled like bleach and death.
"I'll kill him!" The words ripped from me like a vow, like a blood oath of my own. "I swear it! I'll tear him apart!"
Rowan was behind me, his hands gentle on my arms, trying to guide me back. "Please, Mrs. Montecchio — Quinn — you need to rest."
I shoved him off with what little strength remained in my body. "Don't tell me to rest! He murdered my child!"
My knees gave out. I collapsed to the cold tile floor, and the sobs came — violent, heaving, full-body convulsions that stole my breath and left me gasping. I pressed my forehead to the floor and I wept for the child who would never open its eyes, never know its mother's face, never hear the lullaby I had already been humming in secret. I wept for the future that had been ripped from me by a needle and an order and a man who had once promised to protect me with his life.
Rowan crouched beside me. His voice was thick. "I'm sorry. If there was anything I could have done, I would have."
I didn't answer. The sobs quieted into hiccups, then into ragged breathing, then into silence.
But my mind?
My mind was no longer broken. It was sharpening. Each breath honed it further, like a blade being drawn across a whetstone in the dark. The grief was still there — it would always be there — but something else was growing beneath it now. Something cold. Something patient. Something with teeth and claws and an infinite, calculating memory.
No more pleading. No more waiting for scraps of love or mercy from a man who had none to give. No more playing the dutiful Donna while the walls closed in around me.
I would burn everything they cared about. Both of them.
I lifted my head from the floor. My eyes were dry now. When I looked at Rowan, he flinched — and I understood, in that moment, that something in my face had changed. Something permanent.
"Prepare my discharge papers," I said. My voice was steady. Quiet. Terrifyingly calm. "And all the medical records. I want copies of everything."
