I gave him a half-hearted answer. "I heard you."
Dominic paused, caught off guard. Through the mirror set above the marble basin, he studied my face the way he studied men who owed him tribute, looking for the angle, the lie, the weakness underneath.
"What's wrong with you?"
His eyes dropped to my collarbone, where the edge of the bandage peeked above the silk. "What happened to your neck?"
He reached out, as if to check it, the heavy signet ring catching the low light of the study. I turned away. His hand froze midair, suspended in the silence between us. For once, I didn't let him touch me. In a house where his word moved soldiers and silenced rooms, that small refusal cost me everything I had.
He grew impatient. Then he turned to leave, the obsidian floor swallowing the sound of his footsteps.
"Eva, I've given you everything I promised. You have no reason to act out like this."
But I hadn't done anything at all. That was the thing he could never see. I had spent years being nothing, being quiet, being the dutiful Mrs. Moretti who folded herself into the shape the Family required, and still he spoke as though I had crossed him.
As he started walking away, I looked at his back, at the breadth of those shoulders that had once felt like the only safe wall in the world. My fingers found the thin wedding band I no longer believed in, turning it slow against my knuckle.
"If you think I'm standing in your way, with her or whoever, then maybe..."
I made myself continue. "...we should get a severance. A divorce."
Dominic stopped cold. The clock somewhere in the study ticked once, twice, impossibly loud in the stillness. Then he turned around, staring at me with open disbelief, as though I had said something in a language the Family had never permitted.
"What did you just say?"
A beat of silence stretched between us, thin as wire. Then he let out a dry, bitter laugh, the kind that scraped.
"So that's your move now? First you clung to me like your life depended on it. Now it's emotional blackmail?" He took a step closer, and the temperature of the room seemed to drop with him, the way it always did when his patience thinned. "Eva, do you really think a manipulative woman like you is someone I could ever love?"
The words landed exactly where he aimed them. He had always known where the soft places were.
"You've been coming to this house since you were ten." His voice was sharper than usual, each syllable filed to an edge and meant to draw blood. "If we sever this, where the hell would you even go?"
An orphan the bloodline had taken in. A debt with a face. That was all he was reminding me of, and he wasn't wrong, and that was the worst of it.
"If you're not strong enough to walk away, then stop pretending to be. Just stick to your role as Mrs. Moretti."
It wasn't often he lost his temper like this. But when he did, the ugliness showed through the tailored calm, the way violence always lived just beneath the silk in men like him. He didn't stop until he'd as good as called me a leech, something that fed off the Family's name and brought nothing of its own to the table.
I didn't argue. There was no winning a sit-down where only one of us was allowed to speak. I just turned on the faucet and washed my hands, watching the water run clear over my fingers, over the band I no longer believed in.
Behind me, I could feel his gaze lingering, heavy as a hand on the back of my neck. Eventually his tone shifted, calmer, colder, the boss again instead of the man.
"The Old Don's birthday is next week. Get something respectable and come with me."
A command. No different from how he spoke to the soldiers who waited by the door. No different from an order passed down the line, expecting only obedience.
Then the day of the feast arrived.
Dominic actually came home early to collect me, which should have warned me. The estate was already humming with the quiet machinery of a Family gathering, cars idling at the gate, men in dark coats standing at the edges where the light didn't reach. What I didn't expect, what I should have, was that Gianna was already in the car.
She was in the front seat, settled there as though the place had always been hers. When she saw me, she offered a polite, wounded little smile and greeted me softly as Mrs. Moretti. For just a fraction of a second, before the sweetness arranged itself across her face, her eyes passed over me flat and assessing, measuring exactly how much ground she had taken. Then it was gone, and she was all gentleness again, and I was the one left holding the cold knowledge of what I'd seen.
My fingers found the thin band at my knuckle and went still around it.
