As if my life hadn't just been carved out of me and left bleeding on the floor.
Like a woman possessed, I crossed the bedroom toward Miles's wardrobe, my bare feet silent against the cold obsidian tile. The whole estate was quiet at this hour, the kind of quiet that only money and fear could buy, and yet my pulse roared loud enough to drown it all out. My hands shook as I searched frantically through the soft folds of his suits, the expensive wool sliding through my fingers, until I found the slim leather wallet tucked into the breast pocket of a jacket that still smelled of his cologne and Turkish tobacco.
For years, he had kept our photo inside.
Our photo.
The one small reminder that I had ever mattered to him at all, that the daughter of the late Don Ferraro had once been something more than an arrangement.
When I finally pried it open, my worst fear hardened into truth.
My photograph was gone.
In its place sat the face of another woman. Elias. Smiling out at me from behind the worn plastic, wearing my place as easily as she wore the diamonds at her throat.
There was no denying it anymore.
The evidence was everywhere, scattered across his phone and his pockets and the alibis his own soldiers told for him. My husband had been openly betraying me. The man who had stood before the assembled Commission and sworn a blood-bound union before every Family in the territory. The man my father had trusted with both his only daughter and his entire legacy before they put two bullets in him and called it business. The man I had loved my entire life, since long before I understood what loving a man like him would cost.
With trembling fingers, I opened one of the videos saved to his messages.
Miles's voice filled the room immediately. A voice I knew better than my own heartbeat.
"You're... you're pregnant?"
His expression lit up with pure, unguarded joy, the kind I had not seen aimed at me in longer than I could remember.
When Elias nodded, he swept her up into his arms and kissed her. Then he laughed. A happy, carefree sound, the laugh of a man with no weight on his shoulders, no ledgers to keep, no enemy Families circling his borders.
"I'll have the alliance with Rowan dissolved before the Commission the moment she gives me a son," he murmured against her hair. He kissed her again, slow and certain. "Then we'll finally be a real family. I'll finally have two heirs."
For several seconds, I could not make the words mean anything. They moved past me like smoke, refusing to settle.
Then I replayed the video.
Again.
And again.
And again.
Each replay drove the blade deeper, twisting it slow, the way our world taught men to do it so the wound would never close clean.
My fingers drifted to my bare ring finger. I used to twist my wedding band whenever the nerves got the better of me, around and around until the gold went warm. The ring sat upstairs now, locked away in a velvet box because the swelling of late pregnancy had made it bite into my flesh.
Only then did I understand something that had been waiting beneath all of it.
That ring had stopped meaning anything long before I ever slipped it from my finger.
I sank down onto the floor at the foot of his wardrobe, drawing my knees as close as my swollen belly would allow, and wrapped both arms around myself as the truth pressed down with the full weight of everything I had believed.
Then, downstairs, the front door opened.
The shift in the air of the house was immediate, a current that ran through the whole compound. The faint, disciplined sound of enforcers straightening in the foyer. The quiet movement of men finding their posts. The unmistakable signs that always rippled through the estate when its master crossed the threshold. The soldiers always knew before I did.
He was home.
"Rowan?"
His voice echoed up through the stairwell, smooth, expecting an answer.
"Rowan?"
When the silence gave him nothing, I heard his footsteps on the stairs, unhurried, and then the bedroom door. The lights flicked on, flooding the room, and his eyes found me at once, folded into the corner with tears drying in tracks down my face.
"Rowan?" Concern arranged itself across his features, practiced and warm. "Are you alright?"
He crossed to me and reached for my shoulders, trying to lift me up, and every instinct in my body screamed to throw his hands off me. His hands were warm. They had been on her. Hours ago those same fingers had cradled another woman's face on a riverside where anyone might have seen.
"You're due any day now," he went on, his voice softening into something almost tender. "Can you stop being so careless? Why are you sitting in the dark? What if you'd fallen, what if something happened to—"
"Where were you?"
The question sliced clean through the performance.
He froze. Only for the space of a single breath. Then he recovered, the way he recovered from everything, with the ease of a man who had never once been made to answer for himself.
"Cara, I was with Elena all day. We were settling the border dispute with the Winslow territory before it turns into something we'll all bleed for." The lie came off his tongue effortlessly, oiled and ready.
"Really?" I looked directly into his eyes, holding them, refusing to let him slide away. "A friend of mine said she saw you on the riverside this afternoon. Buying hot chocolate."
For one moment, every drop of color drained from his face. Then he clamped down on it and pulled the mask back into place.
"So what?" His tone sharpened, going cold at the edges the way it did when an associate forgot his place. "Am I not allowed to buy something I want now?" His eyes narrowed to slits. "And why is someone following me? Who's putting eyes on me?"
The guilt flashed across his face before he could bury it. I saw all of it in that instant. He had spent the day with Elias. Laughing with her. Walking the riverside with her in plain view. While his soldiers stood at their posts and lied for him. While Elena's name, his own Underboss kept conveniently in the dark, served as a clean and convenient alibi.
I forced myself to stay calm, to keep my voice level, to give nothing away.
"I only asked because I wanted hot chocolate too."
I wanted to see how far he would go. How many lies he would lay, one atop the other, before the foundation gave. Apparently there was no limit to it. Apparently a man could build a whole second life and never feel the ground shift beneath him.
Finally his patience cracked.
"Why are you always so demanding?" His voice rose and filled the room, hard against the cold marble. "I have been working all day. If you want something, ask the staff to bring it to you. That's what they're for." Then he shook his head, his mouth curling in something close to disgust. "Honestly, Rowan. How are you supposed to stand beside me as a proper Don's wife when you're this stubborn?"
He did not wait for a single word in answer. He turned and walked out, and the bedroom door shut behind him with a soft, final click that landed heavier than any slammed door ever could.
Silence returned to the room.
Slowly, I lowered my head and wrapped both arms around the swell of my stomach, holding the only thing in this house that was still wholly mine. The tears I had fought down finally spilled over and ran free.
"My sweet baby..." My voice cracked and broke apart in the empty room. "Your daddy has already abandoned us."
I closed my eyes and gently stroked the curve of my belly, breathing through the ache until I could speak again.
"But Mommy won't." The words steadied as they left me, the first thing all night that felt like truth. "Mommy will always take care of you."
