Instead of going to the penthouse, I took a cab straight to the Estate.

It was a fortress of stone and iron, built to withstand sieges from rival families, but the true enemy was already inside.

I swept through the front doors, ignoring the shocked expressions of the guards. They didn't dare stop me.

I was still the Donna, even if my husband treated me like a mistress.

The house was quiet.

Too quiet.

I headed toward the main staircase. At the top of the landing, the gallery wall stretched out-a space that was supposed to be covered in our wedding photos. They were large, black-and-white prints of the day two crime families merged.

Now, the wall was bare.

The frames lay shattered on the marble floor below, and glass crunched ominously under my heels.

I looked up.

Ilene stood at the top of the stairs. She was wearing one of my silk robes, looking like a wraith-pale and smiling.

"I thought they looked better down there," she said.

Her voice echoed in the cavernous hall.

"Get out of my house, Ilene."

She tilted her head. "Ethan said this is my house now. He said you were going away for a long time."

Rage, hot and blinding, flooded my veins.

I started up the stairs, taking them two at a time. I didn't care about her fragility. I didn't care about her dead father. I was going to drag her out by her hair.

When I reached the top landing, Ilene didn't back away.

Instead, she stepped forward.

She placed her hands on my shoulders. Her grip was surprisingly strong.

"You are in the way," she whispered.

Then, she shoved.

It wasn't a stumble. It was a calculated, forceful push.

My heels slipped on the polished marble, and gravity took over.

I fell backward.

The world spun.

My back hit the edge of a step with a sickening crack.

My head slammed against the banister.

I tumbled down, a ragdoll of limbs and pain, finally crashing through the shards of my own wedding photos at the bottom.

I lay on the cold floor as darkness crept into the edges of my vision. I couldn't move my legs.

Through the haze, I saw the front door open.

Ethan walked in.

He stopped dead.

He looked at me, broken and bleeding on the floor, before shifting his gaze to the top of the stairs.

Ilene was screaming, fake tears streaming down her face.

"She slipped! Ethan! She tried to hit me and she slipped!"

Ethan looked back at me.

He didn't run to check my pulse.

Instead, he pulled out his phone.

"Erase the security tapes in the main hall," he ordered into the device.

Then he looked at his head of security.

"Get the car. We need to get Ilene out of here before the police come."

Without a second glance, he stepped over my body to get to her.

The hospital room felt different this time.

It was sterile, blindingly white, and it smelled of lies.

A heavy plaster cast anchored my leg to the bed, a dead weight against the crisp sheets.

Every shallow breath hitched against the cage of my three broken ribs.

Behind my eyes, a concussion throbbed a dull, rhythmic warning.

But the worst injury was the clarity.

It sliced through the haze of painkillers with brutal precision, refusing to let me sink back into oblivion.

I reached for the phone resting on the bedside table.

My fingers trembled, not just from weakness, but from resolve.

I dialed three numbers.

It was the ultimate betrayal.

Omertà-the sacred code of silence-was the bedrock of our existence.

Wives didn't dial 911.

We bled in private. We died in silence.

But the canary was already dead.

I wasn't a Mafia wife anymore. I was a liability.

A victim.

The operator's voice crackled through the line, a beacon from a world I was forbidden to touch.

"911, what is your emergency?"

I opened my mouth to speak, to shatter the code.

A hand slammed down on the receiver, severing the connection with a violence that rattled the base.

I looked up.

Ethan loomed over me.

His face was a mask of cold, unadulterated fury.

"What the hell do you think you are doing?" he hissed, his voice low and dangerous.

"I'm calling the police, Ethan. Your mistress tried to kill me."

"She isn't my mistress."

"She pushed me down the stairs!"

"She said you fell."

"And you believe her?" I asked, my voice rising, cracking under the weight of his betrayal. "You deleted the footage, Ethan. I heard you. You wiped the servers before you even checked if I was still breathing."

"I did what I had to do to protect the Family," he said, the capitalization audible in his tone.

The Family.

Always the Family.

"If the cops get involved, they will dig into everything, Aurora. The business. The offshore accounts. You would bring down the entire empire over a domestic accident."

Domestic accident.

That's what I was to him now.

An inconvenience. A loose end.

"Give me the phone, Ethan."

He didn't hand it over. Instead, he yanked the cord out of the wall, plaster dust falling to the floor.

"You are hysterical. It's the concussion talking."

He shoved the disconnected phone into his pocket.

I stared at him, trying to find the man I married.

This man had killed for me before.

He had once broken a man's fingers just for looking at me the wrong way in a club.

But when the threat came from inside his own house, born of his own sins, he was paralyzed.

"You are my husband," I whispered, the word tasting like ash. "You swore to protect me."

"I am protecting you," he said, his voice flat, devoid of warmth. "I have guards posted outside the door. No one gets in."

"Except you," I said.

A muscle feathered in his jaw. He flinched, just barely.

"I need to go," he said, straightening his jacket, adjusting his cuffs as if this were a business transaction. "The Commission is asking questions about the ambulance dispatch. I have to spin this before it gets out of hand."

He turned and walked to the door.

"Ethan."

He stopped, his hand hovering over the brass knob.

"If you walk out that door, don't come back."

He didn't turn around.

"Rest, Aurora. We will talk when you are rational."

The door clicked shut.

The silence that followed was heavier than the plaster cast on my leg. It was suffocating.

He chose her.

Again.

And in that crushing silence, the last flickering ember of love I held for Ethan Bruce finally sputtered and died.

I didn't cry.

Soldiers don't weep on the battlefield.

And I was at war.