Elena POV

They offered us the guest room, but sleep was elusive.

The silence of the countryside was deafening.

I craved the sirens of New York. I ached for the knowledge that armed guards were patrolling the perimeter.

Unable to bear the stillness, I walked out onto the porch.

The wooden boards creaked softly under my boots. The night air was cool, biting at my exposed skin.

I leaned against the railing, looking up at the stars. They were brighter here, unpolluted by the city lights.

Did Dante look at these same stars and wonder who he used to be?

Or was he so content in this small, simple life that he never looked up at all?

The screen door opened behind me.

I didn't turn.

"Couldn't sleep?"

It was Mia.

She was wearing a thick robe, her hand resting protectively on her belly. She moved with the heavy, careful gait of late pregnancy as she joined me.

By all rights, I should hate her.

She was the other woman. She was living the life I was supposed to have.

But looking at her face, open and guileless in the moonlight, I couldn't find the hate.

She hadn't stolen him. She had saved him.

I helped her sit on the porch swing.

"Thank you," she sighed, rubbing her lower spine. "My back is killing me."

"You're far along," I said.

"Seven months. It's a boy."

A son.

An heir.

Dante had always wanted a son. He used to tell me that our son would rule Chicago and New York.

Now his son would be... what?

A mechanic? A simple farmer?

"I don't hate you," I said suddenly.

The words slipped out before I could check them.

Mia looked surprised. "Why would you hate me?"

"For finding him before we did."

Mia looked down at her hands.

"I found him on the riverbank," she whispered. "He was... it was bad, Elena. He was shot. Three times."

I flinched at the image.

"I dragged him to my car. I stitched him up on my kitchen table because the nearest hospital is an hour away and he was bleeding out."

She looked up at me, her eyes glistening.

"He didn't speak for weeks. He just stared at the door like he was waiting for someone to come kill him."

"He was," I said.

Mia shivered.

"I didn't know who he was. I still don't, really. But I know he's dangerous. I've seen the scars. I've seen how he looks at strangers."

She paused.

"If I had known..."

She trailed off.

"If you had known?" I pressed.

"If I had known he was someone important... someone with a past like that... I might have run," she admitted. "I'm just a nurse, Elena. All I ever wanted was a quiet life."

She looked at the door where Dante was sleeping.

"But then he woke up. And he looked at me. And he wasn't a monster. He was just... lost."

I gripped the railing until my knuckles turned white.

He wasn't a monster to her. Because he had forgotten how to be one.

"You saved his life," I said. "For that, I owe you a debt."

"You don't owe me anything," Mia said. "I love him."

The words hung in the air between us.

Simple.

True.

And devastating.

She loved Arthur. And Arthur loved her.

Dante Moretti was dead.

And I was the widow who had come to drag his corpse back to the throne.

Elena POV

"Thank you for keeping him alive," I said.

The words were heavy, sitting on my tongue like river stones.

Mia looked at me, her eyes wide and searching beneath the flicker of the dim porch light.

She tucked a loose strand of blonde hair behind her ear.

"You said you're family," she ventured softly. "But you didn't say how."

I gripped the wooden railing until a splinter dug into the soft flesh of my palm.

The sharp bite of pain was grounding.

It was the only thing keeping me from screaming the truth that was clawing its way up my throat.

I am his wife. I am the woman he promised to burn the world for.

But looking at the closed door behind us, where Dante slept without screaming for the first time in years, I knew I couldn't say it.

The truth would shatter the fragile glass of his mind.

The doctors had warned us about the fragility of his memory, the trauma that had rewritten his very existence.

If I forced him to remember the blood, the torture, the empire he ruled, it might kill the man he had become.

And I loved him too much to kill him twice.

"I am Elena," I said, my voice steady and detached. "I am a cousin. A distant relative of the Famiglia."

Mia let out a long, shaky breath.

Her shoulders slumped as the tension left her frame.

"Oh, thank God," she whispered. "I was worried... I thought maybe you were an ex-lover."

She laughed nervously, her hand drifting to rub her swollen belly.

"I know how that sounds. Insecure. But he doesn't remember anything before the river, and when I saw you... you look like someone who belongs in a magazine. I'm just a nurse from a one-stoplight town."

She looked down at her hands.

They were rough, chapped from years of scrubbing and work.

"I was afraid he belonged to someone else."

"He doesn't," I lied.

The falsehood coated my tongue like ash.

"He belongs to you now."

Mia looked up, hope warring with fear in her expression.

"But his parents... the family you mentioned. Will they accept me? I'm nobody, Elena. I don't have money or status."

I looked at her.

She was innocent.

She was soft.

She was everything Dante used to despise.

He had once called civilians sheep waiting to be slaughtered.

Now he had become the shepherd protecting one.

"He chose you," I said. "In our world, loyalty is currency. He is loyal to you."

"But will they like me?" she pressed.

I looked away, staring into the suffocating darkness of the cornfields.

"You saved the Heir," I said. "The Family will treat you like royalty."

I didn't tell her that royalty in our world usually ended up dead or widowed.

I didn't tell her that by entering the Moretti estate, she was stepping into a cage gilded in gold and drowned in blood.

Mia smiled, a genuine, radiant thing.

"Thank you, Elena. I'm glad you found us."

She reached out and squeezed my hand.

Her skin was warm, alive.

Mine felt like ice, dead.

"We should sleep," I said, gently pulling my hand away. "We have a long drive tomorrow."

She nodded and went back inside.

I stayed on the porch.

I listened to the chorus of crickets.

I listened to the slow, steady beat of my own failing heart.

I had just given my husband to another woman.

And the worst part was, I knew he would thank me for it.

Elena POV

The convoy arrived at dawn.

But it wasn't a carriage that came for us.

It was a fleet of black, armored SUVs that crouched on the dirt road like idling beasts.

All down the street, curtains twitched as neighbors peeked through their blinds, terrified.

Dante stood on the porch, his body coiled tight.

He was scanning the perimeter, his eyes tracking the movement of the soldiers Rocco had called in.

From the wary set of his jaw, I could tell he didn't know them.

He didn't realize they were his subordinates.

He only saw armed men near his pregnant woman.

"It's okay, Arthur," Mia said, her voice soft as she touched his arm. "They're here to take us home."

Dante didn't relax until she was safely inside the middle vehicle.

It was the most secure one.

Bulletproof glass.

Reinforced chassis.

It was the car designed for the Don and his Donna.

I stood by the open door, watching.

"Get in," Rocco said to me, gesturing to the back seat where Dante and Mia were settling.

I shook my head, stepping back.

"No," I said. "I'll take the lead car."

Rocco frowned. "Principessa, that car is for security. It's not comfortable."

"I don't care."

I couldn't sit in a confined space with them for twelve hours.

I couldn't watch him touch her.

I walked to the front SUV and climbed in next to the driver.

The leather was stiff.

The suspension was unforgiving.

As we rolled out of the town, leaving the safety of the Midwest behind, I felt the familiar weight of the life I had tried to escape settling back onto my shoulders like a lead cloak.

We drove for hours.

My back ached.

My chest felt tight, a constant pressure that made it hard to draw a full breath.

We stopped at a rest area in Pennsylvania.

The soldiers formed a perimeter instantly.

Dante helped Mia out of the car.

He kept his hand on the small of her back, guiding her toward a picnic bench as if she were made of glass.

He didn't look at the soldiers.

He didn't look at me.

His world had shrunk to the size of the woman beside him.

I sat on a concrete barrier, keeping my distance.

Rocco brought me a bottle of water.

"You need to eat," he grunted.

"I'm not hungry."

I watched Dante.

He was peeling an orange.

He did it methodically, removing every scrap of white pith before handing a segment to Mia.

She ate it, laughing at something he said.

He wiped a drop of juice from her chin with his thumb.

The gesture was so intimate, so casual, it felt like a slap across my face.

He used to do that for me.

On our honeymoon in Sicily, he had peeled blood oranges for me on the terrace.

He had told me that the fruit was sweet because it grew from volcanic soil.

Destruction creates beauty, Elena, he had said.

Now he was creating beauty for someone else, and I was just the destruction.

My phone buzzed in my pocket.

It was a text from Luca, my brother.

Status?

I typed back with trembling fingers.

He is coming home. Prepare the Don.

I didn't tell him that the Don was gone.

I didn't tell him that the man coming home was named Arthur, and that he was bringing a queen who wasn't me.