Seven years of marriage, and Nico Valente had slept with every last friend and connection I had.

I pretended I saw nothing. Kept going to my prenatal checkups, nine months along, belly heavy in front of me. The Family's driver took me. The Family's doctor examined me. Everything I did passed through the Valente name like light through stained glass, colored by it, owned by it.

Until the day I was on my way to one of those appointments, and his latest woman ran me down with her car.

I was bleeding, wouldn't stop bleeding, and I begged him to take me to the hospital.

Nico looked at me like I was something stuck to his shoe.

"Sera Calloway, when did you learn to fake an accident for sympathy?"

"Don't think putting on a little show is going to make me care about you. You could die right here in front of me, and I wouldn't spare you a second glance."

Then he left with his new toy and didn't look back. His soldier opened the car door for him, and the black sedan pulled away from the curb like nothing had happened. Like I was nothing that had happened.

By the time I was brought to the hospital, the baby had already suffocated inside me.

And my grandmother. The shock triggered her heart condition. She was gone too.

When I woke, I stared at Don Aldo Valente with nothing left on my face.

"Let me go. Whatever I owed the Valente family, I've paid back with my life."

——

While I was speaking, my phone kept buzzing with incoming messages.

Screen after screen, all of them photos of Nico and his new favorite, Gianna Marchetti.

While I was hemorrhaging and losing my child.

The two of them had been at the Family's private club on the waterfront, going at it until dawn.

Gianna was draped against Nico's chest, kiss marks all over her, smiling straight into the camera with pure provocation.

Aldo Valente, still not knowing the full truth, tried one last effort. He placed a property-transfer document on the bed in front of me. Even now, his hands were steady. The hands of a man who had run an empire for fifty years. But his face looked older than I had ever seen it.

"Sera, Nico isn't bad at heart. You've loved him all these years. Why not give him one more chance? As long as I'm alive, no one can touch your position in this family."

I said nothing. I tapped open a video Gianna had sent.

The sounds of the two of them together filled the hospital room instantly.

Gianna, breathless, asked:

"Nico, you just left Sera lying in the road. You really don't feel anything at all?"

Nico was kissing Gianna's neck, eyes half-closed, hazy.

"Why would I? You're the one I like most. Even if Sera had the baby, she still wouldn't deserve to be compared to you."

Those sounds, those unbearable sounds, sent the veins in Aldo's temples throbbing with rage. His ring finger tapped the bed rail twice. Two taps. He had heard enough.

After a long sigh, he gave in.

"The Valente family has wronged you. I'll handle the divorce myself. Seven days, and you'll have your freedom."

"As for your grandmother and the baby's arrangements..."

Before he could finish, a nurse had already carried the baby in.

Maybe even heaven couldn't stand to watch me waste away in this marriage any longer.

So it let this child come into the world without ever drawing a breath.

I turned my head away.

Forced myself to keep steady.

"Bury the baby with the Valente family. I'll take my grandmother's ashes with me."

Aldo nodded, his face carved with pain.

"This is my fault. I should never have kept you here. Go. Go. You deserve a bigger life than this."

He hunched forward, gathered the still, silent baby into his arms, and left the room. The door closed behind him with a soft click, and two of his soldiers fell into step outside. Even grief, in this family, had an escort.

The tears I'd been holding back for so long finally slipped free.

All that bitterness, every last drop of it, rising at once.

My marriage to Nico had been Aldo's arrangement from the start.

He needed someone to keep Nico in check. A woman of clean reputation, quiet and steady, to anchor the heir the whole organization whispered was too reckless to lead.

I needed someone to cover Nonna Rosa's medical bills. The debts had been crushing us for years, and the Valente family's money was the only door left open. The price was me.

So we struck our deal.

I left my life behind and married Nico Valente. A blood-bound union. There was no prenup, no exit clause. Under the code, there was no divorce. There was only the Don's word.

After the wedding, I learned what had happened to him as a boy. Both parents killed in a rival family's hit before he was grown. Aldo had raised him inside the compound walls, surrounded by soldiers and silence.

I saw it with my own eyes, the way he cried out for his mother in the middle of the night, sobbing in his sleep. A man the city feared, curled into himself in the dark like a child, calling for someone who would never come.

Two broken people. In that moment, something in me answered something in him.

I wanted to heal that heart of his.

I wanted to build a real family with him.

To be the wife he deserved.

I spent hours teaching myself to cook, trying again and again to recreate the taste he said his mother used to make. Sunday gravy, slow-simmered for hours the way the old country women did it. I burned batch after batch and started over every time, because I believed that if I could get it right, if I could give him back that one small thing, maybe the rest would follow.

I traveled everywhere, piecing together the little wooden cabin from his memories, detail by detail.

I learned every trick in bed to keep him satisfied.

I thought we'd have a happy future.

But on our wedding anniversary, he walked into a hotel with my best friend, right out in the open.

I ran to confront him like I'd lost my mind.

Nico sneered and flung my contract with Don Aldo in my face.

"Sera, what exactly do you think you are? You play house for a couple of days and suddenly you think you're Mrs. Valente?"

"You're a dog my grandfather bought. What right do you have to question anything I do?"

"Push me again and I'll have your grandmother's treatment cut off today."

I stood there as if I'd been struck by lightning, unable to form a single word.

After that, Nico only got worse.

Once he'd had his fill of socialites and girls from associate families, he started going after my friends. Pushing past every line I had left.

On one side, my grandmother needed her treatment. On the other, a marriage that had already rotted through.

The two forces pulled me apart from opposite ends.

I nearly broke.

One day I was so out of it that I lost my footing and tumbled down the stairs of the compound. The hospital visit revealed I was pregnant.

Don Aldo all but begged me: "Sera, keep this baby. It might be the turning point for your marriage."

"If Nico still hasn't changed after the child is born, I promise I won't ask you to stay."

Carrying every tangled emotion inside me, I agreed.

I never imagined that after fighting so hard, my grandmother, my baby, my marriage, my love — I couldn't hold on to a single one.

I wiped the tears from the corners of my eyes, slowly, and looked up at the gray haze beyond the window.

Maybe the only consolation left was that Nico and I had both been set free.

While I was still lost in thought, his call came through.

"Sera, you went running to Grandpa to tattle again, didn't you? Gianna and I finally had some time alone and you ruined it."

"I'm warning you. Pull something like that again and I'll cut you off completely. No money, no protection, nothing."

Before, I would have groveled. Explained. Apologized. Done whatever it took to earn his forgiveness.

Now I just said, flat and empty:

"Do whatever you want."

My indifference caught Nico off guard.

But it only took a moment before he let out a cold laugh.

"I hear the baby was born. Having a child in your corner really does give you nerve."

"But don't forget. I'm the Valente heir. As long as you're still under this roof, I have more than enough ways to make your life hell."

I closed my eyes.

I knew exactly what Nico's ways looked like.

The first time I caught him in bed with someone, I'd been naive enough to go to Don Aldo for justice. What I got instead was Nico's fury.

He used my grandmother as leverage and forced me to kneel on the freezing bedroom balcony, slapping my own face over and over. Two of his soldiers stood inside the glass doors, watching. Neither moved. Neither looked away.

That night, the sounds of him and his woman carried through the walls until morning.

I was taken to the hospital the next day with a swollen face and frostbite. The doctor on the Family's payroll logged it as a fall on ice. No one questioned it.

Whatever real feeling I'd had left for him scattered into that blinding snow and never came back.

From then on, no matter what Nico did, I pretended I didn't see it. I swallowed every humiliation, endured every petty cruelty in silence. I held on to the title of Mrs. Valente with everything I had.

But now, my grandmother was gone. My baby was gone.

This marriage that had been dead in everything but name — it was time to finally end it.

I hung up without a word.

Then I stood, called the funeral parlor where the Family sent its dead, and scheduled a time for the cremation.

When I made it back to the room, Nico was standing in the doorway.

He looked at me with a furrowed brow, then let out a cold laugh.

"Done putting on the pity act?"

"Running around right after giving birth. You're clearly healthy enough — guess you don't need any postpartum rest after all."

"I'm moving Gianna into the compound. She's young and delicate, doesn't know how to lift a finger around a house. So check yourself out of the hospital and come home to be our maid."

He stepped closer as he spoke.

A cruel smile on his face.

"That look of pain you get. It's my favorite turn-on in bed."

He stared at me, waiting for me to crumble, to cry, to give him what he came for.

All he got was a face so calm it bordered on numb.

Bored with me, Nico turned and stopped a young nurse passing by.

"Where's the baby? Boy or girl? Bring it here."

The nurse went pale.

"Your grandfather took the baby," I said flatly.

Nico opened his mouth to say something else, but his phone rang.

The moment he answered, his face changed completely.

Then he slapped me across the face.

"Sera, what did you do to Gianna? If anything happens to her, I swear I will make you pay."

Already weak, I lost my footing and slammed backward into the hallway railing.

The nurse rushed forward to catch me.

"Mr. Valente, your wife just gave birth. You're going to kill her like this!"

Nico didn't hear a word.

He was already gone, racing off to tend to Gianna.

The nurse looked at me, her eyes full of pity.

My face was white, but there was nothing on it to pity.

Every last trace of love, hate, and everything in between had been ground out of me over seven years.

After the examination, the doctor ordered me to rest.

I finally learned what had set Nico off.

The baby was dead. Aldo, grief-stricken and furious, had made a single phone call and Gianna was blacklisted from every connected venue, every nightclub, every associate-run business in the city. Her social accounts went dark overnight. The Family's reach was quiet, thorough, and total.

Gianna assumed it was my doing and ran to Nico with a wildly embellished version of the story.

That was why he hit me.

But that wasn't all.

Nico stripped me of my seat at the Family's table. Whatever nominal standing the blood-bound marriage had given me within the Valente organization, he signed it away to Gianna as casually as a man writing a check.

To cheer her up, he bought an entire gold mine and named it after her.

In an interview, Gianna showed off the diamond ring on her hand, preening. She touched the hollow of her throat as she spoke, that quick, almost flirtatious gesture she wore like a habit.

"I've never considered myself the other woman. If a wife can't hold on to her husband's heart, she deserves to sit at home alone."

"Besides, the current Mrs. Valente only married into the Family for money. I'm different. Everything I have for Nico is real."

The comments section split down the middle.

A swarm of her rabid fans tagged my account.

Insults, slurs, demands that I step aside for Gianna.

I scrolled through it all and felt nothing but the irony.

After all these years, Nico's playbook for winning women over hadn't changed one bit.

He'd done the exact same thing to me, once.

When he found out I'd grown up poor and never had a birthday party, he gave me twenty gifts the year I turned twenty.

A gold baby locket for age one, all the way up to a villa on the coast for age twenty.

To make up, he said, for every year of hardship I'd ever known.

I still remember that night, standing under a sky full of stars, his hand around mine.

"Sera, I lost my parents young too. My grandfather raised me. I understand what that's like."

"From now on, I'll treat your grandmother like my own. I'll build the happiest family you've ever had."

I melted in those tender eyes.

Believed, naively, that I'd found the person I would spend my life with.

Then the novelty wore off.