If I was too tired and accidentally fell asleep, I would still leave the bedside lamp on, afraid he would come home to darkness and feel lonely.

But tonight, I had no strength left to care.

I turned my back to him and said nothing.

My silence seemed to annoy him even more.

He clicked his tongue. "Are you seriously giving me attitude right now? Serafina's son had a 102-degree fever. If I hadn't taken them to the hospital, he could've suffered brain damage. Can you stop being so cold-blooded for once?"

Something inside me snapped.

I sat up and stared at him, my voice shaking with anger.

"When you left me on the curb in the middle of a snowstorm, did you think about whether I would be okay? Did you care whether I made it to the hospital safely? Dante, I'm pregnant. I'm carrying our child."

My eyes burned, but I forced myself to keep looking at him.

"Tell me, who is your wife? Me or Serafina? Is she so helpless that she can't call 911 by herself? Why does she have to call someone else's husband every time something happens?"

Dante let out a long, impatient sigh.

He looked at me as if I were being unreasonable, as if I were making trouble out of nothing.

"Adriana, don't be so petty. Serafina just came back from London. Her husband over there divorced her, and she has no one here. I'm the only person she knows. Life hasn't been easy for her. Raising a child alone is exhausting. If I can help her, then of course I should."

"For her?" I repeated softly.

My throat tightened, and tears stung my eyes.

"So because life is hard for her, you can abandon your pregnant wife on the roadside? Because she has no one, I deserve to be left alone in the snow?"

Dante frowned. "That's not what I meant."

"Then what did you mean?" I asked, my voice breaking despite myself. "If you care about her so much, why don't you just divorce me and go back to her? Isn't that what you really want?"

The words hung in the room. In any other Family, a wife suggesting divorce to an Underboss would have been unthinkable. But I was a Bellandi before I was a Valente, and my father's name still carried weight on both sides of the river.

The more I spoke, the more my chest ached.

I suddenly remembered the Dante from before.

Back then, if I so much as caught a cold, he would panic. He would wrap me in a coat, rush me to the clinic, and ignore even the most urgent calls from his Capos just to stay by my side.

He used to be afraid I would suffer even a little.

But now, he could leave me alone in a snowstorm while I was pregnant and still accuse me of lacking compassion.

Maybe he finally noticed the pain on my face, because his expression softened slightly.

He stepped closer and pulled me into his arms.

"Alright, honey. Don't be angry anymore," he said gently, as if coaxing a child. "I was wrong this time. Forgive me, okay? I swear it won't happen again."

His voice was tender, but it no longer warmed me.

Then his hand slid beneath my collar, and his lips brushed against my neck.

"I've missed you," he murmured. "It's been a while since we last did it."

Disgust and disbelief surged through me at the same time.

I slapped his hand away.

"What do you mean, a while?" I snapped. "We were together just last month. The doctor already warned us that I can't have sex again until after the baby is born. If something goes wrong, I could miscarry."

Dante's face darkened.

"Fine, fine," he muttered, clearly annoyed.

He let go of me and picked up his phone.

The moment he saw the screen, his expression changed completely.

The impatience vanished from his face. His eyes softened, and even the corners of his lips lifted slightly. He stared at the phone as if he had just received the most precious message in the world.

I called his name.

"Dante."

He didn't respond.

"Dante."

Still nothing.

It was as if I had disappeared from the room. The Underboss of the Valente Family, a man whose attention soldiers competed for, whose silence could empty a room. And he couldn't hear me sitting three feet away.

Later, while he was in the shower, his phone lay on the bedside table.

I stared at it for a long moment before reaching out. My thumb drifted to my left ring finger, pressing against the band there without thinking.

To my surprise, the lock screen code had been changed.

It used to be my birthday.

For years, he had used my birthday as his code. He once said it was because the day I was born was the luckiest day of his life.

But now, that code no longer worked.

I tried again.

Wrong.

Again.

Still wrong.

Then, for some reason, I thought of Serafina.

My fingers stiffened.

I entered 1123.

The screen unlocked.

For a few seconds, I just stared at the phone in silence.

So that was it.

My birthday had been replaced.

And so had I.

November 23rd.

That was the day Serafina Russo came back from London after her marriage fell apart.

No wonder Dante had changed his cipher to 1123.

The moment I realized it, I couldn't help letting out a cold laugh. My fingers tightened around his phone as the screen unlocked, and the first thing that appeared was his message thread with Serafina.

I opened it.

The sweetness in her words was almost nauseating.

[Serafina: Dante, thank you so much for today. I really don't know what I would've done without you. Sometimes I think, if only you were Matteo's dad.]

And Dante had replied almost immediately.

[Dante: If you don't mind, let Matteo call me Dad. I actually quite like it. ]

A smiling emoji sat at the end of the sentence, bright and harmless-looking, but it stabbed into my eyes like a blade.

My heart sank so hard it felt as if it had fallen into a frozen lake.

For a moment, my whole body went numb. The blood in my veins seemed to turn cold, inch by inch, until even my fingertips lost feeling. Somewhere down the hall, one of the soldiers shifted his weight outside the bedroom door, the floorboard groaning beneath him. Even the guards knew not to knock when the Underboss was home.

Just then, another notification popped up.

It was from Serafina.

A voice message.

Only two seconds long.

I stared at it for a few seconds before pressing play.

A young boy's cheerful voice came through the speaker.

"Thank you, Daddy Dante."

The room fell silent.

Then I laughed.

It wasn't because I found it funny.

It was the kind of laugh that came from pain too deep to cry over.

I was carrying Dante's child inside me, risking my body, enduring the discomfort and fear of pregnancy, while he was out there happily playing father to another woman's son. A Bellandi daughter, married into the Valente bloodline to carry an heir, and the heir meant nothing to the man who put it there.

On our wedding night, he had held my hand and promised me forever.

He had said he would love only me.

He had said he would be loyal.

He had said he would cherish me for the rest of his life.

It had only been three years.

And already, those vows had rusted into something ugly and worthless.

The bathroom door opened.

Dante stepped out with damp hair, a towel in his hand. The moment he saw me holding his phone, his expression changed.

His face twisted with rage.

Before I could even speak, he strode over and shoved me hard.

I lost my balance and crashed to the floor. The cold marble of the townhouse sent a shock up through my palms. A sharp pain tore through my lower abdomen, and I instinctively curled one hand over my stomach. My teeth sank into my lower lip as I forced myself to breathe through the pain.

"What the hell do you think you're doing?" Dante snapped. "Have you ever heard of privacy?"

Privacy.

The word was so absurd that it almost made me laugh again. Privacy, from the man whose soldiers swept the house for listening devices every Tuesday. Privacy, in a marriage that had been negotiated between two Families over a Sunday dinner neither bride nor groom had been invited to.

I struggled to push myself up from the floor, my voice shaking with anger.

"Privacy? What about boundaries?" I shot back. "You're letting Serafina's son call you Dad. Then what is our baby supposed to be?"

Dante's face remained cold.

"Oh, come on. It's just a godfather thing. Why do you have to turn everything into a problem?"

He stood there, looking down at me.

He didn't reach out.

He didn't ask if I was hurt.

He didn't even glance at my stomach.

There was only impatience in his eyes, as if I were some unreasonable burden he had been forced to deal with.

"It's not like I'm leaving you to marry Serafina," he said. "Isn't that enough for you?"

His words hit me harder than the shove.

Enough?

So I was supposed to be grateful that he hadn't abandoned me completely. I was supposed to accept that my husband could answer another woman's every call, let her child call him Dad, change his cipher to the date she returned, and still expect me to stay quiet because he had not officially severed our alliance marriage yet.

For a second, my mind drifted back to three years ago.

Back then, when Dante proposed to me at the Bellandi estate garden with my father's ring still warm from his handshake, his eyes had been full of warmth. He had looked at me like I was the only person he could see. Every word he spoke had been tender enough to make me believe in a lifetime.

But now, he looked at me with nothing but disdain.

As if I were something troublesome.

As if I were something he wished he could scrape off the bottom of his shoe.

I opened my mouth, but before I could say anything, his phone rang again.

I glanced at the screen.

Serafina.

No.

Not Serafina.

He had saved her contact under an unbearably intimate nickname.

Fina mia.

The sight of it made my chest tighten.

Dante picked up without hesitation, completely unbothered by the fact that I was still sitting on the floor.

Serafina's soft, delicate voice came through the phone.

"Hey, Dante. Sorry to bother you again, but Matteo's been fussy all night. He says he misses his Daddy Dante and wants you to come read him a bedtime story."

The anger on Dante's face disappeared instantly.

His eyes softened.

His expression lit up like a child who had just received the gift he wanted most.

"Aww, isn't he a cute boy?" he said, his voice full of affection. "How can I let him down?"

He was already turning toward the closet.

"Alright, I'll be right there. Wait for me, Matteo. Daddy's on the way."

Daddy.

The word made my stomach twist.

"Dante!"

My voice trembled as I called out to him.

He paused at the door, impatiently looking back.

I swallowed the bitterness in my throat and said, almost pleading, "Please don't go. Stay with me tonight. When you pushed me just now, I sprained my ankle."

It was true.

My ankle throbbed with every tiny movement, the pain shooting up my leg like needles. My stomach still ached faintly too, and fear sat heavy in my chest. My thumb drifted to my left ring finger, pressing the band against the bone as if the pressure could hold something together.

But Dante only glanced at me with disgust.