All of Italy knew Kayson Moretti was obsessed with me.

He was the untouchable Don of the Moretti family, a man who never lost control in public, yet he broke every rule for me. He declared his love at a gathering of the most powerful mafia families in the country, then bought an entire private island just to build me a glass-domed garden when he proposed.

For years, he laid the world at my feet—power, jewels, territory, status. If I wanted something, Kayson didn’t promise it. He made it mine.

That was why everyone believed I was the luckiest woman in Italy.

They were wrong.

Because the same man who swore he would die for me was sleeping with his private secretary behind my back. Worse, he got her pregnant.

The day she sent me her ultrasound, their bed photos, and every intimate secret she thought would destroy me, I didn’t cry. I didn’t beg. I didn’t confront him.

Instead, I erased every trace I had ever left in his world.

My name. My accounts. My records. My past.

I staged my death.

I let the world believe I had died in a private jet crash.

My phone vibrated.

That anonymous number had sent me another photo.

I tapped the screen. The woman in it was Sofia Romano.

She was wearing a clinging deep wine satin gown, the straps so thin they barely seemed to exist. Faint marks still stained the side of her neck and along her collarbone. She was half-reclined against a black leather sofa, and in the lower right corner of the frame, a man’s hand rested possessively on her knee.

I recognized that hand instantly.

The wedding band on his ring finger caught the light with a cold, merciless gleam. Kayson had designed those rings himself, then had them custom-made by a Swiss jeweler. I still remembered the way he had held my hand and told me there would never be another pair like them in the world, because anything he gave me was meant to be mine alone.

Now the memory felt like a joke.

He was wearing the ring that was supposed to mean forever, supposed to mean only me, while touching another woman.

For one awful moment, I found myself wondering what had been on his mind. Excitement. Desire. The thrill of getting away with it. Or maybe, somewhere beneath it all, the smallest flicker of guilt.

Before I could stop staring at the photo, the front doors of the estate opened.

Kayson was home.

He did not even bother taking off his coat before crossing the room straight toward me. There was still the look of someone who had rushed back in his face, but his voice, when he spoke, was as warm and low as ever.

“I’m sorry, tesoro. The capos kept dragging things out. The meeting ran late. I almost missed our anniversary.”

Had family business kept him, or had another woman?

“What’s wrong?” His eyes landed on my face, and the concern in them was immediate, almost convincing. “Who upset you?”

The one man with the greatest right to make me miserable was him, and still he could stand there and ask me that.

I forced back the tears burning behind my eyes and said only one word.

“You.”

Kayson paused, then gave me that familiar look, half helpless, half indulgent. He thought I was upset because he was late.

“Then I’m guilty,” he said softly, looking down at me like I was something precious. “From now on, you come before everything. I won’t make you wait for me like this again. Don’t be angry with me, hm?”

Then he bent and pressed the lightest kiss to the corner of my eye.

If this had happened before, I would have melted. I always did.

But now all I could think about was where he had been before he came home to me. I could not stop thinking about the fact that those hands had touched someone else, that mouth had kissed someone else, and now he was using both to comfort me as if I would not know the difference.

My stomach turned.

I lifted a hand to stop him and stepped back without meaning to.

Kayson froze for a second. When he spoke again, his voice was gentler.

“Lucia, I know I was wrong tonight. Just don’t be upset yet. At least look at what I brought you, all right?”

He reached into his coat pocket and took out a dark blue velvet box.

“I designed it myself,” he said. “A bracelet. Our names are engraved on it.”

He opened the box slowly.

Inside lay a diamond bracelet, extravagant and flawless. Exactly the kind of gift Kayson Moretti would give me. Rare. Expensive. One of a kind.

That only made it hurt more.

The betrayal was real.

The tenderness was real too.

The lies were real.

So was the effort.

He could wear his wedding ring while touching another woman, then come home and hand me an anniversary gift meant to prove how much I mattered. He could break every vow he had ever made to me, then look me in the eye and play devoted husband so perfectly I almost wanted to believe him.

Kayson Moretti.

Which part of you is real?

Then I stopped myself.

It did not matter anymore.

A few hours earlier, I had already put an end to this rotten, beautiful lie.

“Miss Bellini, are you certain you want to erase your identity completely? Once this takes effect, you disappear for good. No one will be able to find you.”

“I’m sure.”

By the time I walked out of that office, Lucia Bellini was already beginning to disappear on paper.

In forty-eight hours, the rest of the world would believe she was gone too.

A new passport. A new name. A new country waiting for me on the other side of the sea.

Before our wedding, I had made one thing very clear to Kayson. If he ever betrayed me, I would vanish so completely that even the Moretti family, with all its reach and power, would never find me again.

Now I was only doing exactly what I had promised.

By the time I returned to the estate, it was already nine-forty.

Today was our third wedding anniversary.

Kayson said he had a gift waiting for me, something only I deserved to have.

I believed I was waiting for my husband.

Instead, what reached me first was the photo Sofia sent.

Before Kayson, plenty of men wanted me.

None of them stayed.

After what my father did to my mother, I had no patience for sweet words or expensive gestures. I had seen what men called love, and I knew how quickly it could rot.

Most of them gave up after a few rejections.

Kayson Moretti did not.

He came back every time, never louder when I pushed him away, never colder when I humiliated him, just steadier. More certain.

He spent three years breaking down my walls without ever once asking me to lower them for him.

Then, the one man who hated spectacle lit up half the harbor for me at the family’s annual gala, in front of socialites, politicians, and the most dangerous men in the city.

Not because he enjoyed being seen.

Because he wanted me to understand that whatever this was, it was not temporary. Not a game. Not a whim.

When Kayson loved me, he loved me in a way that made retreat impossible.

On the day he proposed, he told me he wanted to give me something I would never forget for the rest of my life.

So he built me a glass-domed garden with his own hands.

Every seed in it, he planted himself.

I told him he could have left it to the gardeners, but he only lowered his head, kissed my fingertips, and said, “If it makes you happy, I’ll do it myself. My donna deserves the best of everything.”

He was the one who made those promises.

He was also the one who broke them first.

When I did not say anything, Kayson grew visibly more uneasy.

“Do you not like the necklace?” he asked, watching my face too carefully now, his voice edged with that soft, coaxing tone he used whenever he wanted to smooth something over. “If you don’t like it, I’ll have them bring something else. Anything you want, hmm?”

As he spoke, he pulled out his phone.

“What about this one?” he said, turning the screen toward me. A sapphire brooch filled the display.

Then, just as he started to scroll, a message dropped across the top of the screen.

From Sofia Romano.

Kayson, I’m bleeding again. The family doctor says the pregnancy still isn’t stable. Can you come?

It was only there for a second.

Kayson swiped it away so fast.Then he looked up at me.

He was waiting to see whether I had caught it.

I gave him nothing.

He thought I had not seen it.

“If you don’t like this style,” he said smoothly, “I’ll have the jeweler send over everything new from the family vault tomorrow. You can take your time choosing.”

I only gave a quiet hum in response.

His mind was already elsewhere now.

And because of that, he did not notice the shift in me.

A few minutes later, his phone rang.

He did not even glance at the screen before standing up too quickly, already reaching for his coat.

“Baby, something came up at the East Harbor,” he said, his tone rushed, casual in a way that felt rehearsed. “I need to deal with it now. Don’t wait up for me.”

He was gone before I could say a word.

I walked to the window.

There was a time when Kayson hated leaving me for even an hour. Before every meeting, every trip, every errand, he used to hold me a little longer, kiss me one more time, act as if being apart from me for a moment was unbearable.

I do not know when that changed.

I only know that at some point, leaving me became easy for him.

Not long after, Sofia sent me another message.

This time, it was a photo.

Kayson stood inside a private hospital suite, peeling an apple for her.

Then her text came under it.

I threw up everything again tonight, but the second he got here, I felt better. Maybe the baby already knows who Daddy chooses when it matters.

I stopped responding to Sofia.

She never got tired of it.

Any time Kayson was with her, my phone would light up. A photo. A message. Some smug little reminder that while I still wore his name, she was the one getting his time, his attention, his hands on her body.

I ignored every one of them.

At that point, there was only one thing I cared about.

Two more days.

In two days, I would be gone.

That afternoon, I took down the lacquered keepsake box from the back of my dressing room shelf.

For years, I had kept everything in it.

The handwritten cards Kayson used to leave for me. The black-and-white photo from the night we first met. The invitation from the gala where he publicly pursued me for the first time. A pressed white rose from the glass garden he built when he proposed. Even the silk ribbon from the box that had held my wedding veil.

I had saved them all carefully, foolishly, like they were pieces of a future we would one day look back on together.

Now they were only proof that I had once believed in a man who knew exactly how to love me and still chose to betray me.

One by one, I fed them into the fire.

That was when Kayson came in.

“Baby?” His voice reached me a second before his footsteps did. “What are you burning?”

I said. “I was clearing out the room and found a few things I don’t need anymore.”

At once, he came up behind me and drew me gently back from the fireplace, his hand firm around my wrist, then my waist, like protecting me was still the most natural instinct he had.

“Then let the staff handle it,” he said, already frowning. “Why are you standing this close to the fire? What if you got hurt?”

All of his attention was on me.

He never once looked into the flames.

If he had, he would have seen his own handwriting still visible on the half-burned edges. He would have seen his name before the fire swallowed it whole.

“Baby, I’ve finally cleared most of the family business off my plate,” he said, his voice warm, almost careful now, as if trying to make up for something without naming it. “I’m free today. I can spend the whole day with you. Anywhere you want to go, I’ll take you.”

His arm was still around my waist when he said it. His dark eyes were full of that same tenderness, that same indulgent affection the whole city knew him for.

Anyone watching would have thought this was love.

I said, “Let’s go to the shooting range. I haven’t been in a while.”

That was where we first met.

It felt fitting to say goodbye there.

Kayson smiled and nodded without hesitation.

“Whatever you want, tesoro.”

When we arrived, several of his men were already there.

His underboss. Two caporegimes. A few other core men from the family.

And standing beside them, dressed in black training gear that hugged her too well to be innocent, was Sofia Romano.

She did not look surprised to see me.

If anything, her smile deepened, bright and polished and far too comfortable, like she had known all along I would be brought here.

She stepped toward me first, all graceful confidence, and offered a smile so polite it was almost insulting.

“So you must be Miss Bellini,” she said. “I’ve heard so much about you.”

The air changed instantly.

Kayson’s arm tightened around my waist for half a beat before he let it go. His face cooled at once, and when he looked at Sofia again, his voice had gone flat.

“That’s my wife,” he said, each word precise enough to cut. “You will address her as Donna Moretti.”

Sofia’s expression froze.