The Heir He Gave Away, The Empire I Took Back

Dante called three times before noon. His voice carried that tight, rapid quality it always got when he was about to deliver information he knew the Boss wouldn't want to hear. I could almost hear him tapping the face of his watch on the other end of the line.

"Mrs. Valente, is the Boss at the estate? He hasn't come to the club. He's not answering his phone."

Three calls. Three variations of the same question. Each one more carefully worded than the last, because even a low-ranking soldier knew better than to imply that the Boss was unaccounted for.

Putting it all together, there was only one place I could think of. Somewhere with Silvana. Probably in an obstetrician's office, looking at the ultrasound of the child he had chosen to create. Sitting beside the woman he had chosen to give his bloodline to. Holding her hand, maybe. The way he had never held mine.

I was heading somewhere too.

After making an appointment at the private clinic on the east side of the city, I called a cab. Not the Family car. Not Dante. A yellow cab, anonymous and ordinary, because what I was about to do was mine alone, and no one in the Valente household would ever know about it.

The clinic was clean and quiet. The kind of place where they didn't ask questions and they didn't keep records that anyone could find. I lay on the table and stared at the ceiling, and the fluorescent light above me buzzed with a faint, insistent hum that sounded like a question I couldn't answer.

The procedure was over before I knew it. The baby was no longer inside me in just a few minutes. That was the part no one tells you. How fast it is. How the thing you've been carrying, the thing you've been talking to in whispers when no one else is home, the thing you've been apologizing to in the bathroom with your hand on your stomach, just... stops. In minutes. And then you're standing up, and the nurse is handing you paperwork, and the world expects you to walk.

So I walked.

I was already in line to settle the bills, standing under the harsh clinic lighting with my discharge papers in my hand, when I saw them.

Two figures at the end of the corridor. Walking toward me. Close together. His hand on the small of her back.

My husband with his ex.

Simone saw me first. His face went through three expressions in the space of a second. Surprise. Confusion. And then something harder. Something that rearranged his features into the cold mask he wore when a soldier had overstepped.

He ran his thumb along the edge of his jaw. Slowly.

"Grazia? What the hell. Do you really have to follow me here?" His voice was low, controlled, but the accusation cut through the quiet corridor like a blade. "You stalking me now?"

I shifted my eyes to Silvana.

She stood half a step behind him, her hand resting on her stomach in that protective, proprietary way that pregnant women hold themselves. When my gaze found hers, she looked away. A quick, practiced aversion. The kind that looks like modesty but is actually strategy.

Then she touched the hollow of her throat with two fingers.

"Simone, don't accuse her like that." Her voice was gentle. Chiding. The voice of a reasonable woman calming an unreasonable man. "Do you really think she'd stalk us? I mean, we're here for the baby. Grazia gets the situation." She turned to me with a smile that was warm on the surface and surgical underneath. "Right, Grazia?"

Her words shifted the focus onto me with the precision of a woman who had been redirecting conversations her entire life. I was no longer the wronged wife standing in a hospital corridor. I was the jealous woman who had followed her husband. The unstable one. The problem.

I could only chuckle. The sound came out dry and hollow, scraping against my throat.

"Right. You're just here for a check-up, and I just happened to be here too. I'm not stalking."