The Wife He Called Cheap Walked Away Forever

I carried Dominic's phone up the curved staircase of the estate, past the soldiers who lowered their eyes as I passed, toward the private study where the Don conducted the Family's quietest business. The hallway smelled of old cigar smoke and lemon oil rubbed into mahogany, the scent of a house built on money no one dared ask about. My heels were silent on the runner. I had learned long ago to move through this house like something that belonged to it but was never quite welcomed by it.

Before I even reached the door, I heard Gianna's voice spilling out from inside.

"Don Moretti, thank you. I don't know what I would have done today without you." Her voice was soft, trembling at the edges, laced with the kind of tears that fall on cue. The words slid out like silk dragged across a blade.

Through the gap where the heavy door stood ajar, I saw Dominic draw her into his arms. He did it as though it were the most natural thing in the world, as though her body fit against his chest by some old, established right. "I'm here," he murmured into her hair. "Don't be afraid."

She buried her face against his throat and wept without restraint, her shoulders shaking, her fingers curled into the lapel of his jacket. The grandfather clock in the corner of the study ticked on, steady and indifferent, marking off seconds I would never get back.

Dominic looked down at her, and his eyes, those cold dark eyes that turned grown men to stone across a sit-down, were full of something I had spent ten years begging to see and never once earned. Concern. Tenderness. He leaned in, his lips brushing the shell of her ear.

Then she pushed him away.

"We can't," she breathed, eyes red, chest rising and falling. "Don Moretti, you're a married man. We can't do this."

I waited for his temper to break. I had seen that temper level rooms. I had seen made men go pale beneath it.

But Dominic didn't get angry. He moved toward her again, slow and certain, like a man who had already decided. His voice dropped low, soft, deliberate, the voice he used when he was about to give an order no one in the Family would dare refuse.

"Gianna. If this is what's making you unhappy. I can arrange a severance."

My hands clenched into fists at my sides. My nails bit crescents into my palms and I welcomed the sting because it was the only thing keeping me upright.

Severance. From the Family. He said the word so easily, so lightly, as if cutting me loose were no more than dismissing a courier who had outlived her usefulness. As if the past ten years were nothing. As if the night I was given to this bloodline at the age of ten, raised inside its walls, married into its inner circle to settle a debt of blood, all of it weighed less than the tears of a woman he had known a handful of weeks.

I did not wait to hear the rest. I could not.

He had never once called me by a tender name. Not in front of the soldiers, not at the long Family table, not in the dark of our own room. Always "Eva." Cold. Formal. Correct. The name of an obligation. Even when he came to me at night, he treated it like a duty owed to the bloodline, distant and detached, his eyes already somewhere else. I had always been the one reaching across the cold space between us. The one trying. For ten years, that was how it had been, and I had told myself the silence was only a hard man's reserve.

But the truth had been waiting for me at that door all along. He simply did not love me. He never had.

I bit down hard on my lip until I tasted copper. My fingers found the thin wedding band on my left hand and I twisted it, around and around, the way I always did when fear or resolve pressed too close to bear. I set Dominic's phone down on the floor at the study door, quietly, the way an associate leaves tribute that was never wanted, and I turned and walked away.

It had begun to rain by the time I crossed the gravel and reached my car.

The sky opened up over the Moretti estate, gray and merciless, and something inside me opened with it. The wipers could not keep ahead of it. I could barely keep ahead of myself. My breath came in pieces. The streetlights smeared across the windshield into long bleeding ribbons of gold, and I drove out through the iron gates with the guards' shadows shrinking behind me in the mirror, and for the first time in ten years no one in that house would notice I was gone.

Distracted, hollowed out, blind with the rain and with everything I had heard, I ran the red light at the empty intersection.

The truck came out of nowhere.

It slammed into the side of the car with a sound like the world tearing in half, glass and steel screaming, the chassis folding around me. The seatbelt cut across my chest and the door crushed inward against my hip, pinning me, and then everything went terribly, ringingly still. Rain hammered the broken roof. Somewhere a horn was blaring and would not stop. I could not move. I could not free my legs.

My fingers fumbled across the seat and found my phone by some stubborn animal instinct. And out of an even older instinct, the one I should have killed years ago, I called Dominic.

The line clicked. His voice came through flat and cold, the same voice he gave to men who interrupted his evening for nothing.

"What is it?"

I forced the words out through the pain crushing my ribs, through the iron taste flooding my mouth, through the rain and the broken glass and ten years of silence.

"There's been an accident. I'm trapped in the car. I can't get out."