Chapter 1

I had already taken off my wedding ring when the lawyer slid the documents across his desk.

Alongside the divorce papers was an agreement ending my involvement in the Vito family’s financial arrangements.

For years, I had managed Luca’s charitable foundation, attended dinners, and maintained the respectable face of a family whose real business rarely appeared on paper.

Now I wanted to give it all back.

“He hasn’t signed,” the lawyer reminded me.

I looked at the blank signature line and called Luca.

Sofia’s voice reached me before his did.

“Luca, I want that lemon cake from the restaurant by the harbor. You promised you’d take me.”

My fingers tightened around the phone.

“There are documents you need to sign. They dissolve the financial arrangements between us.”

“Now?” A car door closed on his end. “Elena, I’m busy. Whatever you decide is fine.”

“You don’t want to read them?”

“You’ve always handled those things, haven’t you?”

There was even tenderness in his voice, as though my concern were something small he could soothe without listening to it.

“All right. My lawyer will send them to your assistant.”

“Good. Anything else?”

“No.”

After we hung up, I sat there for another fifteen minutes.

Then the lawyer’s inbox chimed.

Luca had signed.

The consent documents, the financial agreement, the release from my remaining family responsibilities—every page requiring his signature had been returned.

He hadn’t called to ask a single question.

The lawyer reviewed the attachments and looked up.

“We’ll take it from here. I’ll contact you when the court issues the final documents.”

“Thank you.”

“Mrs. Vito, if you change your mind—”

“I won’t.”

I put my ring in my handbag.

“I won’t change my mind.”

From the lawyer’s office, I went straight to the hospital.

In the examination room, I placed my medical report on the desk.

“I want to terminate the pregnancy.”

The doctor studied the report, then me.

“Is this your decision?”

“Yes.”

“Is someone pressuring you?”

I shook my head.

Luca had once wanted this baby so badly.

The day we found out, he dismissed everyone from his study and held me for a long time, one hand resting against my stomach.

He said he finally had a home that didn’t depend on fear.

Now he had turned our child into a joke people passed around his dinner table.

“I’m sure,” I said.

On the procedure table, I closed my eyes and remembered meeting him.

He hadn’t taken over the family yet. At a university fundraising reception, he had gone onstage as the representative of one of the donors.

Then he saw me and forgot his speech.

He pursued me for a year.

I refused his flowers. I refused the car waiting outside campus. I told him I didn’t want to marry into a family where every man carried a gun.

“Then marry me,” he said. “Not my last name.”

One snowy night, he stood outside my apartment until his fingers were numb, waiting to apologize in person.

Once, after I casually mentioned a cake from a bakery across the river, he crossed half the city after a family meeting to bring it to my door.

But what finally won me over was a charity concert before graduation.

Halfway through my performance, the sound system failed with a piercing squeal. I stopped playing. Someone in the audience laughed.

Luca rose from the front row, walked onto the stage, and sat beside me.

“Look at the keys,” he murmured. “I’m here.”

We finished the piece together.

When the applause began, he looked only at me.

“I know my world scares you, Elena. But I promise you’ll never have to be afraid of me.”

I believed him.

For a while, he treated me as though I were precious.

The exception was Sofia Rossi.

Her father had taken a bullet for Luca’s father. When the Rossi family lost its power, the Vitos took responsibility for protecting them.

“We grew up together,” Luca always said. “I can’t abandon her.”

So I learned to step aside.

Our birthday trip disappeared because Sofia had a fever.

Our anniversary dinner ended because she saw an unfamiliar car outside her apartment.

While I lay in bed burning with a fever, he escorted her to a yacht party so she wouldn’t have to face people who looked down on her family.

I yielded again and again.

Until he refused to acknowledge our child.

If that was how he wanted it, I would keep neither the pregnancy nor the man.

After the procedure, I walked slowly out of recovery, one hand against the wall.

When I rounded the corner, I saw him.

Luca was kneeling in front of a bench, fastening Sofia’s shoe.

She held an ultrasound picture in her hand.

“The doctor says the heartbeat is strong.”

He looked up at her, his expression so gentle it almost seemed unfamiliar.

“That’s good.”

“Do you want a boy or a girl?”

“I just want you both safe.”

My fingers crushed the edge of my medical folder.

Minutes earlier, I had said goodbye to our baby.

And he was looking forward to someone else’s.

I should have confronted him. Asked whether he remembered pressing his forehead to mine and saying he hoped our daughter would look like me.

Instead, I stood there until exhaustion swallowed everything else.

Then I turned away.

“Elena?”

His voice came from behind me.

“What are you doing at the hospital?”