**Chapter Ten: Final agreement**

**Sam's POV**

The ceiling was the first thing I noticed when I opened my eyes. It wasn't anything remarkable, an old design, a pale color, nothing wrong with the light filtering in through the curtains, but I laid there staring at it anyway, unable to move past the simple fact of it while I tried to work out how I'd ended up in this room at all.

Then the memories started coming back, not all at once, but in pieces that landed one after another. The rain still clung to me somehow, even though I was dry now, warm even. I could still feel the cold water, still feel Adrian's grip on my arm, the way he'd looked at me like I already belonged to him before I'd said a single word.

I sat up too quickly. The room swayed around me, and I caught myself against the edge of the bed before the dizziness could pull me back down.

The dress I remembered wearing was gone. Someone had changed my clothes while I was asleep, or unconscious, or whatever the right word was for the space I'd disappeared into after his hand closed over my mouth. A strange kind of panic settled into my chest at the thought that someone had touched me, dressed me, moved me around while I had no say in any of it. It was enough to make my skin crawl.

Two knocks came at the door before I could even finish putting the pieces together.

"Come in." My voice sounded rough, barely recognizable as mine.

Nanny Rosa entered carrying a small tray, a tall glass of warm water with honey, a plate of toasted bread beside it. She set it down on the bedside table and smiled at me, gentle in a way that made me wary rather than comforted.

"Adrian brought you upstairs yesterday, he'd asked me to prepare this for you when you woke up."

She addresses him by his first name, she must be very close to the family. I looked at the tray. Then at her. Then back at the tray. "He asked you to prepare breakfast for me?"

"Yes madam."

"I don't want it."

"Okay, what would you like for breakfast then?"

"I'm not hungry. I don't want to eat"

"You'll still need to eat, you'll love it. I'll prepare the bathtub"

She walked into the bathroom anyway, quiet and unbothered, as if I hadn't said a word. I remained on the bed, holding the warm glass with both hands, watching the steam curl up off the surface while my mind kept circling back to the name ‘Adrian Dela Cruz’.

A name that felt heavier, somehow, than the throbbing pain behind my eyes. Just the thought of his face made something tighten in my chest, some feeling I didn't have a clean word for.

He was a man people only spoke about in lowered voices, the kind of man whose name alone was rumored to make entire mafia operations fold in on themselves. I didn't know exactly how I'd come to know that much about him, or why the information had settled so deep in me so fast. Maybe fear did that. Maybe it carved things into your bones whether I wanted it there or not.

But there was one thing I was certain of, even through the fog sitting still over everything else: he hadn't pulled me out of that river out of pity. And somewhere in all of this, he was connected to the Salvatores.

"Miss Samantha?"

Rosa's voice pulled me out of my own head. I blinked and realized I'd been sitting there holding the cup for far longer than I'd meant to, the water had gone lukewarm in my hands.

She stepped closer, her expression gentle, careful, like she was handling something breakable.

"Are you alright?"

"No… I mean yes. Yes I am alright."

"Well the boss had ordered that after your breakfast, you take a bath and join him downstairs."

"Any reasons?"

"The doctor is around."

"I'm not going, I'm okay."

"The doctor has something important to tell you, it's about your child."

—————

The windows downstairs glowed with warm morning lights.

Low conversation drifted out from the dinning hall, and something inside me — a small, foolish flicker of hope I hadn't given myself permission to feel, yet pulled me a few steps closer before I'd even decided to move.

*Maybe my child had still been alive. Maybe there was still something to live for after all*

I took another step, and that was when I heard the doctor's voice.

"Physically she's recovering well. And the pregnancy—"

Everything inside me went still.

"It has already been terminated. Before she was taken to the bridge, before the fall."

My chest tightened so suddenly I nearly lost my breath.

Could I have heard that wrong?

I stood frozen just outside the doorway, willing the words to rearrange themselves into something I could survive hearing.

"The fall didn't kill the baby," the doctor said. "The injection she received during her hospital visits contained a slow-acting abortifacient. It was carefully dosed. The mother wouldn't notice immediately, but the pregnancy wouldn't survive it."

Something inside me snapped.

I stepped back from the doorway, careful to keep my breathing soft, controlled, unwilling to let them know I'd heard any of it.

So this was what it all meant.

Before the river.

Before the bridge.

Before any of it had even started, it had already been decided.

I closed my eyes, and Diego's voice came back to me exactly the way he'd said it on the bridge, calm, certain, final.

*The Salvatore legacy doesn't include you… or your child*

It hadn't been cruelty, I understood now.

*You're a worthless daughter-in-law. You're barren*

It had been certainty. Every Salvatore member had known long before that night that there was nothing left to protect me for, because by then my baby was already gone — gone before I'd even left the hospital the first time, gone before I ever knew to be afraid of losing it.

The tears came quietly. Not because my child had died in that moment on the bridge, but because they'd been doing this to me for over three years, methodically, patiently, while I told myself I was simply unlucky. And I had spent the past days since waking in this house believing I had failed to protect the one thing I still had left, when the truth was I had never been given the chance to protect it at all.

I sank down onto the floor of the hallway and stayed there a long time.

—————

By evening I couldn't take it any longer. I needed answers, and not from Nanny Rosa, who had already given me more than she probably should have. I needed them from the mafia boss himself.

I found him exactly where I expected to.

His study.

The door was already open, like he'd known I would eventually come looking for him whether he wanted me to or not.

He looked up once as I stepped inside. He didn't seem surprised to see me at all, almost as though he'd been waiting for exactly this, patient in the same way he seemed to be patient about everything.

"Why the hell weren't you downstairs this morning as I had instructed."

"I wasn't interested."

"What do you want?" he asked.

I looked at the contract sitting on his desk, then back at him.

"I want the truth."

His eyes stayed on mine, steady, unreadable.

I walked closer, forcing myself to keep my spine straight even though everything in me wanted to fold in half.

"If I fully sign the marriage contract…" The words caught somewhere between my throat and whatever pride I had left. "…Celine Salvatore disappears."

"You already disappeared." His answer came without a single beat of hesitation. "The question is whether Samantha Dela Cruz intends to live."

I looked down at the papers again, and for the first time since I'd woken up in this house, signing didn't feel like surrender. It felt like something closer to revenge, the first decision in days that was actually mine to make.

I reached for the pen.

He didn't react.

He didn't even smile.

He simply watched me sign, as though this had never really been about winning anything from me at all, only about waiting for me to arrive at the one door that was ever going to open.

The ink had barely dried when a knock landed against the study door.

Theo entered. Adrian's underboss, the one who had made sure I never had a second chance at trying to escape again since the night I woke up here.

"There has been an invitation from the Salvatore family."

I looked up.

Theo placed a cream-colored envelope on the desk, the Salvatore crest pressed neatly in gold at its center.

"The Salvatores are hosting their annual masquerade charity gala." He paused, glancing at me before he finished. "It begins in seventy-two hours."

Adrian's gaze shifted toward me, something settling into place behind his expression. "We accept the invitation."