All Chapters of I Faked My Death to Destroy My Husband: Chapter 261 - Chapter 270

Romeo The operating theater was designed to eliminate human error. The temperature never fluctuated beyond sixty-eight degrees. The lighting was engineered to erase shadows completely. The airflow was filtered down to microscopic precision. Every instrument was sterilized, counted twice, and arranged in the exact same sequence for every procedure. Nothing was accidental in this room. Nothing was left to chance. And when I scrubbed in, I became part of the machinery. I dictated the pace. I controlled the variables. I decided who lived. “Dr. Rossi, pressure is dropping.” The anesthesiologist’s voice cut sharply through the steady mechanical rhythm of the monitors. “Eighty over fifty. Heart rate one-forty. She’s becoming hypotensive.” I didn’t look up. The patient was thirty-four weeks pregnant. Severe placental abruption. Massive concealed hemorrhage. We had delivered the infant six minutes ago—a tiny, screaming boy currently being stabilized across the room by

Irene There is a specific stone ledge overlooking the Tiber River that almost nobody knows about. It sits just far enough away from the chaos near Ponte Sisto that the tourists thin out completely after sunset. No couples taking blurry photos. No loud university students spilling beer onto the pavement. Just the steady rush of black water beneath the bridge and the occasional distant hum of a Vespa somewhere deeper in Trastevere. It was my emergency exit. My decompression chamber. My leave me the hell alone location. Thursday night found me exactly where I wanted to be: completely off-grid. I had a sweating bottle of Peroni balanced against my knee, a half-finished slice of cold mushroom pizza resting on top of the bakery box beside me, and a carefully curated playlist blasting through my headphones that contained absolutely no tragic Italian opera. I hadn’t answered work emails. I hadn’t told Alessia where I was. I hadn’t even looked at my phone in nearly two hours

Irene“Rule number two…” I continued. “Normal friends use WhatsApp, Romeo.”He took another cautious bite of pizza. “Define normal.”“Normal people send texts…” I explained. “Maybe a meme. Maybe a mildly aggressive sticker. They do not hack smart-home security systems and triangulate cellular tower radiuses to locate each other like emotionally unstable Batman villains.”That tiny crack in his composure widened slightly.A real smile ghosted briefly across his mouth. It transformed him in a way that felt actively unfair to women everywhere.Exhaustion still shadowed his face. The bruised hollows beneath his eyes remained. But without the rigid Galante control locking every feature into place, he looked younger.“I will try to integrate standard messaging protocols into my routine.” He replied.“Thank you.”“Though…” He added, lifting one arrogant eyebrow slightly, “I think my method was significantly more efficient.”I stared at him in disbelief. “Your method is illegal in at least tw

Romeo By year two, the boundaries had not dissolved.But they had softened into something survivable.We started meeting outside the fortress of the penthouse.Never formally. Never intentionally.Just a long chain of engineered coincidences neither of us acknowledged.I would “accidentally” appear at the café near her architecture firm every Tuesday around four-thirty.She would “coincidentally” already be seated there with an espresso and a pastry she claimed she wasn’t going to finish.We always sat at separate tables.But our conversations drifted easily across the narrow aisle between us like sunlight stretching across stone.“The junior architect with the navy obsession…” I said one afternoon, leaning back in my chair with an espresso balanced between my fingers. “Is he still attempting to negotiate your caloric intake?”Irene snorted into her cappuccino. “Luca? No. Luca got promoted and moved to Florence.”“A statistically intelligent relocation.”“He realized trying to date a

Irene My emotional firewall hadn’t suffered a minor glitch. It had detonated spectacularly in the middle of the Borghese Gardens. For five years, that system had been flawless. It had survived family dinners, crowded holidays, late-night conversations in penthouse kitchens, and endless carefully orchestrated Saturdays where Romeo Galante existed permanently in my peripheral vision without a single catastrophic breach in containment. Apparently, all it took to bring the entire structure crashing down was a plastic toy stethoscope, the scent of expensive cedarwood and clean linen, and one devastatingly unguarded look from a man I had spent half a decade trying not to love. “Terminal.” God. Why had I said that out loud? I needed to legally prohibit myself from speaking whenever Romeo was within a twenty-inch radius. Maybe less. Maybe the safe distance was an entirely different zip code. Unfortunately, when you are dealing with a five-year-old Galante monarch, emotional collapse is