All Chapters of THE BILLIONAIRE'S REJECTED WIFE WAS THE MAFIA HEIRESS: Chapter 71 - Chapter 75

Isabella woke before dawn on the morning of the gala, three days ahead of the original timeline nobody had quite managed to prepare for, and lay still for a long moment in the gray early light, one hand resting over her stomach, listening to Ethan's steady breathing beside her.They hadn't spoken much since the argument in the war room. Not coldly, exactly, but carefully, the particular caution of two people who loved each other and had genuinely disagreed about something neither was willing to pretend didn't matter. She missed the ease of the six days before that argument, the small warmth of watching him and Nico bicker over floor plans, and understood, lying there in the quiet, that some of what they'd built back together over the last six weeks was going to require more work than either of them had expected, even after everything.The room was quiet around them, the estate itself holding an unusual stillness in these early hours before the day's inevitable chaos began, a

By seven that evening, the ballroom looked exactly like what it was supposed to look like, warm gold light, a string quartet tuning quietly in one corner, waitstaff moving with practiced ease among tables set for three hundred guests who had no idea they were walking into the most carefully engineered room in the city.Isabella stood in front of the mirror in a small dressing room off the main hall, smoothing the front of a deep emerald gown Amara had insisted on, arguing that a woman eight months pregnant deserved to feel beautiful even on the worst night of her life, and studied her own reflection with an expression she barely recognized. Steady. Focused. Terrified, somewhere underneath, in a place she'd trained herself not to let show."You look incredible," Ethan said from the doorway, and she turned to find him in a dark suit, the particular version of himself he wore for boards and mergers and, apparently, engineered confrontations with a man who'd spent thirty years learning to

Nico reached the loading dock in under two minutes, leaving Falcone with a security detail near the main hall, and found his west entrance team already positioned along the dock's perimeter, weapons drawn but discipline holding, nobody firing yet, nobody willing to escalate first in a building full of civilians.The truck sat idling twenty feet from the dock, engine running, driver's side door still closed. Whoever was inside hadn't made a move since parking, and the stillness of it was wrong in a way Nico's instincts identified immediately, the particular quality of deliberate inaction, something choosing not to move rather than something waiting for permission to."They're waiting for something," Nico murmured to the team lead beside him, a woman named Rosa who'd worked Romano security for over a decade. "Or they know we're already here and they're deciding how this plays out.""Orders?""Hold position. I want to know what's in that truck before anyone does anything that starts a fi