"Just because she looks a little like Lady Seraphina, she has the nerve to claim our lady owes everything to her?"
"Everyone across the underworld knows the Don adores Lady Seraphina and no one else. You're nothing but a wretched outsider who snuck in here, and you dare call yourself his queen? Do you have a death wish?"
Seraphina's lips curled into a vicious smile.
"I assumed that since you managed to slither into this estate using that face of yours to seduce the Don, you'd have at least some cunning. Turns out you're just a brainless fool."
"I've been married into the Valente household for ages, and I've never once heard of a so-called queen. You're a civilian without a single connection to any Family. What could possibly qualify you for that title?"
"If you were truly the Don's wife, why would you be living alone in the Forbidden Wing, where not a single soul dares to tread?"
With that, Seraphina touched the hollow of her throat, a gesture that looked like feminine delicacy, and turned to the other soldiers with her order:
"Cut off this wretch's limbs. Let's see how long that sharp tongue of hers lasts."
The soldiers drew their blades and closed in on me.
None of them knew the real reason the Forbidden Wing stood so desolate.
It was because the Don forbade any living creature from coming near. Even a stray associate who wandered too close to the perimeter had been found skinned and strung up along the fence line, left there for days before the body was cut down.
He had kept my identity hidden because he wanted to wait until our child was born.
Then, before the entire underworld and every Family with a name worth speaking, he would crown me in a ceremony no one would ever forget.
And the reason he was absent today was precisely because he had divined through the old ways that this was the day our child would arrive.
He had gone personally to summon the most powerful men across the Five Families and beyond, so they could witness the birth of the Valente heir.
To welcome the future sovereign of the empire he had built.
And now, every one of those precautions had become the very reasons Seraphina refused to believe me.
Watching them close in, panic seized me. I screamed, "I am the Don's wife! If you don't believe me, go ask Dominic Valente yourself!"
They didn't even pause. Blades rose and fell.