Agony tore through me, bone-deep and blinding, as my limbs were severed one after another.
My whole body convulsed. Every breath came thinner than the last.
Seraphina clapped a hand over her mouth, laughing. "Oh, look at her! No arms, no legs, just that swollen belly. She looks like a turtle pulled into its shell!"
The others doubled over with laughter, clapping and cheering. The sound bounced off the stone walls of the Forbidden Wing and came back hollow.
I glared at them through a haze of red, my voice raw and shaking. "You will regret this."
Seraphina stepped closer and looked down at me.
"In all the underworld, no one has ever made me regret a thing."
"But I can certainly teach you what regret feels like."
The moment the words left her lips, she shaped her hand into a blade and sliced my belly open.
A fresh wave of agony swallowed me whole.
Through the blur of fading consciousness, I watched Seraphina reach inside me and pull out a blood-soaked infant boy.
He was alive. His tiny fists swung on instinct, batting at Seraphina's arm as if in protest.
Seraphina stared at my son, eyes widening.
"A mongrel born from a civilian, and his life force is this strong?"
"What a pity. You're still nothing but outsider filth. Leaving you here would only taint the Valente name. Today, I'll clean house on the Don's behalf."
Terror flooded every fiber of my being. My voice came out barely above a whisper.
"He is the Don's child. You must not harm him."
Seraphina's brows twisted together, and she fixed me with a look of pure contempt.
"You wretched civilian. To save this bastard, you'd tell a lie that absurd?"
"The Don's power is beyond measure. A woman with no Family blood could never carry his heir."
The other soldiers chimed in.
"Exactly. The Don's reach is so vast that anyone outside the bloodlines would be destroyed just trying to get close to him."
"You're a nobody. You don't even have the standing to be with him, let alone bear his child."
"This bastard is obviously the product of some affair with a low-ranking guard. And you have the audacity to pass it off as the Don's heir? The nerve."
They weren't entirely wrong. The gap between a civilian and the head of the Valente empire was vast beyond reckoning.
The Don, above all, was a man no outsider should have been able to touch, let alone conceive a child with.