The Heir He Gave Away, The Empire I Took BackChapter 1
The word spread through the wives' network on a Sunday afternoon, the way these things always do. Not a phone call. Not a whisper at Mass. Silvana Ricci told the world herself, right there at the social club luncheon where anyone with eyes and a grudge could hear it.
She'd been carrying on about gratitude, about hope, about how she'd almost given up on having a child. And then she said it, bright-eyed and glowing, her hand resting on her still-flat stomach: Grateful to my donor. I was almost hopeless... but now, look. I'm having a baby.
She didn't say his name. She didn't have to.
He was my husband. Simone Valente. The acting Boss of the Valente Family. And he had given another woman his heir.
By the time the whispers reached me through three different wives and a cousin's girlfriend, the whole neighborhood knew. I sat at the kitchen table in the Valente estate, the late afternoon light cutting hard lines across the marble, and I felt something settle inside me. Not rage. Something quieter. Something final.
I picked up my phone and sent a message to the woman who had relayed Silvana's announcement, one of the wives who always smiled too wide at me at Sunday dinners. Four words: Good for her.
The phone rang before I could set it down.
Simone's voice came through tight, controlled, the way he sounded when a deal was going sideways. "Come on. I just helped Silvana out. Don't blow this up, Grazia. Please."
I listened to the sound of his breathing. I could hear a car engine in the background. He was driving somewhere. Or being driven. Dante would be behind the wheel, tapping his watch, knowing this call would end badly.
I hung up.
The silence in the kitchen was enormous. The refrigerator hummed. Outside, one of the guards shifted position on the gravel drive, his footsteps crunching once, then stopping.
I pressed my thumb against the inside of my wedding ring and turned it. Slowly. A full rotation.
It was time to consider dissolving the alliance.
……
I touched my belly in the bathroom, where the light was too bright and the tile was cold under my bare feet.
My hand rested there, on the small, secret curve that no one knew about. Two months. I was two months along, and the only person I'd told was God, kneeling in the back pew of St. Anthony's three Sundays ago.