Chapter 3

"Handle it."

He didn't even look up from his desk when he said it. Two words, delivered with the same tone he used to order a shipment moved or a problem buried.

"Dante. I'm pregnant. With your children. Twins."

His eyes lifted then — and swept over me like I was a disappointing ledger. "I said handle it. Dr. Romano's office will contact you. Don't make this complicated, Aria. Children in my world are leverage. Hostages with my last name. You'd be giving my enemies two soft targets."

For one second, I almost believed he was protecting them.

Then he added, "And you'd be in breach of contract," and went back to his papers.

I didn't handle it. I refused. And that's when the punishment began — quiet, bureaucratic, absolute. My keycard stopped opening the garden. The kitchen staff stopped cooking for me. A monthly allowance still hit my account — just enough that no lawyer could ever call it abandonment. Dante's consigliere was thorough.

His assistant delivered the new terms by email: I would stay out of sight during all family business. My settlement would be cut for "breach of implied terms."

As if conceiving my husband's children was a crime.

I carried the twins alone. Every appointment, every scan, every kick at 3 AM that I narrated to an empty room. The NDA meant I couldn't tell a single soul I was married. My mother was in remission in a facility his money paid for, and I refused to drag her back into fear.

At twenty-eight weeks, my blood pressure spiked into preeclampsia. Strict bedrest. I sent Dante one email — desperate, stupid, hopeful.

The twins could come early. I could die. I thought you should know.

The reply came from his assistant three hours later.

Mr. Moretti acknowledges your message. A medical account has been opened at Mount Sinai. Please refrain from further personal correspondence.

An account. Not a call. Not even cruelty — cruelty would have meant he felt something.

I lay in the dark that night with my hands on my belly and made a promise to my daughters: I will stop hoping. I will deliver you, sign his papers, and vanish so completely he'll wonder if he dreamed me.

Then, at thirty-two weeks, my body gave out on a delivery table while my husband's wedding to Camilla Russo streamed live to two million people.

You know the rest. The blood. The incubators. The text from his bride.

What you don't know is who I called.

My father spent his life running from his own name. He scrubbed it off our documents, our history, our tongues. He died in a "robbery" I was never allowed to ask about. And the one thing he made me memorize — in case the day ever comes when there is no other way — was a phone number.

His father's number.

My grandfather is Nikolai Volkov. The Pakhan. The Wolf of Brighton Beach. The man the Five Families do not name out loud, the man whose organization makes the Moretti empire look like a corner store. Twenty-six years ago, his only son fell in love with a nurse, refused the life, and disappeared — and the Wolf let him go, because it was the only thing his son ever asked of him.

He has spent twenty-six years watching from a distance. Waiting. Mourning.

And tonight, his granddaughter — bleeding, discarded, holding annulment papers signed by a Moretti — finally asked him for help.

At midnight, the hospital hallway outside my room filled with the sound of boots.

Dozens of them.

I looked up from my daughters' incubators as the doors swung open — and I stopped breathing.