After I Learned His Love Was a Lie, I DisappearedChapter 1
Three years into our marriage, I stumbled upon a secret: my husband, Ermanno Santoro, the man who supposedly loved me to the marrow of his bones, kept a safehouse on the outskirts of the city.
I followed him there and watched with my own eyes as he slid his hand inside another woman's clothes in full view of his captains, his gaze burning with a desire I knew all too well.
The men around them exchanged knowing looks. "You're so desperate for her, Boss, why not just marry Katarina Ferro already? You've been feeding your wife that contraceptive through the doctor for years. Aren't you just waiting for her to fail to conceive so she'll offer to step aside herself?"
He cut them off with a frown. "Shut your mouths. And speaking of the compound, make sure Dottore keeps the dosage careful. I won't have it damaging her health."
After a pause, he added one more warning.
"If word of this reaches my wife, none of you will be spared."
They all went silent, hands at their sides, and watched as he wrapped his arm around the woman and led her into the back room.
Soft moans drifted through the closed door. My heart froze over, inch by inch.
So the husband who had treated me like his whole world had already given his heart to someone else.
Fine, then. Heaven or abyss, I would make sure he never found me again.
——
I fled the safehouse in a blind panic, wandering aimlessly until the moon hung high before I finally made it back to the compound.
Rosa was waiting in the kitchen with the usual glass of warm medicine the family doctor had prescribed, ready for me to drink.
The faint metallic tang of blood hit my nose, and my thoughts drifted far away.
After our wedding, the family doctor had examined me and declared my constitution too weak to conceive easily.
Ermanno refused to watch me grieve. He called in specialists from as far as Chicago and Miami until one of them devised a rare remedy: medicine brewed with a man's own blood, said to strengthen the body at its root.
Without a moment's hesitation, he took a blade to his own chest and began brewing the tonic with blood drawn from over his heart, every single day.