I Crashed My Cheating Husband's Empire on the Day I LeftChapter 1
I was four months pregnant when my husband, Tomasso Rossetti, brought another woman into our home. She was seven months along.
"Giovanna, Catarina was Fausto Volpe's wife. He's gone now, and she's got nothing. No protection, no family, no money. The code says we take her in. I owe Fausto that much." He touched the scar on his right palm without seeming to realize it. "Don't worry. It's only temporary. Once she's settled somewhere safe, she'll move on."
I was too soft-hearted to say no. I never imagined "temporary" would stretch into two months.
At first, I didn't think much of it. Fausto had taken a bullet for Tomasso during the Calabrese turf war. The old code of fratellanza demanded that a blood-sworn brother's widow be sheltered, fed, protected. It was sacred. I understood. Not until the night I got up to use the bathroom and stumbled onto a scene that stopped me cold.
My husband. And his dead brother's wife. Together by the window of the guest quarters, the curtains half-drawn, the compound grounds dark and silent beyond the glass.
Every drop of blood in my body turned to ice.
I stood outside that door for three full hours. The hallway was cold, the marble floor pulling heat from my bare feet until I couldn't feel them anymore. Down the corridor, a soldier on night rotation passed once, saw me standing there, and looked away. He knew. Of course he knew. In a house like this, the walls had ears and the soldiers had eyes, and every last one of them kept their mouths shut because that was the law. Omertà. Silence. Even when silence meant watching the Don's wife stand barefoot in a freezing hallway while her husband bedded another woman ten feet away.
In that time, they went at it three times.
Watching Tomasso's face twist with pleasure, over and over, I felt my heart being carved open with a blade, one slow cut after another. Each sound through that door was precise and unhurried, and I catalogued every one of them the way a consigliere catalogues debts. Not because I wanted to. Because my body wouldn't let me leave. My hands had gone to my stomach at some point, cradling the child growing there, and I stood like a woman turned to stone in the corridor of her own house while the man who swore a blood oath to protect her broke every vow that mattered.