"I thought you were actually being generous when you agreed to the divorce! How can you be this two-faced? The baby is so small. He isn't even a day old, and you threw him on the ground!" His voice was a blade, each word precise and final, the voice of a Don delivering a sentence. "You're going to be a mother yourself. Aren't you afraid your own child will pay for what you've done?"
My cheek burned. I turned my head slowly and saw the hatred carved into his face. I could barely process what I'd just heard.
For the sake of Catarina's child, he had cursed ours.
The man I had loved for seven years. The man whose syndicate I had built from nothing, whose alliances I had secured with my own blood name, whose enemies I had kept at bay by being a Valente. He stood over me on that hospital floor with another woman's child in his arms and cursed the baby growing inside me.
"Yeah, Giovanna, how could you do that? She just gave birth. You shouldn't have hit her!" One of the soldiers' wives, someone who had eaten at my table, who had kissed my cheek at Sunday dinner.
"No wonder the Don says he's more comfortable with Catarina. Giovanna's temper is way too much." Another voice. Quiet, but not quiet enough.
They all talked over each other, a chorus of noise that split my skull open. My breathing turned shallow and ragged. The room pressed in. Every face was turned away from me or turned against me, and I understood, in that moment, how completely Catarina had constructed this. She had given them exactly the story they wanted. The jealous wife. The innocent widow. The helpless child.
I pressed my hands harder against my stomach and forced myself to speak.
"Enough! All of you, shut up!" My voice tore out of me with a force that startled even me. I saw two of the soldiers step back. "'Giovanna' and 'Catarina'? Do none of you have any sense of right and wrong? This isn't the old country. A man doesn't get to keep a wife and a mistress under the same roof and call it honor! Tomasso cheated. That's on him! And even if I did hit Catarina, she had it coming!"
My outburst stunned the room into silence. Real silence. The kind where men stop breathing because they are not sure what happens next.