I didn't know people like this existed. People whose sense of right and wrong was so thoroughly, spectacularly shattered. People who could invoke a dead man's name to justify the betrayal of a living woman and her unborn child, and do it with steady voices and clear eyes, as though the world itself had rearranged to accommodate their version of events.
And somehow, they were the ones I'd ended up with. The Don I'd built from nothing and the widow who'd slithered into the space I'd left unguarded. Standing shoulder to shoulder in the half-light of my own corridor, wearing matching expressions of mild inconvenience, as if I were the intruder. As if I were the problem that needed to be managed.
In that moment, the thought of divorce erupted in my mind like a flare.
Five years of marriage, and I had never once considered it. Five years of quietly channeling the Valente name, the Valente connections, the Valente protection into the foundation of his syndicate, watching him rise from a mid-tier operator to a Don who commanded respect at every sit-down on the Eastern Seaboard. And not once, through all of it, had the word divorce crossed my mind. But the first time the thought came, it came with a force that nearly knocked me sideways.
Not paperwork. Not a legal filing. In this world, dissolving a marriage meant severing a blood-alliance. It meant the Valente Family formally withdrawing its protection from the Rossetti operation. Every alliance Tomasso believed he'd built on his own, every territory he held, every time the Feds had looked the other way. All of it traced back to my bloodline. And the moment that protection was gone, every enemy he'd ever made would know it within the hour.
The thought should have terrified me. Instead, it settled into my chest like the first breath after drowning.
"Tomasso, I don't know who you are anymore." My voice was quiet, almost calm. The kind of calm that falls over a room right before someone gives an order that can't be taken back. "I really don't. Not even a little. You feel like a complete stranger to me."
I smiled, cold and hollow, and took one step back. Then another. The marble floor was still freezing beneath my bare feet, but I couldn't feel it anymore. I couldn't feel anything except the slow, deliberate turning of my wedding band beneath my thumb. Once. Twice.