She clutched his arm a little tighter and smiled at me sweetly, her hand drifting back to her stomach with choreographed precision. "Mrs. Valente, thank you again for the blood donation. Without you, I'd still be so dizzy today. You saved me and my baby!"
"Dominic, won't you bring Mrs. Valente home with us? Please?" Her voice was silk over a blade. The request sounded like generosity. It was territory. She wanted me in the car. She wanted me to see.
Dominic dotingly tapped the tip of her nose and gently replied, "My sweet angel, whatever you say goes." The Don of the Valente Family. The man who decided which soldiers lived and which ones disappeared. Reduced to a puppet by a woman who placed her hand over her stomach like a shield every time the light shifted.
Since I had to return to the estate to gather my things anyway, I didn't refuse Daniela's "kindness." There were documents I needed. Things hidden in places she hadn't thought to look. A passport she didn't know I still had.
Inside the spacious black car, the armored sedan that ferried the Don through territory he controlled, silence hung heavily. The driver kept his eyes forward. The partition was up. The leather seats smelled of expensive cologne and something else, something faintly sweet and wrong. And then, as if right on cue, I spotted something wedged between the seat cushions.
A pair of still-damp lace panties.
"Oh my!" Daniela gasped, her hand flying to her mouth with the precision of a woman who had placed them there herself and rehearsed the discovery. "How did that end up here?"
"Dominic, didn't you say you took care of it already?"
Biting her lip, Daniela threw herself into his arms, blushing as she playfully hit his chest.
Dominic chuckled and apologized, blaming everything on himself, yet his eyes subtly shifted, watching my reaction.
But when he saw that I wasn't angry at all, the same restlessness he'd felt back in the hospital room crept back into his chest, inexplicably heavy.
"Seraphina," he said coldly, "you've been glued to your phone ever since you got in the car."
His voice carried a note of jealousy, low and controlled, the way a man accustomed to absolute authority sounds when something slips beyond his reach.
"Chatting with your cousin? Or someone else I don't know?"
I had just finished booking my plane ticket and locked my phone screen.
"Just reading the news," I replied calmly.