Chapter 5

Even I felt a pang of pity looking at her, so how could Salvatore not?

He roared, "Enough!" and shot to his feet, Gianna gathered in his arms. He kicked the shattered vase across the marble with a screech of porcelain, and every soldier posted at the door went rigid without daring to move. "Isabella, I'm the one who set you up! Why are you taking it out on Gianna?"

"These full six years, call it a kindness I've shown you! If anything, it's you and me who owe Gianna a blood-debt!"

The way he shielded Gianna with his own body slowly overlapped with the way he'd cradled me against his chest six years ago, the night he dragged me out of the wreckage that was never meant for my family.

Then those unresolved questions I'd overheard on the docks came rushing back.

A mouthful of blood surged up my throat, and I screamed out the suspicion I'd buried. "A kindness, or atonement? You dare tell me my parents' deaths had nothing to do with you and the hit you let happen?!"

"Salvatore! She's the one who said a cripple like me suits a trafficker perfectly! You think that woman is as simple as she looks?"

"Don't be a fool. And fine, she was trafficked here, that's pitiful. But what about me? What did I do wrong? Do I deserve to be treated like this?"

My reckless words landed like blows, and Salvatore's frame swayed. Shock and horror moved through his eyes. The signet ring stopped turning on his finger, his hand gone perfectly still. And in the end he still threw down one last line. "You really have lost your mind, Isabella. If you still think you did nothing wrong, then sit in this room and reflect on it."

Then he swept Gianna up in his arms and strode out.

He locked me in that room completely. Dried blood on the floor, the stench of it still hanging in the air, tangled with the reek of liquor.

Grief spread cold through me. I pressed my thumb hard against the seam where the prosthetic met the flesh, steadying the pain, and without a second's hesitation I sent Dominic a message: 【Come get me. Salvatore's locked me up.】

The reply came fast. 【Give me half an hour.】

Only once my heart settled did I notice how frighteningly low my body temperature had dropped.

And my lower belly was cramping, twisting with pain.

I stroked my stomach gently. "Baby, I'm sorry. Mommy can't bring you into this world."

"Oh? So there was a little bastard hiding in that belly?" Gianna's face appeared at the window. The trembling was gone from her lip now, her gaze flat and appraising, the mask slipped clean off.

She held a burlap sack in her arms, and with a rustling rush she dumped it through into the room.

"Hsssss——" Dozens of snakes, big and small, spilling out across the floor.

Every hair on my body stood on end. Terror ripped a scream out of me. "You're insane, Gianna! Did you ever think about the consequences?"

"Consigliera Isabella, you're at death's door, so drop the sharp tongue. I take it they didn't torture you enough? Then let's see how you like a taste of the big pythons."

The moment she finished, she turned on her heel, and the snakes lunged.

"Ah!" The cold, coiling touch wound around my limbs.

It hurt. God, it hurt.

I lost count of how many bites tore into me, and where. All I could see was red, and in my lower belly, a hollow, tearing sense of something being stripped away.

The last thing my mind held was Dominic's blurred face. "Bella, hold on!"

-

In the car parked in the shadow of the estate wall, ever since Gianna had come back from the bathroom, Salvatore's temple had been pounding.

——Had something happened to Bella?

In the end he couldn't sit still. He yanked the car door open and bolted for that room, his enforcers scrambling upright behind him.

But the moment the door swung wide, dozens of blood-red snake carcasses littering the floor stopped him cold.

Where was Bella? Bella was gone?

His head spun. His phone lit up, and when he looked, it was a text from the head of the Falcone Family, Dominic.

【I've taken Bella. Your good days are over too.】