Chapter 2

The next morning, I dropped Marco off at St. Xavier's, watched him disappear behind the oak doors, and then called Valentina from the car.

Val had been with me since I was sixteen—not just my assistant, but the second-in-command my father, Don Enzo, had personally chosen to stand beside me when I inherited the family.

"Val. Pull Dominic's communication records. Last six months. Every call, every text."

By evening, a sealed envelope sat on my desk at the Red Hook office. I opened it.

Hundreds of entries. And I saw it at once—a New Jersey number, recurring like a pulse.

Always between midnight and three a.m. Calls ranging from fifteen minutes to over an hour.

I noted the number and locked the records in the drawer.

Dominic came home late that night, reeking of whiskey.

"Business with Caruso's people."

He kissed my forehead and disappeared into the bathroom.

His phone was left on the nightstand.

I tried our wedding anniversary. Wrong. His birthday, Marco's birthday—wrong.

Then, with a bitterness rising in my throat like bile, I entered the date written on the back of the photograph.

The screen unlocked.

The carrier records showed dozens of calls to the New Jersey number. His phone showed none.

He had deleted every trace.

I entered the number into a messaging app. A profile page opened.

The avatar was a photo of a sunset—perfectly ordinary. But the banner image showed the silhouettes of three people against a golden dusk—two adults, a small child between them, walking hand in hand along a shoreline.

The man's face was hidden, but the Valentini signet ring on his right hand caught the light.

It was Dominic.

I set the phone back exactly as I'd found it, locked myself in the other bathroom, and gripped the edge of the sink until my arms stopped shaking.

Then I walked into Marco's room.

He was asleep, curled up, clutching his stuffed bear. Dominic always said Marco had my eyes, my smile. But when I really looked now—there wasn't a trace of me in that face.

Carefully, I plucked a few strands of hair from his scalp, roots and all, and sent them, along with a sample of my own, to a private forensic lab.

Three to five business days for results.

Those days stretched on like years.

That week, Dominic began coming home later and later. Tony wanted to renegotiate. Sal's crew had a problem. The meeting with Caruso ran long. Every excuse delivered with easy composure.

But one thing changed: every night before he left, he stood in front of the mirror, smoothing his hair, switching cologne, changing shirts twice.

He had never done that for me.

One evening, the moment he pulled out of the driveway, I quietly followed.

Dominic drove south, deep into New Jersey, then turned into the Pine Barrens—down a dirt road, all the way to a small cabin nestled in the woods.

I knew this land. It belonged to the Valentini family. My father used to hold meetings at that cabin—meetings that could never take place anywhere that might be bugged.

Dominic parked. A woman stepped out of the cabin.

Even from that distance, I recognized her at once. The white sundress had been replaced by a beige coat, but the face was exactly the same.

The woman from the photograph.

He took the handbag from her shoulder with practiced familiarity, his other hand settling at her waist.

He bent his head and murmured something in her ear. Even in the dim light, I could see the color rise in her cheeks.

Together, they walked into the cabin.

My phone buzzed. An email from the lab.

My hand was shaking so badly I could barely open the attachment. I skipped past the methodology, the graphs, straight to the last page.

Serena Valentini is excluded as the biological mother of Sample B (Marco Valentini).

One sentence.

The child I had raised for six years. The child I had held through fevers, the child I had soothed to sleep. Not mine.

I shoved the car door open and threw up on the gravel.

When the retching stopped, I sat back and stared at the cabin.

My father's cabin. My family's land.

He was fucking her on Valentini ground.

Suddenly, I remembered the day I gave birth.

Just as my contractions began, the private clinic I had arranged with in advance was attacked by a rival family.

My contractions were only minutes apart, and my guards had rushed me to the nearest maternity hospital—a chaotic, understaffed place full of strangers.

So on the day Marco was born, I had my family's own doctor personally collect DNA samples from both of us, and I sent them, under his direct supervision, to a private lab.

I even had one of my men stationed outside the nursery, twenty-four hours a day.

The maternity test confirmed that the baby was mine.

Then how could the boy I had raised for six years carry another woman's blood?

Unless—the report had been forged from the very beginning. Unless Dominic had already bought off the doctor, the nurse, and the lab technician before I ever held that baby in my arms.

Unless every precaution I had taken had already been factored into their plan.

Dominic had switched my child. I had to find him. And every traitor was going to pay.