Chapter 2

Five years ago, I was on top of the world, walking out of the museum after finishing the restoration of a 16th-century Venetian painting.

Then a black SUV blew through a red light and slammed straight into me.

My wrist was shattered. The tendons in three of my fingers were shredded. The doctor told me there was a sixty percent chance my right hand would never again be capable of delicate, precise work.

For an art restorer, it was a career death sentence.

Alessandro was the first one at the hospital.

He burst into my room, his eyes bloodshot, his suit still spattered with coffee from whatever meeting he'd just run out of.

He grabbed my left hand and kissed my fingers over and over.

"I'll find out who did this," he vowed, his voice trembling with rage. "I swear to God, Margaret, I will make them pay."

Through my tears, I said I wanted to call the police.

He stopped me.

"Don't call the cops. What are they gonna do? Lock them up for a few years?" His gaze turned dark and dangerous. "I will make him suffer a hundred times more than any prison could. Leave it to me."

I believed him.

He was Alessandro Moretti, the king of New York's underworld. When he made a promise, he kept it.

Three days after my surgery, as I cried over my useless hand, he got down on one knee beside my hospital bed.

"Even if this hand can never fix anything again, you are still my most priceless treasure."

"Marry me, Margaret."

Our secret wedding had no guests. Just a priest and the diamond ring he slid onto my finger.

And I had never been happier.

But now, I stared at the third photo on my shattered phone. The man standing next to Alessandro.

It was Marco. The driver from the crash.

Alessandro had told me Marco had been "handled," that I never had to worry about him again.

But here he was, alive and well, standing loyally by Alessandro’s side.

I crouched in the hallway, a deep, bone-chilling cold seeping into me.

The screen lit up one last time. A wall of text from Lilian.

"Marco wasn't alone in the car that day. I was with him."

"Alessandro didn't call the cops, not to get revenge for you, but to keep me from being implicated."

"And marrying you? That was just to buy your silence. It worked pretty well, didn't it?"

My stomach twisted into a knot. Bile burned the back of my throat.

Then a second message came through. A voice recording.

A terrible premonition washed over me, a certainty that if I pressed play, my world would finally, completely shatter.

My finger moved on its own.

Alessandro's voice filled the silence—low, calm, with that same detached tone he used for business.

"Margaret's pregnant."

Then Enzo, his consigliere. "That's good news, Boss. An heir..."

"The timing is wrong," Alessandro cut him off. "Handle it."

The recording ended.

A roar filled my ears. My mind was violently dragged back three years.

That winter, I’d found out I was pregnant. The two pink lines on the test had made my hands shake with pure joy.

When Alessandro found out, he’d picked me up and spun me around, pressing his face to my stomach and whispering, "Our baby. It's going to be as beautiful as you."

I had let myself dream of our little family.

The very next day, our convoy was attacked.

The moment shots rang out, Alessandro threw his body over mine. But a second round of fire came from another direction, and my first instinct was to protect him. I threw myself in front of him.

A bullet tore through my abdomen.

I bled out our child on the cold leather seat of the car.

Alessandro held me, his face streaked with my blood, whispering "I'm sorry" over and over.

I thought it was a random, tragic accident. I even comforted him, told him it wasn't his fault, that we would have another child.

But now, his words from the recording played on a loop in my head:

"The timing is wrong. Handle it."

That attack... he'd set it up. He had killed our child himself.

And those whispered apologies? He was probably just sorry the bullet had missed its mark, that it hadn't taken me out along with the baby.

A bitter laugh escaped my lips.

Tears streamed down my cheeks, darkening the velvet of my dress.

How ridiculously funny.

From the proposal staged as "protection" to the ambush disguised as an "accident," every single step was a calculated move on his chessboard.

And I was the fool, the most willing pawn, walking into every trap while thanking him for my own destruction.

I slowly pulled a folded piece of paper from my small clutch.

The pregnancy report I’d picked up just this afternoon.

Seven weeks.

I had planned to give it to him tonight as a surprise, a celebration of our new life together.

Now, it seemed, that wasn't necessary.

I tore it into tiny, unrecognizable pieces and let them fall into the trash.