Chapter 3

"No — my baby!"

I screamed, both hands pressing hard over my stomach, letting the glass on the floor tear into my back and arms instead.

Marco's boot drove into my ribs. Something cracked, clean and sharp.

My whole body seized. Breathing became something I had to think about.

"Keep screaming." He planted his foot on my hand and pressed down slowly, watching my face. His eyes were bright. He was enjoying it. "I thought you said someone was coming. Where is he?"

Then a different kind of pain hit — deep inside my stomach, violent, like something being ripped loose from the inside.

A moment later, warmth flooded down my legs and spread across the carpet beneath me.

Blood. All of it blood.

"Baby," I whispered. "My baby."

Tears ran down my face and mixed with the blood already there. I could feel it. The most precious thing I had, the thing I'd fought for and waited for — leaving me.

I looked up at both of them and used the last thing I had left.

"Marco. Vivienne." My voice barely came out. "I will never let this go. Not even if I'm dead. And he will make sure you spend whatever's left of your lives wishing you were."

Marco glanced at the blood soaking into the carpet. Not scared. Worse than that — energized.

"It's a bastard. It dies, it dies." He shrugged. "I could beat you to death in this room, Chiara, and not one person in this city would open their mouth."

He raised his foot over my stomach and looked down at me.

"You're already bleeding. Might as well finish it."

He smiled and brought it down.

BOOM.

The security door blew off its frame — not kicked open, torn out — and crashed into the middle of the room.

Marco froze.

The dust hadn't settled when a figure walked through the gap.

Black suit. Not moving. The particular stillness of someone who has already decided what happens next. His eyes cut across the room and landed on me, on the blood pooling around me, and something shifted in them — something that turned the color of it.

His men flooded in behind him and sealed every exit in seconds.

"Uncle—" Marco's voice split right down the middle. "Uncle Dante?"

Dante Ferrante. The Don. Head of the Ferrante family, the man who ran Verrano from the ground up — and his own uncle, his dead father's younger brother.

Dante didn't look at him. He was staring at me. His eyes, usually unreadable, were shaking. His whole body was shaking.

"Chiara." It tore out of him. He crossed the room and dropped to his knees beside me.

Marco actually moved toward him, still thinking he could talk his way through this. "Uncle Dante — perfect timing. This woman's been carrying some other man's bastard and trying to pass it off as a Ferrante. I'm taking care of it for the family—"

Dante turned and kicked him in the chest before he could finish the sentence.

The crack of bone filled the room. Marco left the ground, hit the wall on the far side, and slid down it spitting blood.