Chapter 2

Watching the Dario on the screen, whose eyes held nothing but me, made my chest tighten painfully.

We had once loved each other.

Back then, he was a low-level bodyguard working for my father, while I was the beloved daughter of the Bellandi family.

My parents vehemently opposed our relationship.

To be with him, I betrayed my family and cut off every possible way back.

And to prove worthy of everything I had sacrificed for him, he fought like a madman through the streets of the underworld, carving out a path for us with blood.

Those were the hardest and sweetest days of our lives.

Until Nico was born.

Our son's arrival didn't make him softer.

Instead, it made him completely addicted to the taste of power and blood.

He climbed over corpses until he became the Mafia don.

And the bodyguard who had once loved me enough to die for me was lost somewhere along the way.

The day Nico was diagnosed with severe autism at two years old, I held him in my arms at the hospital all night.

The next morning, Dario pushed open the hospital-room door.

I got up and tried to hand our child to him, but he didn't take him.

Instead, he stepped back.

It was the first time I had ever seen such undisguised disgust in Dario's eyes.

So, in his eyes, Nico wasn't his flesh and blood at all.

He was merely a defective child who didn't deserve to inherit the Falcone name.

Dario's coldness pushed me into despair.

Like a drowning person desperately clutching at a straw, I foolishly tried to earn a miracle from God by doing good deeds.

I fully funded a poor girl named Colette through college.

After learning about Nico's condition, she came to me herself, red-eyed and begging to stay at the Falcone estate as Nico's nanny.

Back then, she clutched my hand and swore she would repay my kindness with everything she had.

What a complete joke.

I had personally brought a poisonous snake into my own home.

Everything collapsed one afternoon.

I brought Nico back to the estate after his rehabilitation session and hurried upstairs to the study to find Dario.

The door wasn't locked.

I pushed it open—and walked straight into hell.

On the enormous desk, the man who had once sworn to protect me with his life was pinning Colette beneath him like a beast.

I rushed forward in a frenzy, hitting and clawing at them.

Dario barely bothered to straighten his clothes before shoving me away.

My head slammed into the corner of the desk, and blood immediately blurred my vision.

Watching everything unfold, Nico let out a piercing scream.

His already fragile cognitive abilities regressed completely that day, and he never said "Mama" again.

After that, the estate became my personal hell.

They stopped hiding it. They made out on the living-room sofa, kissed in my private pool, and even at dinner parties, Dario would shamelessly slide his hand beneath Colette's dress right in front of me.

But I could only swallow every humiliation because I had to rely on the Falcone family to afford Nico's outrageously expensive specialized treatment.

Until Colette produced those mysterious "heavy-metal chelators" and claimed they could cure autism.

I fought desperately to stop her and insisted on having the medicine tested.

But Colette needed only a single tear for Dario to pass judgment.

I will never forget that night.

Two bodyguards pinned me to the floor while Dario looked down at me from above, his voice cold as ice.

"Let her give it to him. Vittoria, your damn jealousy is destroying Nico's chance to recover."

I could only watch helplessly as Colette forced the lethal chemical mixture down my son's throat.

That very night, Nico's fever climbed to the brink of death.

Watching my son's breathing grow so faint it was almost gone, I completely lost my mind.

In one desperate move, I handed all the evidence of the scandal to the media, hoping public pressure would help me get my son out of the estate.

But I had underestimated the reach of a Mafia tyrant who controlled everything.

Overnight, every news report was wiped from the internet.

To the public, Dario branded me as suffering from severe paranoid delusions caused by postpartum depression.

As punishment, he signed a medical order committing me to a psychiatric hospital on a remote island.

High-voltage electroshock, powerful sedatives, restraints that left my wrists bruised and raw.

I gritted my teeth and endured it all, just to survive long enough to get out and see Nico.

But when I crawled out of that hell covered in injuries, what awaited me was a pitiful little white coffin and a cold, emaciated body.

And on the very night Nico took his last breath, Dario posted an update on Instagram.

Beneath a spectacular fireworks display on a private island, he was kissing Colette.

A tear struck the cracked screen of my phone and pulled me back to reality.

On the other side of the screen, Dario from three years ago was trembling all over.

He slammed his fist into the wall, his eyes bloodshot, his voice hoarse enough to crack.

"Vittoria… Tell me. What do I have to do to save you? What do I have to do to protect our child?!"

Through the shattered screen, I looked at him, my voice devoid of life.

"If you really want to save me… tell the Vittoria from three years ago to have the baby aborted."

Dario would become a demon eventually. And he would eventually belong to someone else.

My only wish was to keep my child from ever entering this world and reliving this hell.

On the screen, the younger Dario covered his face with both hands. His tall body slowly collapsed, and a broken howl escaped his throat.

"What do you mean, have the baby aborted?"

A voice colder than death suddenly came from behind me.