Chapter 2

Soraya

I'd barely packed a handful of things when Rosalinda's maid, Carla, came to tell me the Donna wanted to see me.

Rosalinda was waiting in her sitting room in pale silk Valentino, Cesare in her arms. She didn't even look up.

"Kneel."

My whole body locked. Then I knelt.

By Scaffidi tradition, the Donna runs the house, and every woman under its roof answers to her. Rosalinda had spent eight years terrified I'd take her place, and she never ran out of excuses to punish me. I used to fight back. Now I just lowered my eyes.

"What did I do wrong, Donna Rosalinda?"

She laughed and pinched Cesare's thigh through the blanket. Hard. He let out a shriek that went straight through my ribs.

"You have the nerve to ask? This little thing hasn't stopped screaming since he got here. What did you do to him?"

I'd promised myself I wouldn't go near my children. But hearing that cry, I couldn't breathe.

"Please, be gentle with him. He's a newborn. They cry, it's normal—"

"Shut up. You don't get to tell me how to raise him."

Rosalinda shifted the bundle in her arm, marched right up to me, and drew back her free hand.

The slap cracked across my cheek, sharp and venomous.

I didn't move. I didn't even raise my hands. But the moment the blow landed, Rosalinda gasped, twisted her ankle on purpose, and threw herself backward toward the floor, shielding the baby with theatrical terror.

"Mom!"

Before I could process the trap, seven-year-old Dario charged, slamming his full weight into my ribs.

The shove sent me crashing hard against the nightstand.

"Get away from her!" Dario screamed, putting his small body between me and Rosalinda, his eyes burning with pure hatred. "You disgusting woman! How dare you hurt my mother and my little brother!"

My ribs throbbed, but it was the word mother that broke the air out of my lungs.

From the carpet, cradling the wailing baby, Rosalinda looked past Dario and offered me a fleeting, venomous smirk.

A shadow fell over the threshold.

Tiziano stood in the doorway. He looked at Rosalinda on the floor, at our son defending her, and then down at me.

He didn't say a word.

Of course he didn't. When had he ever taken my side?

The next blow turned the world black.

When I came to, I was back in my own bed. Tiziano sat on the edge of the mattress, dabbing ointment onto my swollen cheek.

"If it hurt, you should have said so," he said, his voice low and hard. "Why fake passing out? You scared Dario half to death."

I forced my eyes open. "I wasn't faking."

He frowned. "Even so, Rosalinda says you tried to take the baby again. That's why she disciplined you. You were in the wrong. Tomorrow, you'll apologize to her."

My children taken. And I was the one who owed an apology.

I looked him dead in the eye.

"I never tried to take anything. She set me up." My voice shook. "She's your sister-in-law, Tiziano. I'm your wife. Why do you always believe her and never me?"

His hand went still. Then his expression turned to stone.

"You really want me to say it? You drugged me and crawled into my bed eight years ago. Why should I believe anything that comes out of your mouth?"

The air in the room turned to ice.

When the Basiles were still somebody, I was the girl who trailed after Tiziano Scaffidi, swearing I'd marry him someday.

Then it all collapsed. The debts had no bottom. My parents, Leonardo and Elena, put a gun in their mouths. If Concetta hadn't taken me in, the men my father owed would have finished me, too.

After that, I buried what I felt for Tiziano. When Concetta arranged for me to marry Alfonso, the eldest grandson with the failing heart, in a marriage on paper only, I said yes.

The night before the wedding, Rosalinda, Tiziano's fiancée back then, brought me a glass of warm milk. I drank it.

I woke up in Tiziano's bed.

Rosalinda sobbed in front of half the family. The engagements were swapped to save face. She married Alfonso. I became Tiziano's wife, and overnight, the whole city decided I was a scheming little whore who'd drugged her way into the richest bed in Velmora.

I told everyone I didn't know how it happened. Nobody listened.

Except Tiziano.

He used to hold me and murmur into my hair, "I know you, Soraya. You'd never do something like that. Let them talk."

In private, he was tender, and I drowned in it. I believed he'd come to love me. If he hadn't given my babies away one by one, I might have believed it forever.

My lips trembled. "What did you just say?" I whispered. "You never believed me. Not once."

Regret flashed across his face, there and gone. "That's not what I meant—"

His phone rang. Rosalinda's voice came through, small and breathy. "Tiziano? I had a nightmare. Can you come?"

He was out the door before she finished.

I sat there a long time. When I touched my eyes, they were dry.

So this was what it felt like when your heart finally broke all the way through. You didn't even cry.

I laughed once, bitterly, and called my assistant, Ottavia Neri.

"Draw up divorce papers," I said.