The Flight I Never Took Back

For our tenth wedding anniversary, my husband gifted me a solo trip to Zurich.

After a decade of laundering his cartel's cash and stitching up his bullet wounds, the Don of the West Coast suddenly decided his wife needed a "luxurious break."

Then I stopped outside the study and heard him cutting a deal with our eight-year-old son.

"Dad, if you stand beside Aunt Bianca at the sanctuary ceremony, what happens to Mom?"

"Nothing happens to your mother," Dominic chuckled, smooth and effortless. "The oath just puts Bianca under my name so rivals back off. It's business."

"It looks like a wedding."

"It's just theater, Toby. Your mother has my real ring. She doesn't need to know about this. Keep it between us, and that console you wanted is yours."

I stood in the dark hall, ice flooding my veins.

He wasn't resting me. He was getting me out of the country so he could play husband to his widowed first love—convinced it wasn't betrayal as long as there wasn't a marriage license.

Dominic thinks I'm flying to Europe to be his patient little Donna.

Too bad for him. I just wired my retainer to an international divorce lawyer. The plane leaves at dawn, and Toby and I aren't coming back.

Clara

I waited on the terrace until the freezing night air finally stopped my hands from shaking.

When I walked back into the foyer, Dominic was halfway down the grand staircase. He was wearing an expensive, tailored white suit. It looked sharp.

"I thought you hated white," I said, leaning against the archway. "You used to call it a walking bullseye."

"People change, Clara." He adjusted a platinum cufflink without looking up. "I'm sponsoring an old friend tonight. The council expects a bit of... formality."

Bianca loved white.

Since she'd crawled back to the city after her husband died, playing the helpless, grieving widow, ivory shirts and cream silk pocket squares had slowly taken over his side of the closet. Ties he would have once called flashy were now his daily go-to.

I was the one who folded them. I was the one who hung them away, pretending I didn't see.

"I'll drive you," I said.

Dominic stopped on the last step. He gave me a quick, practiced smile.

"Not tonight. It's just a closed-door meeting with the capos. Stale cigar smoke and territorial bickering—you'd be bored to death."

"I can handle it."

"Come on, sweetheart. Let me do the heavy lifting." He kissed my forehead, his eyes already sliding past me toward the door. "I'll bring something back for you and Toby."

For one stupid second, I wanted to grab his lapel. I wanted to force him to stop, look me in the eye, and tell me the truth before he walked out holding another lie.

But I stayed silent.

The front door clicked shut. The heavy deadbolt locked with a dull, final thud.

On my hand, the diamond ring he'd slid onto my finger ten years ago suddenly felt like a lead weight, dragging me down.

Our marriage wasn't some arranged mafia deal. Ten years ago, we stood in front of the old guard, and he swore his loyalty to me alone. But Dominic had built a wall around his life, shutting me out until I was just another piece of furniture he owned.

I used to call it the pressure of the underworld.

Everyone else saw the "perfect" power couple. Dominic, the feared Don who stayed faithful to an ordinary woman; me, the Donna who scrubbed his shell companies and turned an indebted cartel into the most powerful logistics empire on the coast.

I remembered the winter the feds almost seized our ports. I stayed up for three days straight, auditing the books to seal the leaks. When a rival crew choked our supply lines, I was the one at the negotiation table until sunrise so he wouldn't have to put his men in body bags.

The street guys always called me the luckiest wife in the syndicate for locking down the Don. They never realized how much of myself I had to bury just to keep him on that throne.

"Mom?"

Toby ran into the hall and wrapped his arms around my waist.

"You're not leaving for Zurich yet, are you?"

I knelt down, brushing the hair off his forehead. "Why are you asking, buddy?"

His eyes grew wide and glassy. "You and Dad... you're staying together, right?"

The question tore right through me. I pulled him close, holding him tight so he couldn't see my eyes watering.

"Whatever happens between your father and me, Toby, you and I are a team. You will always have me. You know that, right?"

He went very still, his small body pressed against mine.

"None of this is yours to fix," I promised fiercely into his hair. "I'm your mom. I'm not leaving you."

"Promise?"

"I swear."

I took him into the kitchen to make dinner: steak, charred on the edges, and the roasted potatoes he liked. We had a full staff on the payroll, but Dominic always insisted on "home-cooked" meals—which was really just another unpaid shift I was expected to clock.

Toby stared at his plate, just pushing his food around.

"Mom... you know about Aunt Bianca, don't you?"

I put my fork down. My chest tightened.

"Dad said it doesn't count," Toby blurted out, his lip trembling. "He said it's just a show. He told me if I kept it quiet, he'd get me that new game console I wanted. I was going to tell you, Mom. I just... I thought if it wasn't real, you wouldn't be sad."

"Oh, sweetheart."

I pulled his chair toward mine. He wasn't taking his father's side; he was just a kid trying to hold his world together with his bare hands.

"I don't want the console," he whispered, burying his face in my shirt. "If I say no, can we just stay home? Can we just be a family?"

I wrapped both arms around him, letting the silence settle over us.

None of this was up to us anymore.