Daniela’s proudest achievement is fucking the Don of the Vitale family behind his wife’s back. That wife is me. Back then, I’m scrolling through the thread after work, half-numb from a fourteen-hour day, when the top reply catches my eye. Question: What’s the proudest thing you’ve ever done? Answer: Stealing my son’s classmate’s father straight into my bed. “Two years ago my son pulled a little prank on the girl sitting in front of him at school. Carved his initials into her back with a pocket knife. Cute, right? Her mom found out and came screaming into the headmaster’s office calling me trash. Said I raised an animal.” “And she made some calls. Used her family’s money. Got my son expelled and blacklisted from every elite academy in the city.” “That’s when I met her husband. A real man. Gorgeous. Powerful. He told me she was a vulgar, mouthy bitch — and I was hooked.” “We ended up in bed. Easy. He paid to put my son into a private school overseas — she still has no idea.” “Cheating tastes so good, girls. Highly recommend.” “And the best part? I’m carrying his baby right now. If it weren’t for the bump, I’d shove it in her face. But I can wait. When my kid’s older, we’ll come back for her daughter’s inheritance. I want to see her face then.” Underneath the words, a photo. A man’s face pressed into a woman’s chest. Neither of them showing. They don’t have to. Because right there, on his forehead — just above his eyebrow — is a two-inch scar. Clean white line. Hair never grew back. My palm goes cold around the phone. I zoom in. Two centimeters of dead follicles in a perfect stripe. The kind of scar you only get when someone splits your skull open with intent. I should know. I gave it to him. Two years ago. The night our daughter came home from school with her back carved up by a six-year-old with a pocket knife. The night I broke a whiskey bottle over Lorenzo’s head. I keep scrolling. The comments are a war zone. Half the thread is calling her a shameless whore. She’s loving it. She drops another photo to shut them up — a man shirtless, arms wrapped around a swollen pregnant belly, a box of strawberry-flavored condoms tossed on the nightstand. Lorenzo’s brand. Lorenzo’s size. “The mistress is the one who isn’t loved, sweetie. He only has eyes for me now.” “Not my fault, she couldn’t hold onto her man.” I know that voice before I see the name. Daniela Rossi. Nico Rossi’s mother. The woman who stood in the headmaster’s office two years ago and screamed at me in front of every parent on the board. I tap into her profile. Two years of daily posts. Every single day. Every single one of them about her and Lorenzo. The first one — a coffee shop, the week after Mia came home bleeding. Lorenzo’s hand resting on the table, wearing the watch I bought him for our anniversary. I scroll. A trip to the Maldives the weekend of our wedding anniversary, while I sat in a hospital room holding Mia’s hand through a fever. A black-tie auction in Monaco the night I called him crying because Mia wouldn’t stop asking where Daddy was. Every post. Every receipt. Two years of my marriage, livestreamed by the woman fucking my husband. I stop on a post from last month. The fifteenth. “My king took me to my prenatal check-up today. Cried when he heard the heartbeat.” I remember the fifteenth. I had a meeting I couldn’t push. I called Lorenzo and asked him to pick Mia up from school. He grunted something into the phone. I thought that meant yes. It was the first time we’d spoken all year. I came home at midnight. Mia wasn’t there. Lorenzo wouldn’t answer. The school said she’d left at three. I called the police. I sat on the kitchen floor in a blood-pressure spiral, waiting for the worst news of my life. They found her the next morning. She’d tripped on the way home, scraped her knees raw, and a baker on the east side took her in because she was too scared to walk in the dark. Lorenzo walked through the front door at 8 a.m. like nothing happened. I slapped him so hard his lip split. He told me he got busy and forgot. Told me Mia was fine. Told me I was overreacting like always. We had the worst fight of our marriage that night. He slammed the door behind him and didn’t come back. Three weeks. No call. No text. Nothing. And now I know where he’s been. I lock the phone. Set it face-down on the table. This isn’t the first time Lorenzo has chosen someone else over us. It’s just the first time I’m done pretending I didn’t see it coming. Our marriage was rotting long before Daniela Rossi ever walked into it.
The Vitale family runs half this coast. Old blood, old money, the kind of power that makes governors return calls within the hour. My family built the other half. The Castellanis have been moving cargo through these ports since before the Vitales picked up their first gun. By the time it came down to me, I’d taken the business global. Our grandfathers shook hands across a dinner table sixty years ago. Our parents bought houses next to each other. Lorenzo and I grew up climbing the same fence. The first time I got my period, I was thirteen and crying in the school bathroom. He was the one who showed up. Tied his jacket around my waist. Walked down to the corner store and came back with an entire bag of pads. “Take it. Don’t ruin my jacket.” The words were sharp. The hand shoving the bag into mine wasn’t. He cussed me out every time I cried, then slipped painkillers into my desk before class. “Take them. I’m not carrying your ass home if you pass out again.” When he couldn’t say what he meant, he wrote it down. I found the poem folded into my locker when we were sixteen. I laughed at how cheesy it was. He ripped it out of my hand, shoved it back into my chest, and kissed me under the streetlight outside my house. That was the night I knew. We grew up tangled in each other. Got married the year I turned twenty-four. Had Mia two years after that. And then everything started to crack. He wanted me home. Wanted me to step back from the business. Be a wife. Be a mother. The kind of woman his world expected. I wasn’t built for that. I’d spent my whole life clawing my way to the top of the Castellani empire — I wasn’t about to hand it off so I could pour wine for his capos at Sunday dinner. “Why is the business always more important than me? Than this family?” “They’re not more important. They’re equal. I’m not choosing between them, Lorenzo.” “That’s the problem. You should be.” We fought like that for years. He’d slam doors. I’d work later. He’d disappear for a week at a time. I’d disappear for two. He still played the husband. Still played the father. Until he didn’t. The fights got uglier. My deals took me overseas for months. His patience ran out somewhere along the way, and I was too busy holding two empires together to chase him back. Then Mia came home with her back sliced open. Lorenzo and I had screamed at each other two nights before that. He was still angry when he showed up to the headmaster’s office — late, hands in his pockets, like he’d been pulled out of something more important than his daughter bleeding through her uniform. Daniela was already there. Already screaming at me. Calling me trash. Calling Mia a brat who probably deserved it. I was about to break her jaw. Lorenzo walked in. Looked at his daughter’s blood-soaked shirt. Looked at me. And took Daniela’s side. “Kids play rough. You don’t have to come at her like an animal, Sera.” I slapped him. In front of every parent on the board. In front of Daniela’s smug, lipsticked grin. Then I made my calls that ended Nico Rossi’s name in every elite school on the coast. I made sure that little monster wouldn’t sit next to another child until his mother begged on her knees. She never did. But apparently her husband — soon to be ex — couldn’t pay to undo it, and that’s where Lorenzo stepped in. That night Lorenzo came home drunk and louder than I’d ever heard him. “You humiliated me. In front of half this city.” “You humiliated yourself. Our daughter was bleeding and you defended the woman whose son did it.” He grabbed my wrist. I grabbed the whiskey bottle off the bar. The glass came down on the side of his head before he could finish the next sentence. Amber liquid and blood ran down his face together, soaking the collar of his white shirt. My voice didn’t shake. “Lorenzo. Now you know what our daughter felt.” After that, the marriage was a corpse. We just kept dressing it up for the family. … My hand is locked around the phone so tight my knuckles ache. Daniela’s profile refreshes. New post. “Thank you to my king for cooking for me tonight.” A photo of a man in an apron. Standing at a stove. Smiling like he means it. I’ve been married to him for eleven years. He has never once cooked for me. I dial his number before I can stop myself. It rings. And rings. And rings. Right when I think it’s going to voicemail, his voice slides through, slow and lazy. “What?” “You promised our daughter you’d come home for her birthday yesterday. Where the hell are you?” A pause. Then, quieter — almost amused — “Sera. Beg me. Tell me you miss me.” “Apologize. Soften up a little. And I’ll come home.” I can’t speak. Then a soft female voice in the background. “Lorenzo, who is it?” The last flickering thing inside me goes out. I hear my own voice answer, calm as a blade. “In your fucking dreams.” I hang up.
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