"Emma, wait…"
"No." She turns to face me one last time, and the strength in her expression stops me cold. "I'm done waiting for other people to decide what I can handle."
She opens the door, and I feel our entire world tilting off its axis. If she leaves the compound now, if our enemies see her alone and unprotected, they'll smell blood in the water. And I've just handed them the knife.
"Where are you going?"
"To see my brother. My living brother." The words are precision strikes, each one aimed to kill. "And if your guards tryto stop me, if you try to stop me, you'll learn that Emma Pitt isn't as fragile as you thought."
"You don't even know where he is."
She tilts her head, her eyes on fire. "3504 Hamilton Ave, Rockford."
I glance at the documents on the floor. Of course she memorized the address.
"Stellina…"
"That's Mrs.Rosetti to you." The formality cuts deeper than any blade. She weaponizes my own name against me. The name the Hewsons forced on her becomes her armor against me. Fucking poetic. "Since you seem to have forgotten that wives are partners, not possessions."
She walks through the door with her spine straight, her head high. Not fleeing, not running. Walking with the measured pace of someone who's finally claimed their own power.
My fist connects with the wall beside the door she just walked through. The plaster cracks, blood immediately welling on my knuckles. The pain is nothing compared to watching her walk away. The physical damage can't match what I've done to us.
I stand frozen among the scattered papers, the proof of my betrayal spread across my floor like evidence at a crime scene. The closed door might as well be an ocean between us, between what we were this morning and what we've become.
The silence in my study is deafening, broken only by the drip of blood from my knuckles onto the Persian rug. For the first time since our wedding, I don't know where my wife is going, what she's thinking, or if she's ever coming back.
And for the first time, I understand that I might have protected her from everything except the one thing that could truly destroy us. Myself.
27 - Emma
The suitcase sits open on silk sheets like a wound, half-filled with the few things that were ever truly mine. My grandmother’s astronomy book, worn soft from years of handling, sits next to the cheap watch I wore as a servant, its face cracked from when I dropped it scrubbing floors. Everything else in this room belongs to someone who doesn’t exist anymore.
The sheets still smell like this morning: sex and his musky floral cologne that makes my traitorous pussy clench even now. I hate my body for its betrayal, for the wetness gathering between my thighs just from his ghost lingering in the fabric. My nipples harden under the silk nightgown as I pull another dress from the closet, the emerald one he fucked me in after the charity gala. The fabric whispers against my fingers like a memory, and I can still feel his hands on the zipper, hear his voice rough with need: "Perfect, stellina. My perfect girl."
These clothes he chose for me, each piece selected with those careful hands that know exactly how to transform me.
I fold it carefully before setting it aside. It was never mine to take, even though my body remembers every time he peeled it off me.
The marriage certificate lies on the nightstand where I found it in his desk drawer, the paper heavy with lies. Frances Hewson married Alessandro Rosetti. Not me. Never me. The girl who loved stars and scraped together pennies to buy Tommy commissary money vanished the moment I signed that namein the chapel, witnessed by Chicago's most dangerous families, sealed with a kiss.
My hands freeze on the leather folder tucked behind his watches. Seventeen of them, I've counted, each a trophy from someone who crossed him. Inside, I find photographs. Dozens more than what the blackmailer sent days ago, all of me. Me sleeping in his stolen shirt, hair spread across the pillow, one breast exposed where the fabric shifted. Me at the telescope, lost in mapping constellations, unaware of his camera capturing the way moonlight painted my skin. Me in the kitchen that morning I burned bacon, laughing at something he said, my mouth open in genuine joy.
His handwriting changes through the dates. Controlled at first, then increasingly desperate, like he was trying to capture something he couldn't quite hold. The notes make my chest tight: "She hums off-key when happy, sounds like heaven" and "Left side of neck most sensitive, makes her arms erupt in goosebumps when kissed there" and "Prefers sleeping closest to window, reaches for me in her sleep."
He's been studying me like I'm one of his acquisitions, documenting my transformation from servant to wife with the same precision he uses for violence. But there's something else in these photos. A tenderness in how he's captured my unguarded moments, an obsession that goes deeper than possession. These are intimate, private, taken with care.
I try the bedroom door, but not because it's locked. I know it isn't. The electronic panel would light green for me, Alessandro made sure of that weeks ago. But my hand freezes on the handle because I know what happens if I leave. The guards will alert him immediately. Every camera in this compound will track my movement. The gate won't open without his authorization. And outside these walls? The Hewsons who still want to control me. The Russians who've been circling. The other families whowould love to use Alessandro Rosetti's wife against them. I'm trapped not by locks but by the reality that I know too much to ever be truly free.
Even if I could leave this room, where would I go? My bank accounts are all in Frances Rosetti's name. My identification is a beautiful lie. The servant girl is dead. I can't even remember how she walked with her head down, how she made herself invisible.
The first dress tears easier than I expect, silk ripping under my hands with a sound like screaming. The white gown from our anniversary dinner, the one he made me come in three times before we even made it to the restaurant. Then another, the cream Chanel skirt suit I wore when he first called me stellina, when he ate my pussy in that bathroom and made me forget my own name. Each piece holds a memory that cuts deeper than the last, each destruction making my body throb with phantom touches.
The torn silk catches the light like fallen stars, beautiful even in destruction. That's what he's done to me. Made beauty in my breaking.
I catch my reflection in the floor-length mirror. Hair wild, cheeks streaked with tears and mascara, wearing a designer gown because I arrived with no clothes of my own.
"Who are you?" I whisper to the stranger staring back. Not the servant girl who knew her place, kept her head down, survived on invisibility. Not the mafia wife draped in diamonds, learning to command rooms with borrowed authority. The woman in the mirror exists somewhere between, fractured and lost, created entirely by Alessandro's hands, marked inside and out by his possession.
