“We live separate lives,” she continues. “Separate spaces. I’ll leave it to you to come up with an acceptable story. One we can both live with, of course. We untangle things slowly. Like adults who?—”
My hand slams down on the table before I even realise it’s moving as calm evaporates in an instant. Another fucking first.
She jumps. The plates rattle and the candles flicker violently. One vase sways drunkenly before it rights itself. “What the hell do?—?”
“Enough!”
She stiffens. “Do not fucking shout at me.”
“This is not shouting because I do not shout, cara,” I say coldly. “And for an intelligent woman, you seem surprisingly eager to keep slamming your beautiful head against an immovable brick wall. This is the last time I allow you to pretend this is a negotiation.”
She rises halfway out of her chair.
“I don’t know who the hell you think you are but you don’t get to dictate my life after?—”
“You disappeared for eighteen months,” I cut in sharply. “You left me to run an empire with one hand while tearing the world apart with the other to find you.”
Her face pales.
“And while you were bartending on a beach and pretending to be free,” I continue, voice low and lethal, “La Fratellanza Nera was deciding whether they had the balls to challenge me for my throne.”
Silence crashes down.
She sinks back into her chair slowly.
“What?” she whispers. “Who… who are the La Fratellanza… whatever?”
“They’re the old but very serious guard,” I say evenly. “A hardline faction of the Cosa Nostra that believes power should look the same now as it did fifty years ago. Same bloodlines. Same marriages. Same brutality, just dressed up in nostalgia.”
Her fingers curl into the tablecloth.
“I allowed them a foothold in New York years ago,” I add coolly. “A strategic compromise. One I regret daily.”
Her eyes lift to mine, alarm sharpening.
“They never accepted my modernisation,” I continue. “Never accepted that I refused to rule through terror alone. And they especially never accepted that I married you instead of Isabella Bellandi.”
Her eyes widen, and something sharpens in her eyes before it dulls. “You… you were supposed to marry someone else?”
My jaw grits and my nod is stiff. “Sì. Their don,” I go on, “is Salvatore Bellandi and very old-school. Vindictive. And deeply offended that I denied his daughter the crown he believes should have been hers. They tolerated your existence when they believed you were temporary,” I say. “They tolerated my distraction because they assumed it would end.”
My jaw tightens when my gaze drops to her ring finger. Her very bare ring finger.
She catches my stare and her fingers tremble before she yanks her hand off the table and drops it to her lap.
“It didn’t.”
Her breath stutters. “What does that have to do with me wanting a s-separation?”
“Besides my not wanting to grant you what you want? Besides the fact that you’re mine and I want you back where you belong? Why… everything.”
She swallows audibly at my deadly tone and starts to shake her head. “No. Absolutely not. You can’t lay something like this at my feet. This… this is your world. Your problem?—”
I lean forward into her space, drawing her scent into my lungs even though I know it’ll simply compound one problem with another. Thicken the erection pulsing against my zip with the fury riding my being. “My problem. Which you unfortunately greatly exacerbated by pulling your vanishing act. My enemies learned that my wife could vanish,” I say quietly. “That I would burn time, blood, and leverage to find her.”
Her eyes widen. She opens her mouth again but I beat her to it.
“Yes, you became leverage,” I continue. “A liability. A weakness they intend to exploit.”
