I nodded, unable to speak past the tears.
My legs gave out.
Sofia caught me before I hit the floor, guided me back into the waiting room chair I'd occupied for eight endless hours. I collapsed into it, hands covering my face as the sobs finally came—relief and terror and gratitude all breaking loose at once.
Alive. He was alive.
Sofia knelt beside me, her good hand rubbing circles on my back while her own tears fell silently. "I told you," she whispered, voice thick with emotion. "I told you he'd fight his way back to you."
I couldn't answer. Could only cry while she held me, both of us releasing eight hours of fear we'd been holding back.
Our babies would have a father.
The next three months became a strange split existence—the first weeks consumed by Alessio's recovery and endless pretrial motions, then the grinding reality of the trial itself.
On the third day, Alessio finally woke. I was there when his eyes opened, when he saw me, and managed a weak smile despite the breathing tube.
"Hey,principessa," he rasped when they removed it hours later.
I kissed him carefully, mindful of the tubes and monitors. "Hey, yourself. You scared the hell out of me."
"Sorry. Didn't mean to." His hand found my stomach, still relatively flat at twelve weeks, palm spreading protectively over where our twins grew. "How are they?"
"We're okay. All three of us." I covered his hand with mine, interlacing our fingers over our children. "But you need to focus on healing. I've got the trial handled."
The defense filed every delay they could manage. Motions to suppress evidence. Challenges to my competency as a witness. A request for a change of venue that ate up two weeks of arguments before the judge denied it.
December passed in a blur of hospital visits and legal briefings. By New Year's, Alessio had been moved out of the ICU, working with physical therapists to rebuild the strength the bullet had stolen. I spent my days shuttling between his bedside and the prosecutor's office, reviewing documents, preparing testimony, watching my belly grow rounder with each passing week.
Jury selection began in late January. By then, I was past the point of hiding my pregnancy—the bump unmistakably visible beneath my courtroom blazer. Fourteen days to seat twelve jurors and four alternates. The defense rejected anyone who'd heard of Marco DeLuca. In Montana, that eliminated half the pool.
The trial itself lasted nearly a month.
The courtroom felt like a gladiatorial arena.
I sat in the witness box, hands folded in my lap to hide their trembling, facing the packed gallery. Reporters in the back rows, sketch artists capturing every angle, FBI agents stationed at each exit.
And there, at the defense table, Marco.
Our eyes met across the courtroom. He looked smaller somehow, diminished in the standard suit they'd given him. No expensive tailoring, no distinguished silver hair perfectly styled. Just a man facing consequences he'd spent forty years avoiding.
Lead prosecutor James Rivera approached the witness stand with careful steps.
"Ms. DeLuca, can you tell the court about the evening of March seventeenth? When did you first discover your father's continued criminal activities?"
I took a breath, steadied myself. This was it. The moment I'd been preparing for.
"I arrived at Senator Richard Caldwell's office at approximately 2:15 p.m. to finalize wedding arrangements…"
I spent four days on the stand across two separate weeks, my testimony broken up to accommodate other witnesses and the defense's endless objections. I recited account numbers. Shipping routes. Dates spanning three years of criminal operations.
"The email was from Miguel Cordero, dated March sixteenth at 11:43 p.m. Subject line: 'Tuesday delivery confirmation.' It detailed two hundred AR-15 rifles, fifty thousand rounds of ammunition, forty kilograms of Semtex plastic explosive…"
Marco's attorney objected repeatedly. The judge overruled every time.
Rivera let me talk, barely interrupting, letting my testimony build an inescapable cage around my father.
The weapons trafficking charges alone required a week of testimony—shipping manifests, customs records, three dock workers who'd been granted immunity in exchange for cooperation. I sat in the gallery for those days, watching the evidence pile up, watching the jury's faces shift from skepticism to horror.
