The Don’s Wife Was Never Weak Chapter 06

The Don’s Wife Was Never Weak Chapter 06

I heard about Catalina’s dismissal from Marco, who had begun sending me encrypted updates with my father’s knowledge and approval. Loyalty in our world was currency, and Marco was making a long-term investment.

But firing Catalina didn’t fix what Luca had broken. It was like removing a bullet and expecting the wound to heal itself.

I didn’t have time to think about Luca’s remorse. I was too busy rebuilding myself.

Within my first month back, I restructured the Calabresi shipping routes, eliminating three redundant intermediaries and saving the family fourteen million dollars. I renegotiated a port agreement in Newark that my father’s team had been struggling with for six months—I closed it in one meeting.

The men on the council, who had watched me leave as a lovesick girl, now watched me work with something between respect and fear.

Good. Fear was useful.

At eight weeks pregnant, the morning sickness was relentless, but I never let it show. I conducted meetings with a ginger candy tucked in my cheek and a steel spine that wouldn’t bend. My mother hovered—she’d never admit it, but she hovered—making sure I ate, slept, and didn’t push past what the doctor allowed.

“You’re building an empire and a human simultaneously,” she told me one evening. “Don’t sacrifice one for the other.”

I promised her I wouldn’t.

Meanwhile, Luca began his campaign.

First came the messages—sent through Marco, since my phone was disconnected and the compound was impenetrable.

“Tell her I’m sorry. Tell her I understand now.”

Marco relayed them. I listened. I said nothing.

Then came the gifts. A delivery truck appeared at the compound gates carrying white roses—hundreds of them—and a handwritten note: “I should have noticed. I should have listened. I should have chosen you every time.”

My father’s men turned the truck away without opening a single box.

Then Luca tried a different approach. He requested a formal meeting with my father—a sit-down between the heads of two families. Business protocol. My father couldn’t refuse without breaking the treaty.

They met at a neutral restaurant in Manhattan, surrounded by guards from both sides. I wasn’t present, but my father recorded the conversation.

“Dominic, I need to see Isabella.”

“No.”

“She’s carrying my child.”

“She’s carrying her child. You lost the right to claim anything the night you seated another woman in her place.”

“I made a mistake—”

“You made twenty mistakes. Documented. Timestamped. My daughter kept records, Valentini. She’s a Calabresi—did you forget that? Did you ever even know?”

Silence. A long, damning silence.

“You didn’t know,” my father said, and I could hear the contempt dripping from every syllable. “You married my daughter and never once asked about her family. Never wondered why she had no past, no connections, no name. You were so busy feeling generous that you never considered she might be the one lowering herself.”

“I want to make this right.”

“Then sit with what you’ve done. Because my daughter is not a problem for you to solve. She’s a force you failed to recognize. And now she’s home, where she should have been all along.”

Luca left that meeting looking, according to Marco, like a man who’d been gutted.

I listened to the recording twice. The second time, I cried—not for him, but for the girl who had loved him so completely that she’d hidden her own power just to fit inside his small idea of who she should be.

That girl was gone now.

In her place was someone Luca Valentini had never met.

And she had work to do.