The Don’s Secret Wife Was Mafia Royalty Chapter 07

The Don’s Secret Wife Was Mafia Royalty Chapter 07

I made him wait another hour.

–

Not out of cruelty. Out of arithmetic. For three years, I had waited for Dante Moretti at dinner tables, in hospital rooms, in a guest bed listening for his key in the door. One hour in the rain didn’t begin to balance the

books.

When I finally came downstairs, he was standing in my grandfather’s receiving room, dripping on marble, flanked by four Volkov men who looked at him the way wolves look at a limping deer. The king of New York, soaked to the bone, unarmed, in enemy territory.

He’d come anyway.

I noticed things I wouldn’t have noticed three months ago. The hollows under his eyes. The slight hunch in shoulders that had never bent for anyone. His hands clasped behind his back-knuckles white.

He was afraid.

Good.

“Dante.”

He turned, and I watched his expression run a gauntlet – surprise, confusion, recalculation. The woman who’d left his fortress had been gaunt, broken down to component parts. The woman standing before him had color in her cheeks and a wall of armed men at her back and the particular steadiness that comes from being loved by people who’d kill for you.

“Aria.” His voice was carefully neutral. “Or should I call you Volkova.”

“You can call me Mrs. Moretti,” I said. “Legally, I still am. As your lawyers have painfully discovered.”

A muscle jumped in his jaw. “I came to talk about the children.”

“Their names are Luna and Stella.”

A pause. Longer than it should have been. “I came to talk about Luna and Stella.”

“What about them? The children you told me to handle? The children whose existence you learned from a lawyer’s panic attack? The children who spent their first month in incubators while you honeymooned with the

woman who just tried to get you killed at a sit-down?”

His composure cracked – a hairline fracture. “I made mistakes.”

“Mistakes.” I tasted the word like ash. “Dante, a mistake is forgetting a birthday. What you did was

systematic You erased me You erased them And now

Cano
now that your capos are defecting and the Farm Her have suspended your vote and your wife has sold you to her father’s butchers – now you remember you have a family?”

“That’s not what this is.”

“Then what is it? Because from where I’m standing, it looks like a drowning man swimming toward the only

lifeboat he ever set on fire.”

The silence was thick enough to cut Rain ticked against the windows. My grandfather’s men didn’t move

And then Dante Moretti did something I had never seen him do in three years of marriage. Not in front of his,

men. Not in front of anyone.

He sat down. Heavily, gracelessly, like his strings had been cut. He put his head in his hands.

“I know what your grandfather is doing,” he said quietly. “I know I can’t stop him. I’m not here to negotiate, Aria. I have nothing left to negotiate with.” He looked up, and his eyes were raw in a way that made my chest ache against my will. “I’m here because two weeks ago I saw a photograph in a legal filing. Two babies. And

one of them -”

His voice failed. He tried again.

“One of them has my grandfather’s eyes.”

I stood very still.

“I haven’t slept since,” he said. “I’m not asking for forgiveness. I’m not asking for mercy. I’m asking for one conversation. You set the terms. You set the room. Your men can hold guns to my head the entire time.”

I looked at this man – soaked, dethroned, stripped of everything but the truth – and I made my decision.

“Tomorrow. Nine o’clock. My lawyer will be present, and everything will be recorded.” I turned for the stairs,

then paused. “And Dante? You’ll answer every question I ask. Honestly. Or my grandfather’s men will show you

out – and the next time you see me will be at a courtroom, or a funeral. Possibly yours.”

“Understood,” he whispered.

He had no idea what I was going to ask first.

Neither, honestly, did I.