The Forgotten Donna: A Second Chance Chapter 05

The Forgotten Donna: A Second Chance Chapter 05

For three full seconds after the helicopter vanished into the snow, no one inside St. Michael’s Chapel moved.

Then the first black envelope landed in the aisle.

A senator’s wife picked it up before Damian’s men could stop her.

The color drained from her face as she stared at the copy of the divorce agreement inside, Damian’s signature sitting clean and undeniable at the bottom of the page.

Another envelope hit the front pew. Then another.

Damian did not move from the altar. Serena’s hand was still stretched toward him, her white glove treinbling, but he was looking past her to the side door Eve had used.

“Seal the doors,” he said.

Matteo, his underboss, snapped his fingers. Men in black moved down the aisles, but the damage was already done. Phones had come out. Screens were glowing.

Serena turned toward the guests with tears shining in her eyes. “This is fake. Eve did this because she hates me. She has hated me since we were girls.”

Someone near the back laughed under his breath.

Damian finally looked at her. “Don’t.”

“Damian, you can’t believe her over me. She sent that bullet. She hurt herself to make me look guilty. She’s always been dramatic. You know how she is.”

“I said don’t.” Damian took the envelope from Matteo’s hand and pulled out the printed stills. One showed Serena alone in the service garage, her head bent over Eve’s mahogany gift box. Another showed the ruby bracelet in her hand. The last showed her whispering into a guard’s ear seconds before that same man drove his shoulder into Eve at the party.

Serena saw the pictures and went still.

Her father, Rafael Vega, recovered first because men like him never cared what was true until they knew what version would cost them less. He stepped forward with both palms open. “Damian, this is obviously a setup. Eve is angry. She has always been jealous of Serena.”

Damian turned the photographs toward him. “Your daughter was caught on camera. Choose your next sentence carefully.”

Rafael swallowed. Beside him, Mrs. Vega gripped her pearls and stared at the floor, already calculating who she could blame once the gossip reached Fifth Avenue.

Serena pressed a hand to her stomach. It was the same move she had used at the party, the one that had sent Damian running. “I can’t breathe,” she whispered. “The baby… Damian, please.”

His eyes dropped to her stomach. “Whose child is it?”

Serena’s tears stopped too fast.

“What?”

“You heard me.”

“It’s yours in every way that matters,” she said, her voice breaking right where she wanted it to break. “I came back because I trusted you. Because I knew you would protect me.”

“That is not an answer.”

The guests were watching now, hungry and horrified. Damian had spent his life making powerful people nervous. He had never been the man standing at an altar while the city wondered whether his bride was carrying another man’s heir.

Matteo leaned in and spoke low. “Boss, we need to move this somewhere private.”

“No,She wanted an audience. Let her have one.”

Serena’s mask cracked. For one second, the soft, wounded girl everyone adored disappeared, and something sharper looked out through her eyes. “Don’t humiliate me in front of them.”

Damian gave a humorless smile. “Funny. I don’t remember you worrying about humiliation when my wife was bleeding on the

floor.”

My wife. He heard the words after he said them. So did everyone else.

A murmur moved through the chapel. Serena flinched as if he had shoved her away. Rafael Vega’s face darkened, but he kept his mouth shut. He had just realized the same thing Damian had: Eve had not left empty-handed. She had left with proof, leverage, and enough timing to turn a fake wedding into a public execution.

Damian walked off the altar. He did not look at Serena again. “Find Eve.”

Matteo hesitated. “The helicopter didn’t file a route. The pilot spoofed the tracker.”

“Then find the lawyer. Find the doctor. Find the damn snow she stepped on if you have to.”

“Boss.”

Damian stopped at the chapel doors. His ring finger felt strangely bare, though he was still wearing the wedding band he had never taken off. In all the chaos, he had not noticed that the other ring, Eve’s ring, the one he kept locked in the family safe because it was “too dangerous” for her to wear, had been missing from the manor for two days.

She had been leaving long before he saw her stand up.

Eve’s room was open. The wardrobe was empty except for Serena’s dresses, which now looked cheap and desperate hanging there.

Damian walked past them to the small wall safe behind the vanity. He had installed it years ago after Eve once joked that every mafia wife deserved somewhere to hide her secrets. At the time, he had laughed and kissed her temple. He had forgotten the

safe existed.

The code was not his birthday. Not Serena’s. Not the wedding date.

He typed in the day he first brought Eve back to the manor after the wedding.

The safe opened.

There was no jewelry inside. No love letter. No note begging him to understand.

Only a flash drive, a folded copy of their divorce papers, and a trust document thick enough to make his stomach tighten before he opened it. He read the first page. Then the second. Then he stopped breathing.

Three port routes. Two clean shipping accounts. A controlling interest in the warehouse union fund. All transferred into an independent trust beyond Lucchese seizure.

Beneficiaries: Eve Vega Lucchese and her unborn child.

Damian sat down on the edge of her bed.

For five years, he had hidden his wife because he thought that was protection. He had told himself the world was too ugly to put her name in its mouth.

Now he was looking at proof that she had been carrying his heir, bleeding under his roof, and planning an escape because she believed the greatest danger to her child was him.

For the first time in his life, Damian Lucchese had no order to give that could fix what he had done.