Chapter 2 - The Sins of an Assumption
The space between our table and the entrance seemed to stretch into miles. I could see the frantic panic masked behind Luca’s cold exterior—a panic born of a devastating realization that was hitting him wave after wave.
Years ago, when our marriage had crumbled under the agonizing weight of infertility, Luca had let the whispers of his inner circle poison his mind. In the mafia world, bloodlines were currency, weakness was fatal, and a barren wife was often viewed as a liability. When month after month yielded negative pregnancy tests, and medical specialists offered vague, frustrating explanations about unexplained fertility blocks, the seeds of doubt were planted.
Someone—likely one of his ambitious capos looking to insert a more compliant bride into the Moretti dynasty—had whispered that the problem wasn't the stress of his empire, but me.
Luca never openly accused me of betrayal, but his touch grew colder, his absences longer, until that snowy night in our penthouse kitchen when he looked at me with dead eyes and said he didn't love me anymore. He thought my body was broken. He thought I was holding him back from building the eternal dynasty he craved.
So, I let him go. I signed the papers without a fight, taking only my clothes, my pride, and the small inheritance my grandfather had left me.
What Luca never knew—what I couldn't bring myself to tell a man who had already emotionally abandoned me—was discovered three weeks after the divorce was finalized. Sitting in a cold clinic office downtown, staring at a small ultrasound monitor, the doctor had given me news that felt like a cruel miracle: I wasn't infertile. The extreme chronic stress of walking on eggshells inside a toxic marriage had simply shut my body down. The moment the toxic weight of Luca Moretti was lifted from my shoulders, nature took its course.
Twins. A boy and a girl.
I had considered calling him. I had stared at his private number on my phone dozens of times while my belly swelled, wrestling with the urge to tie him to me forever. But then I remembered the way he looked at me in those final months—as if I were a defective piece of machinery. I swore then and there that my children would never grow up in a world ruled by gunshots, extortion, and the constant, suffocating fear of the Moretti name. I packed up, moved across the city to a quiet neighborhood, built a thriving graphic design business from home, and raised my babies in peace.
Meanwhile, Luca had moved on. He married Evelyn Shaw, a woman from old Chicago money who looked stunning beside him at charity galas. But fate possessed a grim sense of humor. Even with Evelyn, there were no children. Desperate for an heir to inherit his sprawling empire, Luca had spent the last two years visiting top-tier fertility clinics in Chicago and Manhattan, only to hear the same devastating verdict from every specialist: There is no medical issue on your end, Mr. Moretti. You are entirely capable of fathering children.
May you like
For the first time in his life, Luca had been forced to confront a terrifying truth: he had sacrificed his marriage, his peace, and the only woman who had ever truly loved him for nothing more than a poisonous assumption.
And now, standing beside my table with his chest heaving and his face stark white, he was looking at the undeniable proof of his catastrophic mistake.
