Chapter 3

I didn't cry over the photo.

I threw up instead. It felt more honest.

Lorenzo's housekeeper, Rosa, found me on the bathroom floor. She was sixty, built like a fortress, with eyes that missed nothing.

"Too thin," she announced, and put a bowl of pastina in my hands. "Eat. The baby needs."

I froze. "Who told you?"

"Nobody tells Rosa. Rosa sees." She patted my cheek. "Also you smell coffee and run. Very obvious."

She fed me every three hours. She left crackers on my nightstand. When I cried in the pantry on Friday, she didn't ask why. She just stood beside me peeling oranges and humming.

Lorenzo, I barely saw.

But things kept appearing. Prenatal vitamins, the right brand. A stack of trauma journals in the library. Warm slippers outside my door after I'd walked barefoot on the marble at midnight.

"Thank you," I told him on Saturday night, when I finally caught him in the kitchen. "For the slippers."

He didn't look up from his laptop. "Rosa's idea."

"Rosa says they were yours."

"Rosa talks too much."

"Rosa," a voice called from the hallway, "hears everything."

The Ice King closed his eyes like a tired son. I laughed. It startled both of us.

Sunday came white and cold.

A small chapel on the estate. Candles. Twenty guests from the Salvatore family. Rosa had taken in an ivory dress at the waist so it wouldn't show what was growing beneath it.

I walked down the aisle alone.

Halfway there, the chapel doors opened.

Dante.

And on his arm, Gemma, in red. My grandmother's sapphire on her hand, catching the candlelight.

Every head turned. Whispers rolled through the pews.

He'd come. To my wedding. With her.

He wanted me to see it.

My knees went weak. Then I looked up.

Lorenzo was standing at the altar, watching me. Not them. Me. Like there was no one else in the room.

I kept walking.

"I do," I said. My voice didn't shake.

"I do," Lorenzo said. His didn't either.

When the priest said he could kiss the bride, Lorenzo hesitated. Then he lifted my hand and pressed his lips to my knuckles.

The most careful thing anyone had ever done to me.

At the reception, Dante cornered me by the terrace doors.

"This is temporary." His voice was low and urgent. "Once the debt is settled, I'll get you out. Don't let him touch you. Do you hear me? You're still—"

"Still what?"

He didn't finish.

"You brought her to my wedding, Dante. Wearing my ring."

"It's strategy. Gemma's family needs to see—"

"You gave me away."

"I protected you."

Something twisted low in my belly.

A sharp, deep cramp. Then another, so hard I grabbed the doorframe.

"Sienna?" Dante frowned. "What's wrong with you?"

I looked down.

A bright red stain was spreading across the front of my ivory wedding dress.