Chapter 2

I married Nico Castellano because he bled all over my emergency room.

I was an ER nurse at Northwestern. Twenty-two, night shift, too tired to be scared. He came in at three a.m. with a knife wound under his ribs and two armed men who told me to hurry.

I told them to get out of my trauma bay.

Nico laughed through the pain. "Do what she says."

I stitched him up. He sent roses every day for a month. Then he sent a car to take me to dinner. Then he held my hand at my mother's funeral when cancer finally won, and stood between me and the world like a wall.

"You'll never be alone again, Aria," he told me the night he proposed.

He meant it.

Right up until Bianca Russo came home from Milan.

His first love. The girl he'd been promised to at nineteen, before her family moved her to Italy. She came back beautiful and fragile and grieving her father, and Nico decided she was his responsibility.

"She's family, Aria. She has no one."

I had no one either. He just never noticed.

Late nights. Phone calls in the hallway. Dinners I cooked and ate alone at a table set for two. His men stopped meeting my eyes. My friends stopped calling. The house got bigger and quieter every month.

And tonight—at the gala I'd spent six weeks planning—he'd danced with her twice.

He hadn't danced with me once.

Now I was sitting in a guest room forty floors above Chicago, in a borrowed cashmere sweater, holding a phone the Bratva had let me keep.

Roman had told me I could call anyone.

The only person I wanted to call hadn't called me.

At two a.m., it finally buzzed.

Nico.

My heart jumped like a fool.

"Behave. Don't provoke him. Bianca's in shock, so I'm staying with her tonight. We'll talk in a few days."

A few days.

I read it four times. Then I put the phone face-down and pressed both hands over my mouth so no one would hear what came out.

A knock.

"Mrs. Castellano." Roman's voice. "May I come in?"

I wiped my face. "It's your house."

"It's your room."

He opened the door but didn't cross the threshold. He was in shirtsleeves now, cuffs rolled, holding a mug.

"Ginger tea," he said. "Dr. Petrov says it helps with the nausea."

"I'm not nauseous."

"You've been in the bathroom three times in an hour. The walls are thin."

Heat crawled up my neck. He set the mug on the dresser nearest the door and stepped back again, as if he knew exactly how much space a frightened woman needed.

"Why are you being kind?" I asked. "I'm collateral."

"You are a guest under the old law. No one will touch you. No one will raise their voice to you. If any of my men so much as looks at you wrong, you tell me."

"And after thirty days?"

"That depends on your husband."

We both knew what that meant. Nico had money. Nico had territory. Nico could pay the debt tomorrow if he wanted.

He hadn't even asked Roman the price.

Roman watched me understand that. He didn't say anything cruel. He didn't say anything at all.

Somehow that was worse.

"Can I ask you something?" I said.

"Ask."

"At the warehouse. When he told you to choose. You said, 'Which her?'"

"I did."

"Why?"

Roman leaned against the doorframe, gray eyes steady.

"Because I've watched men trade guns. Territory. Their own brothers." His jaw tightened. "I've never seen a man walk past his wife like she was furniture."

My breath caught.

"Drink the tea, Aria," he said quietly—my first name, for the first time. "And lock your door if it helps you sleep."

"Would it matter? You have the key."

"I don't," he said. "It's the only copy. It's on your side."

He closed the door.

I looked down. The key was already in the lock.

On my side.

For three years, I'd lived in a mansion where I couldn't lock a single door.

My enemy had handed me the only key in the first hour.

I lay awake until dawn, one hand on my stomach, listening to the city breathe.

At six a.m., my phone lit up again.

Not Nico.

A photo from an unknown number.

Nico, in the kitchen I had designed, making coffee in the mug I'd bought him.

And Bianca, barefoot, wearing his shirt.

Underneath, one line:

"He never really needed you. Now he knows it too."