Sera’s POV
The zip ties cut grooves into my wrists every time I move.
I've stopped moving. Not because it doesn't hurt — because the hurt is information and the information is: the ties are tight, they're plastic, and the chair is bolted to the concrete floor.
I've checked. Twice. The woman who spent two years memorizing floorboard creaks and guard rotations has been cataloging this room since they put me in it.
One door. No windows. Fluorescent lights buzzing overhead with the particular frequency that lives in your teeth.
The concrete is cold through my dress. My hand is still bleeding from the reopened cut — the knife scar, the letter for my husband, now smeared across my lap in a pattern that looks like something a child would finger-paint.
Marco sits across from me. Cleaning a gun. The movements are slow, practiced, the ritual of a man who wants me to watch the metal and understand what it means.
I watch. I understand. But I don't give him the satisfaction of looking away because looking away is what they want and I learned a long time ago — in a different house, with a different man — that the thing they want is the thing you never give.
"Comfortable?" He doesn't look up from the barrel.
"I've had worse."
It's true. This chair is more comfortable than Nico's hardwood floor. The zip ties are kinder than Nico's hands. The irony would be funny if I could feel anything besides the cold concrete and the baby pressing against my bladder and the sound of my own pulse in my ears.
Marco sets the gun down. Looks at me properly.
"Here's how this goes. Vittorio wants the chair. Dante's too young, too compromised, too distracted by…" He gestures at me. My body. My stomach. Everything I am reduced to a wave of his hand.
"The letters were manufactured. Both of them. The first to turn Dante against your father. The second to turn him against you."
My chest tightens. I knew. I figured it out in the hotel room before they kicked down the door. But hearing it confirmed — hearing the architecture of my destruction explained by the man who built it — makes my stomach turn in a way that has nothing to do with the pregnancy.
"Dante thinks you're the leak." Marco tilts his head. The same gesture Nico used to make. The head-tilt of a man enjoying the show. "By morning he'll believe you ran. Abandoned him. Took whatever secrets you could carry and disappeared. By next week — new leadership. Clean transition."
"He'll come for me."
The words leave my mouth before I think them through. Steady. Certain. The certainty surprises me — not because I believe it but because my body believes it.
My body that has been held by this man and choked by this man and loved by this man believes he's coming. Even now. Even after the cold interrogation. Even after I walked out his front door.
Marco laughs. Short. Sharp. The laugh of a man who has been waiting for exactly this.
"He doesn't love anyone." He leans forward. Elbows on his knees. Close enough that I can smell his cologne — cheaper than Dante's, sharper, the scent of a man who performs power instead of owning it.
"That's the whole point. We built this entire plan on the one thing everyone in this family knows about Dante Morrante. He doesn't attach. Doesn't feel. Doesn't let anyone close enough to matter."
He pauses. Studies my face. Looking for the crack.
"Did he ever tell you he loves you?" His voice drops. Almost gentle. The cruelty of gentleness. "Even once? Did he ever say the words?"
My mouth opens. Closes. The answer sits in my chest like a stone dropped into water.
No. He never said it. Not once. Not on the study floor with his jacket under my back. Not in the dark with his lips on my stomach. Not when he said you're mine with his heart hammering under my palm.
I reach for the counter-evidence the way a drowning woman reaches for wreckage. The gateway. The jacket on cold stone. The thumb on my knuckles. Each one dissolves under my fingers because Marco is right — none of those moments came with the word. He said mine. He said nobody touches what's mine. He never said the thing that lives on the other side of all those sentences.
Maybe mine is just mine. Maybe the gifts were strategy and the gateway was reputation and the belly kiss was a man protecting an heir, not a father loving a child.
Maybe I built a cathedral out of crumbs because I was starving and crumbs were all he gave me. Maybe the woman who survived Nico by learning to read men has finally misread one — confused possession for devotion, obsession for love, a cage made of cedar and smoke for a home.
How could I be so stupid. How could I fall for the same trick twice — different man, different packaging, same empty center. I kissed him first. I said I'm yours. I lay on his study floor and thought I'm home and the whole time I was just another thing in his house.
Another asset. Another possession that looked better on his arm than off it. Nico at least had the decency to never pretend it was more than ownership. Dante let me believe. That's worse. That's so much worse.
"No," I say. Looking at Marco. My voice doesn't break. It's worse than breaking — flat, empty, the voice of a woman who just watched the last light go out. "He hasn't said it."
Marco smiles. Sits back. Case closed.
I don't argue. Don't defend. What would I say? He held me like it mattered? Men hold things that belong to them. That's not love. That's inventory.
A door opens behind me. Heavy footsteps. Vittorio enters — older, composed, the authority of a man who believes time has proven him right. He looks at me. His eyes drop to my stomach and stay there and the look on his face — the calculation, the dismissal, the particular coldness of a man assessing a problem he intends to eliminate — makes my blood go cold.
"Unfortunate about the child." He says it the way you'd say unfortunate about the weather. "Truly. But the Morrante line will continue through Marco. Cleaner blood."
My hand presses against my belly. Instinct. The gesture I've been making since the first cramping, the first nausea, the first moment I understood that something was growing inside me that was worth more than every war being fought around it.
The baby kicks.
Here. Now. In this concrete room with fluorescent lights buzzing and a man discussing my child like a line to be erased.
The kick is small — a flutter, a nudge, barely there. And enormous. The most enormous thing I have ever felt. A life announcing itself in the worst possible moment with the worst possible audience. My baby saying I'm here in a room full of men who wish it wasn't.
I bite the inside of my cheek until I taste copper. I will not cry. Not here. Not for these men. They get nothing from me. Not my tears, not my fear, not the sound my daughter or son just made against the inside of my body. That belongs to me. That belongs to Dante. Nobody else.
Outside — distant but unmistakable — tires on gravel.
Marco's head turns. Vittorio's hand goes to his hip. The room changes temperature.
I press my hand harder against my stomach and whisper so low only the baby can hear: your father is coming.