Chapter 6 - The Anatomy of a Divorce
Nico stayed bowed over her hand for an eternity, listening to the two disparate hearts beating in the small room: the slow, struggling metronome of the mother, and the frantic, galloping drum of his child.
His mind was a labyrinth of self-recrimination. He remembered every word of their final confrontation in the library. He had called her unreasonable. He had slammed his hand against a centuries-old desk and told her that she knew who he was when she took his ring—that a Marchetti did not apologize for the blood spilled to keep the family safe.
She had looked at him with those massive, intelligent brown eyes, completely calm while the storm raged around her.
"I'm not asking you to apologize, Nico," she had said, her voice quiet, devastating in its finality. "I'm asking you to choose. Because one day, the men who want to kill you are going to realize that the easiest way to take your life is to step on mine. And I refuse to die as a footnote in a mob war."
She hadn't been protecting herself.
The realization hit Nico like an iron bar across the back of his neck. She hadn't walked away because she had fallen out of love with him; she had walked away because she had taken a pregnancy test in the private bathroom of their master suite that very week. She had realized that the moment the Outfit discovered she was carrying the next Marchetti, her life would become a high-value target for every disgruntled capo and rival syndicate between New York and Detroit.
She had fled to save the baby.
She had stripped herself of his name, his protection, his money, and his private security details, calculating that obscurity in an ordinary Chicago neighborhood was safer for their child than a three-acre compound guarded by thirty men with automatic weapons. She had chosen poverty and loneliness over the gilded crosshairs of his empire.
"You idiot," Nico choked out into her cold fingers, his voice trembling with a mixture of profound love and suffocating fury. "You beautiful, stubborn idiot. You thought you could hide from this city? You thought you could do this alone?"
He lifted his head, his hand sliding up from her knuckles to cup the side of her neck. He avoided the clean, sterile dressing on her temple, his calloused thumb gently tracing the smooth skin of her jawline.
Beneath his fingers, her carotid artery pulsed with heavy, sluggish resistance. Her shaved head made her look impossibly young, like the twenty-two-year-old art restoration student he had met in the gallery district fifteen years ago, long before his father’s death had dragged him to the head of the table.
She was twenty-two again on this pillow—fragile, unprotected, and paying the price for his sins.
May you like
"You should have told me," he rasped, his voice dropping into a desperate plea. "I would have burned the city down, Elena. I would have walked away from the table. I would have taken you to Europe. I would have given them the whole damn territory. You didn't have to run."
The room offered no redemption. The fluorescent light hummed. The IV drip clicked in its transparent plastic chamber, releasing another drop of saline into her bloodstream. The silence of the room was an accusation, and Nico Marchetti was guilty on every count.
