Chapter 144

Chapter 144


REINA

I had told myself I knew Domenico Gravano.

I had told myself that despite everything — despite the manipulation, the obsession, the way he looked at me like I was something he'd already decided to keep — I understood him. That beneath the danger there was something almost human. Something that cared for me in its own twisted, consuming way.

Standing in front of the mirror in a dress I hadn't chosen, in a room I hadn't wanted to enter, with him sitting crossed-legged on the bed behind me watching my every movement with that quiet, satisfied expression — I realized I had been catastrophically wrong.

I didn't know this man at all.

The dress he'd chosen was deep burgundy, fitted, expensive. It skimmed every curve with an intimacy that felt deliberate. Intentional. Like he'd selected it knowing exactly how it would sit against the new fullness of my body. I kept my eyes on my own reflection and tried to make my hands stop trembling as I smoothed the fabric at my waist.

"You look extraordinary," he said from behind me. Low. Unhurried. "Even more than I anticipated."

I said nothing.

"The color suits you." A pause. "Everything suits you lately. Have you noticed that? The way you're changing?" His voice dropped into something almost reverent. "You're becoming something else entirely, Reina. Something more. Fuller. More luminous. It's because of what's growing inside you."

My stomach turned violently.

"Don't," I said quietly.

"Don't what?" He rose from the bed with that fluid, unhurried grace that had once struck me as magnetic and now struck me as predatory. He appeared in the mirror behind me, tall and immaculate in his dark suit, eyes tracking over me with slow, deliberate possession. "Don't speak the truth? Don't acknowledge what's happening?"

"I'm not doing this right now."

"We should get married."

The words landed in the quiet of the room like something detonating.

I turned around slowly. He was watching me with complete seriousness. No smirk. No performative amusement. Just those dark eyes, steady and certain, like he'd been sitting with this thought for a long time and had simply decided now was the moment to release it.

"What?" My voice barely made sound.

"Married." He said it again, simply, like it was obvious. Like it was inevitable. "You're carrying my child, Reina. My third child. It makes sense. Become my wife. Let me take care of you both properly. No more hiding. No more Paolo. No more of this exhausting back and forth."

The room felt like it was tilting.

"You're insane," I whispered.

Something moved across his expression. Not hurt. Not quite. "Is it so unreasonable? I have wealth. Protection. I can give this child everything. I can give you everything."

"I have a husband."

"You have a man who vomited on you on your anniversary and disappeared." His voice remained gentle. Conversational. Which somehow made it worse. "A man who hasn't answered a single one of your calls. A man who has never once touched you the way you deserve to be touched." His eyes moved over me slowly. "Is that really what you want to protect?"

"Don't you dare talk about Paolo like—"

"Or," he continued, tilting his head slightly, "if marriage feels too formal for your sensibilities — you could simply stay. Here. With me. The way things have been." A small, almost lazy smile. "My third baby mama, as the young people say. I'd take care of you all the same. You and the child both. You'd want for nothing."

The words hit me somewhere visceral and ugly. Third baby mama. Said so casually. So carelessly. Like I was simply a slot to fill. A function to serve.

"I'm not going to be either of those things." My voice shook but I held his gaze. "I'm not going to marry you and I'm not going to be your— I'm not your anything, Domenico. This baby is a mistake. This whole thing has been a mistake and I need you to let me leave."

He looked at me for a long moment.

Then he moved.

Not aggressively — that was what made it so frightening. He crossed the room slowly, giving me every opportunity to step back, to protest, to stop him, and somehow my feet didn't move. He stopped directly in front of me, close enough that I could feel the warmth radiating off his chest, and raised one hand to cup the side of my face.

"A mistake," he repeated softly. His thumb traced my cheekbone. "Is that what you believe?"

"Yes." The word came out smaller than I intended.

His other hand found my waist. Drew me closer with gentle, inexorable pressure. "Liar," he murmured, and then his mouth was on mine.

I pushed against his chest. "Domenico—"

He kissed me deeper, one hand sliding into my hair, tilting my head back. His grip wasn't rough but it was immovable — the kind of hold that communicated very clearly that he had decided this was happening and my protestations were simply part of a script he'd already read to the end. I pushed harder and he simply absorbed it, walking me backwards until the backs of my knees hit the edge of the bed.

"Stop." My voice cracked. "I said stop—"

"Reina—"

"I mean it." Tears were burning the backs of my eyes now. Real tears. Not from sadness but from something more primal — that cold, flooding fear that arrives when your body understands something your mind is still catching up to. "Domenico, please. I'm scared. I'm actually scared of you right now, please—"

He pulled back just enough to look at my face.

And I saw it — the moment he registered my expression. The genuine terror in my eyes. Something shifted in him. A flicker. Almost human.

But it wasn't enough to stop him.

His hands found the neckline of the dress and I grabbed his wrists. "Don't. Don't ruin it, don't—" The fabric gave anyway, a sharp sound in the silence as the neckline tore, and I flinched like I'd been struck.

"You're mine," he said against my jaw, his voice rough now, unraveling at the edges. "You've always been mine. This child is mine. Stop fighting something that—"

The door exploded open.

The sound was so sudden, so violent, that we both froze.

Elisa stood in the doorway.

She was in riding clothes — boots, jodhpurs, hair half-pulled from a braid — and for one suspended second she simply stared at us. At me, backed against the bed, dress torn at the neckline, tear tracks on my face. At her father, looming over me, hands still raised.

The color drained from her face.

Then it flooded back as something white-hot and volcanic.

"Papa." Her voice was barely controlled. Low and shaking with a fury I had never heard from her before.

Domenico straightened slowly. "Elisa, this isn't—"

She didn't wait for him to finish. Her eyes swept the room — my torn neckline, my wet eyes, the open box on the chair, my bag abandoned by the door — and whatever conclusion she drew made her jaw harden into something ancient and unforgiving. She crossed to the vanity in four long strides, grabbed the heavy glass perfume bottle sitting on its surface, and spun back around.

"Get away from her." She raised the bottle. Her hand was steady. Her eyes were not. "Get away from her right now or I swear to God—"

"Elisa—" His voice carried a warning.

"I will break this across your skull." She meant it. Every word. The bottle didn't waver. "Step back. Now. Now, Papa."

A terrible silence stretched between them. Father and daughter, locked in something that had nothing to do with me and everything to do with a history I didn't fully understand — old wounds, old patterns, old fears that lived in the walls of this family long before I arrived.

Domenico stepped back.

It was slow. Deliberate. He smoothed the front of his jacket with unhurried hands, his expression closing off into something unreadable. But he stepped back.

Elisa was already at my side, her free hand reaching for my arm, pulling me gently but firmly away from the bed, away from him, positioning her own body between us like a shield.

"Are you hurt?" she asked me without taking her eyes off her father. Her voice had dropped to something careful and quiet. The voice of someone who had done this before — who knew how to stay calm in the eye of a storm because the storm had a name and lived in her house.

"I'm okay," I whispered, though we both knew it wasn't entirely true.

She squeezed my arm once. Then she looked at her father — really looked at him — and something in her expression broke open and sealed itself shut again in the space of a single breath.

"We're leaving," she said to him. Flat. Final. "And if you follow us, I'll make phone calls you don't want me to make."

Domenico said nothing. He stood in the center of the room like a statue, watching us with those dark, unreadable eyes, completely still.

Elisa steered me toward the door with a steady hand. I grabbed my bag from the floor without looking back.

I couldn't look back.

Because the most terrifying thing — the thing that would keep me awake for nights afterward — wasn't what had almost happened in that room.

It was the expression on his face as we left.

Not anger. Not shame.

Patience.

The quiet, absolute patience of a man who had simply decided to wait.