After Giving Him an Heir, I Left the Mafia Don Forever

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Five years bound to Dante Falcone, and fifty-two times he betrayed the vows sworn under Omert.

I endured it all in silence.

Until I was nine months heavy with his child.

It began with one of his kept women insulting a capo whose alliance the Family could not afford to lose. To hold the pact together, Dante Falcone the man I called husband demanded I make peace on his behalf by sitting down and drinking with them.

I stared at him, unable to believe it. "I'm carrying your child. You want me to drink? What if something happens"

He cut me off, impatient. "It's a glass of wine, not a bullet."

My hesitation only annoyed him. He gave the smallest nod, and the men around that table kept filling my glass, pouring it down my throat while he watched.

The wine burned like fire going down, and the fire tore something loose inside me. The labor came early.

While I fought for my life on the surgeon's table, he spent the night with that woman in a villa out past the edge of the territory.

When I woke after delivering the child, I turned to the woman I called Nonna. "Nonna, you gave me your word. Bear him an heir of the blood, and I could go. Can I go now?"

Her face twisted, conflict and guilt at war beneath the powder and the pearls. "Serafina, won't you give him one last chance? He"

Before she could finish, the television bolted to the hospital wall blared with breaking news.

The screen showed Dante stepping from a car, a woman wrapped in his jacket pressed against him. She leaned into his chest, her face flushed with something warmer than wine.

Though the jacket covered most of her, the camera caught the bare line of her thigh, marked with red that told its own story.

No explanation was needed. Anyone with eyes could read what the two of them had done in the back of that car.

A reporter's voice filled the room. "Dante Falcone, seen tonight with an unidentified woman outside the Family's own hotel"

When Nonna saw it, fury rose in her chest, her breathing quick and hard, her whole body trembling with rage. Anger contorted her face. But when her gaze fell on me, it softened into guilt and sorrow.

Tears stood in her eyes. She struggled to speak, then choked it out. "Fine. I'll grant you release from the bond."

Watching her choke on the words, wiping at her tears, my heart felt like something had lodged in it, pain pricking my chest, sharp and relentless. Still, I held firm. "Thank you, Nonna."

I hadn't even looked at the child I'd just brought into the world. All I knew was that he weighed four pounds and five ounces, his skin pale and delicate, and that he looked like me.

A nurse came near. I was told to go and see him, to see the son I had fought so hard to give.

I shook my head. "No. As long as he's healthy, that's all that matters."

If I didn't see him, there would be no thoughts of him.

Because if I did, I'd never be able to let him go.

But there was no way I could stay bound to the Falcone Family.

Better that than to leave at my side and live a life with no ground under our feet.

It would be best for him to stay under the Family's roof, an heir of Falcone blood.

I lay on the hospital bed and looked out the window.

Thinking about leaving this place, and where in the world I could go.

I was abandoned from birth, raised in an orphanage until Nonna took me in at five to honor a debt owed to a dead man.

No blood kin closer than a stranger, no friend I could lean on when the ground gave way.

I was like a tiny sailboat adrift on a vast ocean, with no port to call home.

Nonna pitied me, and her fury at Dante's silence only grew. She took out her phone and called him again and again, trying to make him come and see us.

Finally, on the last attempt, someone answered. What she got was a cold, mechanical woman's voice. It was not Dante.

"Signora, the Don is in the middle of business right now. You may call back later"

Before the voice could finish, a faint, unmistakable moan bled through the line.

Nonna was no fool. She knew exactly what she was hearing. Her face went white with rage.

Her hand drifted to the rosary in her lap, and the beads went still.

"Tell Dante this. If he still calls me his mother, if he still recognizes me as the woman who raised him, he will come to this hospital now. Otherwise I will pretend I never brought him into this world at all."

After the line went dead, Nonna Falcone's eyes brimmed and spilled over. She held my hand tightly in both of hers, the beads of her rosary tangled between our fingers, and her voice trembled with a cry, "I'm sorry, Serafina This is all my fault. I should never have forced you to stay bound to him, causing you to suffer so much."

It was true. She had arranged my alliance-marriage to Dante with her own hands.

After I came of age, she brought us together under the old codes and told him plainly that I was the only bride worthy of the Falcone name.

He protested, he fought it, but no man in that house could stand against her will. We were blood-bound before the altar.

At first, I thought I'd found my safe harbor, someone I could rely on. I was filled with hope for our future.

I poured my heart into being a good wife, putting him before everything.

Whenever the other women of the Family invited me out, I declined, worried he wouldn't eat properly if left alone in that cold compound.

Eventually, they stopped asking.

I put all my thoughts on him and let the world outside the gates fall away.

I thought my sincerity would be returned in kind.

But I was wrong. Not long after our union, Dante began staying out past midnight, his soldiers driving him home only when the streets had emptied.

Naively, I assumed it was Family business. I prepared careful meals and had them carried to the social club, urging him to care for himself.

Until one night, I stood beside him at a sit-down. Midway through, a glamorous woman crossed the room with a provocative smile.

"So, you're the Don's wife?" she sneered. "I heard you were an orphan. No wonder your cooking is so good. Must've been a survival skill, huh? Were you working someone's kitchen before he took you in?"

Then I understood. The meals I had painstakingly prepared for him had been going straight into another woman's stomach.

When we returned to the compound, I confronted him for the first time.

To call it a fight is generous. It was a catharsis for me alone.

He was unmoved, calm and self-possessed as a man watching a play that bored him.

Once I had exhausted myself, he remarked coldly, "Serafina Lombardi, don't you think your self-pity is a bit pathetic?"

That single sentence shattered every defense I had.

Everything I gave him meant nothing to him. He watched me the way a stranger watches a scene on the street, then remarked without a flicker of feeling that I was only touching my own wounds to feel them hurt.

How ridiculous.

I didn't know how to face him or the years ahead, so I chose avoidance. I stopped caring what he did in the dark hours.

Soon the whispers of his women became open talk in every backroom the Family touched.

One night he was seen with a model on his arm. The next, dining across a candlelit table from some flight attendant. Then slipping into a hotel with a woman he called a business associate.

Each scandal chipped away at my resolve until I was ready to seek release from the Family bond.

But Nonna insisted, "It's all just for show, nothing serious. Serafina, he cares for you, he simply doesn't know how to say it. Please, for my sake, give him one more chance."

She had been my benefactor since I was five, when she took me in and honored a debt owed to my blood. She had carried me through the years no orphan should survive.

Because of her, I never suffered the way the other forgotten children did.

Remembering how she had sheltered me, I endured.

After that, I went slowly from pain to numbness to his betrayals.

But last year, when Nonna learned I couldn't sleep without medication, she finally relented.

Her rosary fell still in her lap. "If you give Dante a child, boy or girl, I'll grant you your release from the Family."

Desperate for freedom, I forced myself to heal, to tend my body again.

But he wouldn't touch me. He preferred the cot at the social club to coming home to me.

So I took matters into my own hands, and by the doctors' quiet arrangement I carried an heir of Falcone blood without him ever laying a hand on me.

Thank God, it worked.

I conceived, and I gave birth.

Now, at last, I was on the brink of freedom.

Not long after Nonna's call, Dante swept into the hospital room, his face cold as ice, two of his enforcers falling silent at the door behind him.

The nurse told him, "It's a boy."

Dante's face flickered with shock. He recovered fast, the way a man does when he has spent his life never showing the first thing he feels. "Arrange a blood test," he said. "As soon as it can be done."

The words struck like a slap in the air.

Nonna Falcone, who had just returned from a call in the corridor, heard it clearly. Her face darkened, and the whole floor seemed to go quiet with her, the way a social club does when the wrong man walks in.

"Dante! Your wife has just given you a son, and this is how you honor her? Are you even a man of blood?"

Afraid of truly angering the woman who kept the old codes, he pulled back, awkward. "I was only joking."

I heard everything.

But I didn't get angry.

Why would I? I had known all along that he doubted the child was his.

Even though I'd explained more times than I could count that the child had been made from his own blood, he never believed a word of it.

Eventually I stopped wasting breath trying to convince him.

Nonna ushered him into the room, then left us alone behind the closed door.

He stood at a distance, not bothering to come near, as though I were some outsider brought in off neutral ground. I did not care either.

The silence in the room was thick and oppressive.

After a long pause he finally opened his mouth, and what came out was still nothing kind. "You wanted this child. Don't expect me to raise it."

As he said it, he watched my face, hunting for something there.

I smiled faintly. "Nonna's already brought in the best. The child will be looked after."

His brows drew together, displeased. "Don't think you can use this baby to bind me to you. I won't"

"It's fine," I interrupted, calm. "Do whatever you want. Nonna will see to the child. You won't be troubled."

My answer seemed to catch him off guard. He pressed his lips into a thin line and, for a moment, said nothing.

I knew why he was surprised.

When we were first bound together, I had told him that if we ever had a child, I wanted to give them a whole family, one full of love, the kind I never had growing up under another man's roof.

But now?

I had no expectations of him left at all.

He opened his mouth to say something more, but his phone buzzed.

He glanced at the screen, hesitated for the space of a breath, then stepped out to answer it.

Even through the door I could hear the sugared voice on the other end.

"The baby isn't even yours. Why waste your night on her? I want to go to the concert. I want you to take me..."

He went out to answer the phone and never came back.

While I stared at the door he had walked through, another mother-to-be passed my room, held up by her husband.

"Do you think the baby will have your face or mine?" she asked, playful.

"Yours, of course. Beautiful, like you," he teased, and she laughed.

The woman laughed the way her husband coaxed her to, and he laughed with her. His eyes held on her for a moment, and every move he made was careful, afraid the ground might rise up against her.

Look at them, spilling over with happiness.

I was envious.

If there were someone who could love me, how good would that be?

Lost in the thought, I was pulled back by the phone buzzing on the bedside table.

[Fifty thousand dollars has been credited to your account.]

I read the message again.

It said: [From Nonna.]

I steadied myself and decided not to send it back. After all, I had earned it, in blood and in silence.

After a few days in the hospital, Nonna brought me back to the compound to recover.

She gave me her word that the day my confinement ended would be the day she used her own authority to release me from the Family bond, from him.

With that word from the one person whose word could not be argued, the restless ache in my chest finally began to settle. For a moment I pressed my thumb to the bare place on my left hand where a band no longer sat, and made myself say nothing.

That night, the woman who had run the orphanage suddenly called.

She said she had found my true blood, my parents. But they had died a long time ago.

They had left me a letter. And a key.

I was required to go in person to the sleepy federal outpost in the town where I'd been born, to collect the letter and the key my true parents had left behind.

After writing down the address, I was tucking the slip of paper into the back of my phone case when I heard the door open.

Dante pushed it wide and walked in.

The smell of liquor came in with him, heavy and expensive, the kind they poured at a sit-down when men were pretending to be friends.

Before I could say a word, he dropped onto the bed beside me, eyes already closed. "Nonna told me I'm to make a proper life with you from now on," he muttered.

The words went through me like cold water.

Nonna Falcone had given me her word she'd arrange my release from the Family. Why had she changed her mind?

Unease crawled up my spine. I threw back the blanket, ready to go find her and demand she explain.

But Dante suddenly rolled over and caught my arm. His face hardened, and he scolded me low. "Do you understand you can't catch a chill right now? You're a mother. Take better care of yourself."

The sudden concern chilled me worse than the cold ever could.

I pulled free on instinct, putting distance between us. "I understand. You should go back to your own room. I need to sleep."

He caught the rejection, and a bitter laugh twisted his mouth into a sneer. "Don't flatter yourself. You're a woman who just gave birth. Your body's ruined. It's not as if I couldn't find someone better."

I swallowed whatever I might have said.

Through the pregnancy the doctor had warned me I wasn't taking in enough. I'd forced down every supplement they gave me to keep the baby healthy, gaining just enough to reach the low edge of normal.

Now, after, soft flesh still clung stubbornly to my waist.

I looked at him, said nothing, and lay back down with my back to him, telling myself I would ask Nonna in the morning.

Somewhere in the dead of night I woke, foggy, and found no one beside me.

Reaching for my phone, I saw a message from the girl Dante kept, sent three minutes earlier.

The photo showed him driving, his profile lit by the glow of the dashboard.

Her text read:

[So what if you've got a child now? If he doesn't love you, he doesn't love you. I missed him for a moment and called, and he left with me the second I asked.]

[Serafina, you're the only one who ever took this ridiculous marriage seriously. You've lost.]

She was right. I had lost completely.

But what Dante would never know was that the first time I stood before Nonna Falcone, she was the one who told me about him.

He would never learn that we had walked the same halls since we were children.

For years I had loved him in silence, following the shape of his life from a distance, never once intruding on it.

So when Nonna proposed, after I finished my schooling, that I be blood-bound to him, I was so happy I couldn't sleep the whole night through.

But my happiness had been built on the ruin of his.

And since that was the truth of it, it was time to set us both free.

I didn't answer the girl's message.

In the compound I ate well, I rested well, I tended to myself.

Soon enough the last day of my confinement came.

At dinner, Nonna, true to her word, set before me a release from the Family bond, signed in Dante's own hand. Her voice wavered with a reluctance she couldn't hide, and the beads of her rosary went still in her lap.

"Tomorrow is the child's one-month blessing. Could you stay for it before you go?"

I shook my head, firm. "No. I've already booked the morning passage out."

"But the child"

"Nonna, I leave this Family in your hands now."

I cut her off gently, and I smiled.

She read the resolve in me and wiped at her eyes. "All right. I'll raise your baby well. Don't you worry."

I took the papers from her just as Dante came down the stairs.

He frowned at the sight of my hands. "What is that you're holding?"

I gripped the agreement tighter and shook my head. "Nothing."

His eyes narrowed, suspicion flickering there as he stared at me, and for a moment the room seemed to hold its breath the way a room does when the Don's attention turns.

But I stayed composed.

Mercifully, he let it go, turning instead to the matter of tomorrow's blessing.

"I have something to handle tomorrow," Dante said, indifferent. "I'll be late to the hotel. If there's a problem, ask Nonna."

Nonna frowned in open displeasure. "What could possibly matter more than your own son's one-month blessing? You"

"It's fine. It doesn't matter. If you have business, go and see to it," I said, calm. His presence or his absence made no difference to the child.

He hadn't spared the boy a single glance since the birth. No more than his father ever had.

Nonna opened her mouth to argue, then stopped when I gave her a small reassuring smile and shook my head.

The day of the blessing came. The compound was quieter than I'd expected, the soldiers at the gate speaking in low voices.

Holding the baby, Nonna made ready to leave. One of the house women hesitated, then asked, "Signora, shouldn't we wait for the young Signora to come with us?"

Nonna froze, her gaze drifting up toward the empty hallway. Something in her face gave way, but she only shook her head, a small broken breath escaping her.

What she didn't know was that I was already gone.

The night before the child's blessing, I had boarded a plane and flown beyond the reach of the Family's eyes, the one thing they all swore no one could do.

I was long gone by the time Dante finished his business and came looking for me, searching the room for my face.

An inexplicable panic gripped his chest, and he turned on his mother, asking again and again, "Where's Serafina? Where did she go?"