I Carried the Don’s Blood Until I Found It Wasn’t Mine

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After three years of a blood-bound union, I still couldn't give the Bruno name an heir. Under my husband's patient pressing, I finally conceived after two years under the clinic's needles. When I was eight months along, I overheard a conversation between Dominic and his underboss, Marco.

You slipped Adriana those pills for three years, just to make her believe her own body was barren, then used it to push her into the clinic, all so you could plant Vittoria's blood in her womb. That's cold, even for you.

Dominic didn't care. He rolled one shoulder as though shrugging off a coat. "Ten months carrying a child. Her figure ruined, and then the tenth level of pain when it comes. I couldn't stand the thought of Vittoria suffering that."

Looking at the man so full of calculation, I dialed the clinic's number without hesitation.

"Hello. I want to make an appointment for an abortion," I said firmly.

"Aren't you afraid Adriana falls apart once she knows the truth? No woman wants to carry another woman's child. Ten months, and the thing she births belongs to somebody else." Marco watched Dominic with a taunting slant to his mouth.

"How would she know, stupid as she is? And even if she did, what then? She's eight months gone. Would she cut it out of herself now? Look at her. Fat as a pig. Who'd want her but me?"

"True. The whole territory knows how much Adriana loves you. Stuck to you like flypaper all these years." Marco cracked one knuckle, then the next, an evil look creeping over his face as he raised his eyebrows. "Still, I've always been curious what a pregnant woman's like."

A flicker of disgust crossed Dominic's eyes. "Fat as a pig. I can't work up any interest just looking at her, never mind touching her. I'd rather watch a filthy film than stare at that belly like a watermelon. It turns my stomach."

"Since you're not interested, let me have a turn next time. I really want to know what a pregnant woman feels like." Marco offered it eagerly, cracking the last knuckle.

After Marco finished his filth, the two men in the room laughed, and every laugh was like a knife stabbing into my heart.

Because of that clinic, I had taken countless hormone drugs and countless injections over the past two years, and my body had swollen and lost its shape.

After I conceived, Dominic was forever fretting that I wasn't getting enough, so he had me take a mountain of supplements every day, and the child grew too large. My belly was covered in ugly stretch marks by the fifth month.

I used to think he pitied all my effort. Now I understood he only cared about the thing he'd made with Vittoria growing inside me. I clenched my palms tight and cold sweat kept sliding down my back. I nearly ran from that suffocating house.

After I steadied myself, I took out my phone without hesitation and dialed the clinic's number.

"Hello. I want to make an appointment for an abortion." I said it firmly.

I went to the clinic that same night. I was afraid I'd lose my mind if I stayed one second longer.

The doctor on duty looked at my huge belly and confirmed it with me again and again.

"You're already eight months along. Are you certain you want to end it now? Where is the child's father?"

"Dead."

Since Dominic had longed for this child so badly, I would prepare a fine gift for him.

The doctor looked into my hollow eyes and asked nothing more. He wrote out the medicine quickly and handed me the appointment slip.

"Take these, and come back for the procedure in three days."

I returned home worn to the bone with the slip in my hand, only to find the keypad on the door refusing me, flashing wrong code over and over.

Just as I reached to make a call, the door swung open, and Vittoria stepped out in a sheer nightgown.

"Adriana, the wiring at my place gave out. Dominic worried about me sitting alone in the dark, so he asked me to stay here at the estate for a while. He changed the gate code to my birthday, afraid I wouldn't remember anything else. You don't mind, do you?"

My eyes fell on Vittoria's slipped straps. There was a clear mark high on her chest, and nothing beneath the silk.

"Adriana's the most understanding woman in the Family," came a voice from inside. "How could she mind?"

Dominic sat on the sofa, his trousers creased, his shirt turned backward, a damp stain darkening the cushion beside him.

He rose and pulled me into his arms. "You went out this late without telling me. You're carrying my child. What am I supposed to do if something happens to you?"

Something in me went cold at the tenderness in his face. On the surface he was the doting husband, guarding the woman who'd give him his heir. Underneath, he'd brought his first love into my own home and changed the code to the gate, terrified I might come back too soon.

I didn't waste words on him. I went straight upstairs.

Dominic, who never touched milk in his life, poured me a glass of it that night.

"You're in your last trimester now. You need protein, calcium. Be good and drink it, tesoro."

My eyes darkened on the glass he held out. "I don't want it."

He looked put out when I refused, but he kept his voice patient, coaxing, the way a man does when the whole thing has already been decided somewhere I couldn't see. "I'm doing this for you and the child. Be good and listen to me."

Then, without another word, he tipped the milk into my mouth.

The taste was sweet and faintly fishy, and after it the drowsiness came for me fast. In the haze I thought I saw two figures overlapping at the edge of the bed.

When I woke the next morning, the pain was so deep I could barely lift myself off the mattress.

After Dominic left for the day, I opened the video on my phone. I'd started recording the night before, after he made me drink the milk, then hidden the phone down in the flower pot where no one would think to look.

The moment the footage began to play, a sense of shame tugged at my heart.

Once I'd gone under, Dominic and Vittoria had come through the door already tangled together, kissing their way across the room until they rolled to the space beside me.

"Dominic, you don't know how sick it makes me, watching you with this woman every single day," Vittoria said, her voice all silk and complaint.

Dominic spat on my face. Then he shoved me aside with his foot.

"How could this fat cow ever compare to you? I only keep her for what she's carrying. If I hadn't wanted to spare you the disgrace, do you think I'd have ever bound myself to her? Next to you she isn't worth a single hair on your head."

Vittoria studied me with idle interest. "You're sure you gave her enough to keep her down?"

She began peeling the clothes from my body as she spoke. "What if she pieces it together after the child comes? Better we hold something over her. Insurance."

Dominic seemed to think this wise. He helped her strip me until I lay completely bare, and then the two of them dragged me to a stool and arranged me on it, legs forced open, facing the bed. He lifted a phone and kept photographing me while Vittoria adjusted my body, pose after pose, like I was nothing that could feel it.

When they'd taken enough, the two of them turned on me where I lay sleeping and did as they pleased. I watched it all play out on the small screen with tears running down my face and my heart in pain. I shut the phone off and swallowed the medication the doctor had prescribed without a moment's hesitation.

"What are you taking?"

Dominic's voice came sharp from the doorway, and I looked up into his worried eyes.

"Just an ordinary calcium tablet," I said, and fought with everything I had to keep my voice level.

Dominic looked almost relieved when the words left me, and then he rose and crossed toward the staircase.

"I forgot to take a document from the study."

I watched his back climb the stairs of the estate, and my eyes went to the phone he'd left on the table.

I keyed in Vittoria's birthday, and in a breath the screen bloomed to life a photograph of Dominic and Vittoria wrapped around each other, mouths locked. The phone ran a second, hidden system. It always had.

I opened his messages fast. The top thread was Vittoria's avatar. The second was a group thread he kept with his men. I opened the second, and what waited there made my heart tremble so hard the phone nearly slipped from my hand to the marble floor.

It was full of the photographs. The ones they'd taken of me last night, when I couldn't move, couldn't speak, couldn't stop them.

"Dom, this one's an animal Adriana still looks charming, eh?"

"Tell you the truth, there's something about a pregnant woman. Shame I don't know how she tastes."

"Don't. Adriana looks like a whore in these. She'd be the top earner in any club we run."

The filth from Marco and the others emptied my mind, as if I were some naked thing paraded on a chain, pointed at and laughed over through a screen.

"Cara, why are your eyes red?"

By the time Dominic came back down with a folded paper in his hand, I had already settled back into the sofa. He took a blanket and draped it over me.

"The nights still run cold. You're carrying. You need to be more careful," he said lightly, as though the tenderness cost him nothing.

He went on. "It's Vittoria's birthday tonight. I'm having something at the house for her. A few of the men will come by after dark. Wear something that suits the occasion."

At the sound of her name I trembled, just slightly, and something in my face went to ice.

"I want to stay in tonight," I said, my voice low. "I don't want to be disturbed."

Dominic's face darkened at once. "Vittoria has one birthday a year. I've only just marked it. Are you truly going to use the child to squeeze me? I've made room for you through this whole pregnancy. This is where the accommodation ends."

I hadn't even finished a sentence, and already he was standing guard over his first love. I should have understood it long ago. In him, love and hate were never hidden things. They wore his face plainly.

In the end, Dominic brought his men into the house to celebrate Vittoria's birthday all the same.

The moment I came down the stairs I felt every eye in the room fix on me. There was a little amusement in those looks. A little contempt. And beneath it, an ill intent that made the skin on my arms tighten.

"Adriana, we're wearing the same dress! We're truly of one mind!"

Vittoria came to me and took my hand as if we were sisters. Only then did I see that the red dress on my body was cut exactly like hers.

"It sits better on you, Vittoria," Dominic said, sparing no chance to lower me while he lifted her. "Adriana's heavy and plain now with the belly. How could she have half your charm?"

"Dom, you can't talk that way. To my eye, your wife's more striking than ever, carrying like that."

Marco caught my hand and dragged his palm slow across the back of it, his eyes full of that loose, grasping heat. I tried hard to pull free, and found his grip only tightened. He raised his brows at me, unhurried, and I heard the small dry crack of his knuckles going one by one.

"I like the Don's wife just like this. Feels good under the hand."

I cast a look at Dominic. A plea, the last one I had. He met it with nothing at all.

"You are what you are now. My brother pays you a compliment, that's your good fortune. Don't be ungrateful."

I gritted my teeth, and the words scraped out through the gap in them. "Dominic. I am your wife."

Then, slowly, he stood from the sofa and pulled me toward him.

"Tesoro, they're only having a little fun with you. You take everything too much to heart." Dominic's voice slid over me, smooth as oil.

I shook his hand off my arm, cold to the bone, and forced the words through my teeth. "Enjoy yourselves. I'm going upstairs to rest."

I turned to leave, but Dominic was already holding out a glass of milk. "Drink this first. For the calcium. Late in a pregnancy the body needs it. Drink, and then go rest."

I looked at the pale glass in his hand, and my body trembled for no reason I could name. "What are you trying to do?"

"I'm only worried you're running low so late along. I want to keep you strong." Concern sat on his face like a well-tailored suit. "Don't you trust your own husband?"

I pushed the glass away. "I don't want it."

Dominic's face went cold in the space of a breath. The men near the bar quieted, sensing the shift the way soldiers always do. "I've shown you plenty of respect tonight. This is for your own good. Drink it. Now."

"Dominic, don't be so hard on her." The voice came from behind me. "If Adriana doesn't want the milk, don't force it down her throat. She's carrying a child. A man ought to give a little ground."

Vittoria came drifting over at precisely the right moment, pressing a cup of hot water into my hands. "Adriana, drink a little of this first."

I held the cup and stared at the clear water inside. "May I go upstairs and rest, once I've finished it?"

I drank it in one swallow. The warm water slid down my throat, and then my body began to grow hot, as if countless worms were crawling and gnawing beneath my skin.

"What did you put in this?"

The moment the question left me, my legs turned as heavy as if they'd been poured full of lead, and then my body softened and fell into a strange embrace. My eyes blurred. All I could make out was Marco's face, ugly with impatience, hovering over me, his hands moving across my body without pause.

"Vittoria, you're a cold one, I'll give you that. Afraid the photos alone wouldn't hold her, so you drug her and let her throw herself into a man's arms. Even if she uncovers the whole business of the bloodline, she won't dare breathe a word with that hanging over her. You'll have her collared for good."

"Let go of me." I screamed it out with what sanity I had left.

But there was no strength anywhere in me. I could only look toward Dominic, searching for the last flicker of conscience in the man I'd married.

Dominic had his arm around Vittoria. He gave me one cold glance, then turned to Marco. "Gently. She's still carrying. That's my child and Vittoria's inside her."

Marco's hands kept roaming over me, restless, greedy. "We know our limits, brother. On my word, not a mark on the child."

Then he lifted me and carried me toward the stairs.

I looked at Dominic in something past despair. "You'll regret this."

"Along with the drug that has your blood running hot, I put a measure of something else in that water," Vittoria said, lifting her wine glass, savoring it. "It buries the worst of what a person feels. When you wake tomorrow, you'll still be the little lapdog curled at Dominic's feet, remembering nothing."

"Sleep sweetly tonight," she finished.

The next second, my world went black.

In the dark, I felt only something tearing me open, until I thought it would tear me into pieces.

When I came to again, I was lying naked on the floor, and beneath me the blood was pouring out in great dark sheets.

"Help me."

I dragged myself toward the door and pounded against it.

Laughter answered from the other side.

"Quit the act. You were louder than any of us in there. Get some rest, sweetheart. You won't remember a thing come morning."

Then Dominic's voice, easy and unbothered. "The business here is settled. Let's move on to the next."

Then a heavy slam as the door closed, sealing me alone inside my despair.

I forced the door open and crawled out. The bright red blood trailed after me down my back, winding into a bloody path, a sight that would have stopped a hardened soldier's heart. I dragged myself down the stairs, found my phone, and called for a doctor.

When I woke once more, I was already in a room heavy with the smell of disinfectant.

"Mrs. Marchetti, we couldn't save the child. What would you like us to do with the body?" The nurse looked at me with pity soft in her eyes.

I looked calmly at what she held out to me. "Arrange a courier for me, please."

Dominic and his friends came home after their night of pleasure.

The moment the door opened, they saw it: a shocking road of blood winding down from the upper floor into the sitting room.

"What in God's name. Adriana?"

Dominic tore up the stairs like a man gone mad. The room held no one, only a great pool of blood.

Just then, the doorbell rang.

"Good evening. Am I speaking with Mr. Bruno? I have a courier delivery. It requires your signature in person."