Chapter 158: Chapter 158
REINA
The zip ties had cut into my wrists raw.
I had stopped pulling against them twenty minutes ago when I realized the chair genuinely wasn’t moving and the plastic was only drawing deeper into my skin with every attempt. So I sat. Hands trembling in my lap. Eyes fixed on the floor in front of me because looking up meant seeing Elisa and I couldn’t keep looking at Elisa without coming apart completely.
She was on the floor near the far wall.
They had brought her in fifteen minutes after Domenico had made his calls — two of his men dragging her through the door and dropping her like she weighed nothing. Her hands were bound behind her back. Her ankles tied with the same ruthless efficiency. Her face was—
I squeezed my eyes shut.
Her face was destroyed.
Blood everywhere. Across her cheekbone, her jaw, her temple, matted dark into her blonde hair that was spread across the marble around her head like a halo. Her breathing was audible from across the room — shallow, wet, labored. Every inhale sounded like it cost her something she couldn’t afford to keep spending. Her eyes had been open when they brought her in, finding mine immediately with an expression that gutted me — not fear, not even pain, just a terrible exhausted apology.
I’m sorry, she had mouthed silently. I’m sorry I couldn’t get you out.
I had started crying then and hadn’t fully stopped since.
Domenico stood at his desk with his back to both of us, phone pressed to his ear, voice smooth and unhurried as though there wasn’t a bleeding woman dying on his floor and another tied to a chair behind him.
"Thursday," he said into the phone. "I need it arranged by Thursday at the latest. Private. Small. Just the officiant and two witnesses." A pause. "Yes. Civil ceremony. The details are straightforward." Another pause, longer this time. "And the divorce filing — what’s the timeline on processing?"
My stomach turned violently.
Divorce filing.
He was already processing my divorce from Paolo. Already arranging our wedding. Already building the architecture of a life I had never agreed to, moving pieces across a board I hadn’t known I was sitting on, with the confidence of a man who had never once encountered an obstacle he couldn’t remove or outlast or simply erase.
I stared at his back and felt something shift inside me.
Something clarifying.
For weeks I had told myself complicated things about Domenico Gravano. That he was dangerous but tender. Obsessive but devoted. That whatever he did came from a place of genuine feeling, twisted and consuming as it was. I had let desire cloud my judgment and guilt distort my perception and loneliness make me interpret possession as passion.
But sitting here now, wrists bleeding, watching him calmly arrange our wedding over the phone while his own daughter lay gasping on the floor behind him —
I had never loved this man.
I understood that with a clarity that felt almost physical. Like something being set back into joint after a long dislocation. Whatever I had felt for Domenico Gravano — the pull, the hunger, the terrifying surrender of it — none of it had been love. It had been something darker and cheaper than love. Something that had worn love’s face and borrowed its vocabulary and fed on my loneliness and my broken marriage until I couldn’t tell the difference anymore.
I had never loved him.
I had been consumed by him. Those were not the same thing.
He ended the call and turned.
His expression when he looked at me was almost tender. That was the most obscene thing about him — the way the tenderness was genuine. The way he could step over his bleeding daughter to cross the room toward me and look at me like I was the only thing in the world worth looking at.
He crouched in front of my chair.
Eye level. Close enough that I could see the dried blood still caught at his hairline from where Elisa had hit him hours ago.
"It’s almost sorted," he said quietly. "The ceremony will be small. Private. Just us and two witnesses. Nothing excessive." His eyes moved over my face with that familiar, unbearable attentiveness. "After the baby comes we can do something larger if you want. A proper celebration. Whatever you want, Reina. I mean that."
I stared at him.
"Your daughter is dying on your floor," I said.
Something flickered across his face. "She’ll be treated once she understands the situation."
"She needs a hospital."
"She needs to stop making decisions that put her in opposition to me." His voice remained gentle. "That’s a lesson she should have learned years ago."
I looked at him — really looked at him — and felt nothing except a cold, exhausted terror and the ghost of my own stupidity haunting every corner of the room.
"I don’t want to marry you," I said. "I don’t want to raise this baby with you. I don’t want any part of whatever life you’re building in your head." My voice was steady in the way that only happens when you’ve moved past fear into something quieter on the other side of it. "I want to go home to my husband."
His expression didn’t change. That was the most frightening part.
"You’ll feel differently once—"
"I won’t." I held his gaze. "I need you to hear me, Domenico. Not the version of me you’ve constructed in your head. Me. I am telling you I will never want this."
He studied my face for a long moment. Then his hand rose and his fingers brushed my jaw and I turned my face away sharply and felt him go very still.
"Reina—"
The door came off its hinges.
Not opened. Not kicked open cleanly the way doors get kicked open in films. It came off — the frame splintering, the door swinging violently inward and slamming against the interior wall hard enough to shake the room, a sound like a gunshot that made me flinch violently in the chair.
Paolo stood in the doorway.
I had never seen him look like this.
He was still in the clothes he’d worn to our anniversary dinner — the shirt untucked now, jacket gone, collar open. His hair was disheveled. His eyes were red-rimmed and swollen but they were not soft. They were not the gentle, careful eyes I knew. They were something older and more dangerous than anything I had ever seen from him, burning with a rage so complete it had passed through anger into something structural. Something geological.
His hand was extended.
The gun in it was pointed directly at his father.
Domenico rose slowly from his crouch in front of me. Unhurried. Turning to face his son with the careful, deliberate composure of a man recalculating.
"Paolo." His voice was measured. "Put that down."
Paolo didn’t move.
His eyes found mine for one fractured second — a world of devastation passing between us in the space of a single look — and then moved to Elisa on the floor and something in his face broke open and sealed itself shut again in the same breath.
The gun didn’t waver.
"Step away from her," Paolo said. His voice was barely above a whisper. Quiet in the way that only the most dangerous things are quiet. "Step away from my wife. Right now."
