Chapter 3

I woke up to the harsh, clinical glare of fluorescent hospital lights.

My wrist was heavily bandaged, a dull, insistent throbbing radiating up my arm with the metronomic beat of my heart.

Julian sat in the chair beside the bed. He appeared utterly exhausted, his customarily immaculate, expensive suit wrinkled and disheveled.

When he saw my eyes open, he leaned forward and grabbed my hand, his grip a thing of tight, desperate possession.

"I will arrange the most extravagant Mafia funeral for him," Julian promised, his voice thick with an emotion I could no longer trust. "He was a loyal Soldier. He will be honored."

I stared without focus at the ceiling, feeling absolutely nothing.

No anger. No sadness. Just an endless, empty void where a soul had once resided.

When I was at last discharged, Julian's behavior shifted into a twisted, suffocating parody of affection.

He would kneel to personally wash my feet in a basin of warm water at the safehouse, assuming the posture of a devoted servant.

In the dead of night, the bedside table would suddenly bear a portion of my favorite street food, its steam rising in the darkness as he sat and watched me chew.

A collection of unlimited black cards was tossed onto my lap, the plastic catching the light from the chandelier—a cheap conjuror's trick to distract from the weight of the cast on my ankle.

And yet, as a cruel reminder of my station, I still had to work.

I limped through the hushed, gilded corridors of the luxury hotel, my broken ankle encased in a heavy fiberglass cast. Each step sent a jarring ache up my leg, forcing me to lean heavily on a cheap aluminum crutch as I inspected the rooms like a common charwoman, despite my injury. Julian had given explicit orders to the hotel manager, assigning me the most grueling floors to ensure my physical torment matched his psychological games.

Room 1704 was supposedly vacant, but the housekeeping log showed fresh towels requested at 3 AM. I made a mental note—Julian's crew was running an off-book operation on the seventeenth floor, and he didn't know I knew.

I opened the door to the penthouse suite and froze where I stood.

Julian and Vivian were standing in close conference by the floor-to-ceiling windows, the city's sprawling geometry laid out behind them.

Vivian noticed me first.

She smiled, stepping away from Julian, and walked right up to my face, her heels making soft, predatory clicks on the marble floor.

"You look terrible," she whispered, a passive-aggressive threat lacing her saccharine words.

Julian turned around, his features instantly hardening into a mask of stone.

His eyes dropped to my hands, noticing the rough, yellow calluses forming on my palms from the unforgiving manual labor.

He closed the distance between us in two long, silent strides, grabbing my chin with a possessive, unbreakable grip.

"I will never let you go," he declared, his thumb pressing with such force into my cheek that I felt the bone beneath might splinter. "You belong to me, Anna. Forever."

Suddenly, Vivian let out a loud, theatrical gasp.

She raised her own hand and slapped herself hard across the face, leaving a stark, crimson red mark on her alabaster cheek.

She dropped to her knees, sobbing violently into her cupped hands.

"Why did you hit me?" Vivian cried out, looking up at Julian with wide, tear-filled eyes. "I was just trying to talk to her!"

Julian's possessive gaze instantly turned feral, a dark, terrible shadow crossing his features.

He released my chin and grabbed me by the hair, dragging me backward into the center of the penthouse suite as I stumbled to maintain my footing.

"You ungrateful bitch," he roared, his voice shaking the plate glass windows.

He shoved me into a heavy oak chair, the hard wood digging into my spine.

Before I could fight back, he pulled his silk tie from his neck and bound my wrists tightly to the armrests, the fine fabric biting into my already tender skin.

He grabbed a thick terrycloth towel from a nearby cart and shoved it into my mouth, gagging me until I could only choke on my own breath.

"You want to act like a savage?" Julian sneered, leaning in so close I could feel the radiating heat of his anger. "Then I will treat you like one."

He turned around and walked over to Vivian, pulling her up from the floor with a counterfeit gentleness.

He kissed her deeply, right in front of me, ensuring I had a premier view of my own humiliation.

He pushed her onto the master bed, his hands tearing at her clothes with a frantic hunger.

I squeezed my eyes shut, but the wet, slapping sounds of their intimacy echoed off the walls. This was a brutal psychological torture designed to assert his absolute dominance over my fractured mind.

When he was finally done, he walked back to the chair, calmly buttoning his shirt as though he had just concluded a business meeting.

He pulled the gag from my mouth, leaving my jaw to ache with a dull fire.

"I am marrying Vivian tomorrow," Julian announced, his tone flat and businesslike. "She will be elevated to my Mafia Queen. You will stand beside her as the bridesmaid."

He untied me and walked out the door, leaving me alone in the silent, airless room.

That evening, back at the safehouse, I locked myself in the bathroom, desperate for the solace of isolation.

I filled the bathtub with hot water, sinking into the heat to ease the deep, aching cramp that had begun to twist its fingers in my lower stomach.

The bathroom door suddenly clicked open, its lock easily bypassed.

Julian stood in the doorway, holding a heavy hotel hairdryer in one large hand.

He smiled, his eyes completely empty of any human recognition.

He tossed the heavy plastic machine directly into the tub water.

I screamed, thrashing backward in sheer terror, expecting a lethal surge of electricity to stop my heart and boil the blood in my veins.

The cord trailed uselessly over the porcelain edge. The hairdryer was unplugged. He had orchestrated this entire sadistic performance merely to watch me break.

But the violent shock, the sheer, primal panic of impending death, ripped through my fragile body.

A sharp, tearing agony exploded in my abdomen, a pain so profound it stole the very air from my lungs.

I curled into a ball in the water, a warm, dark red stain spreading around my legs, blooming like some morbid, underwater flower.

The front door slammed shut somewhere down the hall.

Julian rushed into the bathroom, freezing at the sight of the bloody water lapping against my skin.

"Help me," I gasped, clutching my stomach as another wave of agony crested and broke. "The baby..."

Julian stared at the blood, his jaw clenching in a spasm of pure disgust.

"Stop with the pathetic theatrical stunts," he said coldly, his eyes utterly devoid of pity. "A little fake blood is not going to keep me from leaving you."

Vivian, who had been waiting in the hallway, suddenly stepped into view and collapsed against the sink, grabbing her chest and gasping for air in a flawless pantomime of distress.

"Julian, I cannot breathe," she faked, her voice trembling with perfect calibration. "The shock..."

Julian turned away from the tub, dismissing my agony as if it were a trifle.

He scooped Vivian into his arms, carrying her out of the bathroom without a single backward glance.

I lay in the cooling, red water, watching the life drain out of me. In that moment, the porcelain tub became a cold, silent tomb.