Chapter 3

Floating in the night air, I looked down at the phone glowing on the lounger and thought of yesterday’s prenatal checkup — Dr. Rossi studying my bloodwork with a grave face: hCG abnormally high, progesterone dangerously low. She had warned me it was a sign of a threatened miscarriage, and promised to call today with the confirmed diagnosis and a treatment plan.

I had meant to tell Dante about the baby once everything settled. In the end, I never got the chance to say it.

The ringing echoed over the empty lawn and would not stop.

Dante strode to the lounger, his jaw tight, picked up the phone, and stared at the encrypted hospital number blinking on the screen. Livia followed at his heels, leaned in close, and in a voice soft as a snake’s hiss insinuated that the call was nothing but a performance, that I had surely paid off the doctor and faked an emergency to force him into the water after me.

Dante stared at the screen, his thumb hovering over the glass, deciding with perfect confidence that Livia was right, that I was up to my old tricks again, playing pitiful to win his sympathy.

Without a moment’s hesitation, he pressed the red button and hung up.

Above him I remembered last year’s gang war. We had been racing down a highway in a downpour while a rival’s hitmen closed in, step by step, on Livia’s hiding place. Dante slammed on the brakes, ordered me out into the freezing rain, and drove off to go and get his old lover out.

I walked more than six miles through the storm before I reached the city. The terror and the cold brought on acute stomach spasms; by the time I made it home I was vomiting blood on the floor of the foyer. And looking at that blood on the tiles, Dante turned it back on me: I had paid a doctor to fake an illness, all for his attention.

He punished me then. He was still punishing me now.

And he did not stop at hanging up. He flicked the mute switch on the side of the phone, snuffing out that desperate ringing for good. The faint glow went on flickering uselessly in the dark; he slammed the phone face-down into the corner of the lounger and left it there to drain its last bar in the night air.

My last road to survival, cut off by his own hand; the only chance to save his unborn child, strangled along with it.

Matteo, the head of security, came up onto the terrace, glanced at his watch, and reminded Dante that it was nearly time to take Livia to the private underground art exhibition. Dante nodded, turned to Enzo, and gave a flat, pitiless order: the glass door at the back of the house was to be bolted from the inside. And he warned everyone on the estate, in a hard voice, that no one was to bring me a towel or a single warm thing. He meant to leave me out there all night, wet and locked out, as punishment for my disobedience.

Livia walked unhurried toward the gate, then paused and pointed at the orange life ring with the little white swan and the initials I had painted on it myself. “Can I take this home?” she asked Dante, offhandedly, as though it were a souvenir. Dante barely glanced at it, the way a man glances at a piece of cheap plastic not worth a cent, and answered with contempt: “Take whatever you like.”

The cars carried the two of them away with a roar, engines thundering, and vanished over the crest of the hill. Enzo went in, drove the bolt home with a heavy, final thud, and came back out through the side door.

He did not go with them. He came back to the edge of the pool with the long aluminum skimmer, stood there in the dark, and looked down, and saw nothing at all. She would have climbed out by now, he told himself; she always climbed out. He set the skimmer against the railing, did not dare go into the water, and went to the gatehouse without looking back.

The guests dispersed, the lights went out, and the whole estate closed in on itself. On Dante’s orders, Matteo had pulled the rear gate detail and stood the pool patrol down. No family business was to be seen by hired men, and the back lawn lay unwatched for the first night in three years.

And below me, in the black water, my corpse was drifting slowly and mechanically with the current of the filtration system, soundlessly, toward the shallow end.

Upstairs, in the safe behind the bundles of cash, an envelope was waiting for him. I had put it there myself two nights before, and I had not been able to make myself take it out again.