And so I was left alone in that black, freezing water, punishment for being "disobedient" in his eyes. What he did not know was that I was already carrying his child.
He did not know yet what he had done. I, long since peeled free of my flesh, was floating quietly above his head, watching him.
This time, all that was left in me was a dead, flat silence.
To stand aside and watch him drown, step by step, in the hell he had built with his own hands - that was the only thing I wanted.
Chapter 1
My legs cramped violently and I went straight down, sinking to the bottom of the two-and-a-half-meter pool. My lungs were screaming for oxygen, and all I could do was watch my own husband take out his phone and unhurriedly film me drowning.
If I did not get air in the next few minutes, the child I had carried for barely six weeks, still a secret, the heir to the most brutal mafia family in the country, would suffocate along with me.
You have to understand: Dante was the Godfather of the Famiglia. To hold his throne, he had once wiped out the heads of three rival families in a single night. He was power and violence incarnate, an apex predator before whom everyone bowed without question. And now that terrible authority was being put to use standing by and watching me die.
The water was freezing. The instant Livia pushed me in, the cold sank into every limb. A moment earlier I had only reached for a glass of juice at the edge of the terrace, and she had pretended to turn clumsily, driving her elbow hard into my ribs with enough force to knock me over the edge.
My aquaphobia struck at once. Panic numbed my nerves and muscles; my throat clamped shut as if in an iron vise. I thrashed with everything I had and finally broke the surface at the last possible second, gasping half a breath in despair.
My eyes locked on the rim of the pool - the only orange life ring hung from the metal railing, barely an arm's length away. I reached out; my fingertips brushed the wet plastic -
And Livia got there first. She snatched the ring away, hugged it to her chest, and began posing for the guests scattered across the lawn. She giggled, pretending it was all for a prettier photo, an offhand, mocking smile on her lips, and cruelly took away my only way out.
I went under again. Water forced its way into my mouth and nose, burning my throat like acid. Through the warped, shifting layers of water I saw Dante standing at the edge. He did not jump in to save me, did not even hold out a hand. He simply held up his phone, the screen glowing faintly in the dark, recording my dying convulsions.
In his eyes, this was an act, a bid for attention, a deliberate provocation against his authority. He meant to apply some twisted form of exposure therapy and crush the last of my pride.
Around him, the guests pointed and laughed, watching the boss's wife drown as if it were a clever, lurid entertainment laid on for the anniversary.
My legs went completely numb. The cramps twisted my calves like wire, wringing out my last strength. The black silence of the deep end swallowed me, the weight of the water nearly crushing my chest. The burning in my lungs climbed to the point of breaking, and then a sudden, bone-deep chill swept through me.
The struggle stopped.
A strange weightlessness took its place; I felt light, and the pain of drowning simply evaporated. I opened my eyes and found that I was no longer in the water. I was floating above the pool, looking down at everything below.
My body lay motionless on the bottom. The gray gown spread and drifted around my legs like a shroud; my hair floated weakly in the artificial current.
I was dead.
I stared at my own corpse and did not cry, did not scream. The despair and terror that had drowned me moments before were gone, wiped away; an absolute numbness settled slowly into my soul.
Dante. The Famiglia. Three years of a suffocating marriage, a cage. I was finally, completely free.
Below me, Dante turned his back on the pool and walked toward the middle of the lawn, the same flat, arrogant mask on his face. He stopped at the dessert table, picked up a silver knife, and cut cleanly through the center of the swan fondant cake, the cake I had baked and decorated myself over two sleepless nights for our third anniversary, destroyed in one careless stroke.
Livia came toward him with the life ring in her arms, unhurried, one hand pressed to her chest, her voice full of counterfeit concern as she asked whether I might be in trouble down there.
Dante laughed, loud enough for the guests who smelled blood to hear every word. He told them I could dive, that holding my breath for five minutes was nothing to me. Then he fell into easy conversation with the capos and the men around him, certain that I was only sulking and would come up on my own the way I always did, and so he would not, under any circumstances, jump in.
Livia played her part seamlessly, raising her voice to explain to the crowd that I had stumbled into her myself, that I was simply clumsy. And just like that, black turned to white, and the murder she had committed moments ago was washed completely clean.
Dante turned back to the pool and shouted down into the black water, his voice carrying the Godfather's unquestionable command: "Get out of the water this instant. Don't you embarrass me again."
"She can swim," Livia said, one hand resting on his arm, the life ring still hugged to her chest.
"She's doing it to spite me," Dante said, loud enough for the lawn to hear. "Let her tire herself out."
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