It was because the Don forbade any living creature from coming near. Even a stray associate who wandered too close to the perimeter had been found skinned and strung up along the fence line, left there for days before the body was cut down.
He had kept my identity hidden because he wanted to wait until our child was born.
Then, before the entire underworld and every Family with a name worth speaking, he would crown me in a ceremony no one would ever forget.
And the reason he was absent today was precisely because he had divined through the old ways that this was the day our child would arrive.
He had gone personally to summon the most powerful men across the Five Families and beyond, so they could witness the birth of the Valente heir.
To welcome the future sovereign of the empire he had built.
And now, every one of those precautions had become the very reasons Seraphina refused to believe me.
Watching them close in, panic seized me. I screamed, "I am the Don's wife! If you don't believe me, go ask Dominic Valente yourself!"
They didn't even pause. Blades rose and fell.
Agony tore through me, bone-deep and blinding, as my limbs were severed one after another.