“You might be Luca’s wife, but I’m still your elder.” He clears his throat, his face flushing. “Come here.”
It’s the last thing in the world I want to do, but I don’t want him to have a heart attack or something like that either, not when Caterina is already so fragile. So I stand up reluctantly, crossing the room to his bedside.
“What is it?” I try to keep my voice as calm as possible as Rossi turns towards me, his eyes dark and angry as they sweep over me.
“You’re the cause of all of this, you know,” he rasps. “Everything that’s happened, this escalation with the Bratva, all of it is your fault. You and your filthy Russian bitch of a mother.” He coughs, breathing with a rattle as he glares at me. “I should never have allowed Luca to follow through on your father’s fucking promise. I should have had you killed when I had the chance.”
“Vitto—” I should have known better than to use his first name. He looks almost purple with rage, his jaw working as he leans closer.
“You should hope that Luca doesn’t find out the truth about why Viktor wanted you as his wife,” Rossi hisses, and I stare at him, my eyes going wide with shock.
“He didn’t want—”
“He did,” Rossi says, satisfaction lacing his tone. “He wanted to marry you and fuck that tight virgin hole of yours every night until he put another Russian pup in you, the son he so desperately needs to take what he wants from us and keep it. But Luca got to you first. Even he doesn’t know why you’re so special, though.”
“You’re delirious.” My voice doesn’t even sound like mine to me, colder and harder than I’ve ever heard it. “You need to rest. You don’t know what you’re saying. Luca wouldn’t appreciate you talking to me like this—”
“Luca is a fucking mistake,” Rossi snarls, choking halfway through the sentence. “He’s weak. I should never have given him—I should have fucking had you shot like the Russian bitch you are—”
I try to back away, chills running over my skin at the tone of his voice, the room suddenly feeling ice cold. But Rossi lunges towards me, yanking on his IV wires as he does and setting off the machine he’s still tethered to. I dodge his hand, but it snags on the cross at my neck, snapping my mother’s necklace and leaving it dangling in his fist.
“Give it back!” I exclaim, but he’s already hiding it in his palm as a nurse and Caterina come rushing in, both of them wide-eyed.
“What’s going on here?” the nurse demands, and Rossi lays back in bed, heaving and coughing.
“That girl—she’s being cruel,” he says, choking on his words. “I don’t know why she’s here; she doesn’t belong here—”
“That’s Sofia, you know her,” Caterina says, her face deathly pale. “Dad, it’s fine, she’s just here to help me—”
“Get her out of here!” he roars, and I scramble backward, my heart racing in my chest as I push past the nurse. I almost make it out of the room, but before I can slip out, a sudden, awful wave of nausea grips me.
I barely make it into the bathroom before I heave over the toilet, everything I’ve eaten since last night emptying into it as I throw up again and again until my stomach is clenching painfully and my throat feels raw.
“Are you alright?” The nurse’s voice makes me jump, and I nod, holding a hand out to keep some space between us as I wipe my mouth with a wad of toilet paper, my hands shaking.
“I’m fine,” I manage. “It’s just an emotional time right now, that’s all. Everything is really stressful—”
But even as I say it, my mind is racing backward, making calculations that I hadn’t bothered to think about. After all, Luca and I have been using protection—except we didn’t, the night that he came racing home to me after the intruder broke in. And we didn’t on the roof. And we didn’t last night either—but it’s that first night that’s the culprit, if anything at all.
Because when I count, I realize something that makes me want to be sick all over again.
My period is a little over a week late.