"You are carrying the next head of this family. Stop this nonsense. People in our circles are already whispering that you and Xavier are separating. I've organized a dinner tonight. Xavier's closest associates will be there. You will arrive on time. You will arrive with your husband. And you will not make a scene. Am I understood?"
The line went dead before I could answer. From beginning to end, she had spoken at me, not to me. Orders delivered with the efficiency of a woman who had spent decades commanding household staff and never learned the difference between a daughter-in-law and a servant.
I set the phone down on the desk and stared at it for a long time.
I wanted to see their faces. All of them. The people who had betrayed me, who had treated me worse than a stray dog begging at the back door of a restaurant. I wanted to look at every last one of them before I left for the Valducci compound in the capital. So I called a cab and rode across town to the Salvatore family estate, watching the city blur past the rain-streaked window in silence.