Modern Romance March 2025 #5-8

Chapter One

Chapter One

The last thing Adriano Cavalieri—chairman of Bancaria Cavalieri, one of the most prestigious privately owned banks in Italy—wanted to face when he returned home to Milan after four weeks of touring Southeast Asia on a rigorous schedule was the undeniable proof of his wife’s infidelity.

In the form of scandalous, tacky photographs that belonged on a filthy tabloid, no less.

He had acquired said wife, who had been a waitress/exotic dancer in Vegas nine months ago, in a once-in-a-lifetime, uncharacteristic impulse that mocked him now. A wife who was a mere twenty-two to his thirty-four—a cliché if he had ever known one.

The media outlets were still writing about his choice, after all these months. Fed and fueled by the fact that he had kept her out of the public eye.

Neither had Adriano stopped wondering the reason behind his own actions.

It wasn’t as if Nyra was exceptionally beautiful to have turned his head when other beautiful women hadn’t.

Her face, Adriano remembered from the first moment, had possessed a feral alley cat look with chiseled cheekbones, a sharp nose and a wide mouth. A face that was popular on the catwalk from the few shows he’d attended for Fashion Week in Milan.

Although hers was no doubt a result of missing several meals over a few years. A nondescript black cocktail dress had hung on her bony shoulders, making her look like a scarecrow whose stuffing had fallen out.

The only lushness to her was her wide mouth and those brown eyes—ordinary in every way—except for the depth with which they sparkled when she smiled.

And she had turned that smile on him, at the end of the first round of the game. Like an amplified sunbeam, it had cracked the frost around his uninterested, unmoving heart.

Even now, if he closed his eyes, he could remember how she’d bent over him, her hands caught between his on the table, her thick curls a curtain hiding them from the world itself and said, “Please, act like you’ve already bought me for this week, Mr. Cavalieri.”

One moment of their gazes colliding, one whispered entreaty, one soft graze of her cheek against his jaw, and he’d lost himself utterly.

And now, as he stared at the scandalous photos on his desk, that lush mouth open, her head thrown back in ecstasy with some man, he wondered if that moment had been orchestrated too.

He closed his eyes, wishing he’d never laid eyes on those photos. Which, in itself, was a strange thing, because he’d never shied away from truth.

It was a reminder of how well Bruno, his head of security and his best friend of nearly three decades, knew him that he’d first told Adriano on his flight back that he had “bad stuff involving Nyra” but to let him investigate a little more.

While even Adriano himself didn’t understand his relationship with his wife, it seemed Bruno, and even his childhood nanny, Maria—one of the very few people he trusted wholeheartedly in his life—approved of it. Maria, going as far as to say he smiled now, instead of baring his teeth at everyone in his sphere.

Given that Nyra had been up to something shady for the past month, he had braced himself for something bad as soon as he had gone on this trip.

After all, she’d sold her wedding ring and, according to Adriano’s mother, several valuable keepsakes from the family villa here in Lake Como, things her parents valued because this duke or that king had gifted it to some old, fat, privileged ancestor of his.

He’d initially laughed at his mother’s claim—at his father’s utterly hypocritical horror that he’d brought a common thief into their family. Such a stain on their reputation, the pair had declared, after splashing their own scandalous affairs for all of society to see for three decades.

Only to learn later, on Bruno’s investigation into the missing heirlooms, that the claim had been truthful.

Then her trips to London, which he had only discovered because he’d seen her walk into a seedy part of the city while he’d whizzed away in a chauffeured car in the middle of a meeting.

When he’d asked her about it, she had laughed and claimed he must have been mistaken. Because she’d been cooped up in the apartment, struggling with her latest painting.

Later, with one word to Bruno about her whereabouts, he’d learned that she’d indeed been in London twice in one month.

Still, he had waited for her to come to him.

Then other things had started disappearing, like his platinum cuff links and the diamond bracelet his mother had bought Nyra that she hadn’t liked one bit. Little things he wouldn’t have noticed unless he was keeping an eye out.

To think, he’d even tried to justify it as an undiagnosed case of kleptomania. But she was not a magpie who stored all the things she stole, nor could he see any change in her clothes or her spending habits.

Even after becoming his wife, she’d always dressed in loose, dowdy clothes that she made from his discarded shirts and sweaters, like some hippie artist.

Much to his mother’s, and sometimes his, dismay.

In nine months, she had shown no interest in designer clothes, or expensive jewelry, or leaning into the role of a society wife. She’d never even joined him for a dinner with guests from his circle.

All she wanted, she’d admitted to him after one of their marathon sex sessions in the little apartment by Navigli Lake District, where she preferred to stay, was to paint, read, while away time in cafés looking for inspiration when he was absent and to spend time with him when he was present.

It was so intoxicating to be one of the things she wanted in her simple life that Adriano had defied his mother’s incessant demands that his wife needed to take part in his life.

They had even slid into a strange sort of domestic bliss, his life with Nyra thoroughly compartmentalized from his work and society and even family. If his business associates and the world in general carped on about Adriano Cavalieri’s wife being absent from grand dinners and charity galas, he hadn’t given a damn.

A part of him had reveled in keeping her to himself.

And when that moment arose outside of that cozy apartment, outside of touching her, when he thought it a madness, when he needed at least the illusion of control over his life, he told himself that she was an expensive hobby he had acquired in a fit of acting out.

After all, he’d spent the first thirty-five years of his life, dutifully fixing the family bank and growing its fortunes, holding together the car crash of his parents’ marriage and taking care of a slew of illegitimate half-brothers and half-sisters his parents had spread around like bees spread pollen.

Stealing away from his own life to the one he shared with Nyra—long nights of sex, soft moments of silence and surrender, being alone together while she painted and he worked—had become his reward. His escape. His…haven.

He had expected them to get bored with each other, their passion to wither and die, their near-secret relationship to lose its charm, sooner or later. Then he would give her a nice settlement, make sure she was looked after for the rest of her life, before quietly divorcing her.

But he hadn’t expected this…betrayal that seemed to cut through him as mercilessly as a knife sliced through butter. Rending him into so many pieces. His limbs shook, his extremities felt cold. And yet everything felt extraneous to the hard thumping of his heart in his chest.

The why of it was a vicious echo in his head.

Why had she done it?

Why hadn’t she simply asked him for money? Was all the passion they’d shared nothing but an act? Or was it that she’d found a new man and hadn’t wanted to let go of the security Adriano had provided just yet?

So many lies…and now he couldn’t distinguish what had been real and what had been pretense. Everything felt tainted, the past and the present.

His gaze drifted to the photos over and over again, like some ghoulish spectator drawn to a disastrous train wreck.

Cristo , he’d never had a taste for masochism, and yet looking at those pics of her half naked and writhing in another man’s arms made bile crawl up his throat.

And Adriano realized how deep she’d sneaked under his skin, how hard this betrayal of hers had struck him. How he might never recover from it.

A pained growl escaped his lips and it might as well have been a wretched scream for a man who rarely let himself feel things. And he buried his face in his hands, trying and failing to fight the sense of losing something precious.

* * *

Nyra Shah Cavalieri gazed down the length of the heavy mahogany sixteen-seat dining table at Adriano Cavalieri, her husband of nine months. But he didn’t look at her. Not once, in two hours of this unending dinner.

With a sigh, she looked out the floor-to-ceiling glass windows toward the sweeping vistas of Lake Como. Lush green hillsides dotted with elegant villas and charming villages greeted her but did nothing to cheer her up. The setting sun painted the sky with vivid splashes of pinks and oranges. But even the artist in her couldn’t appreciate the magnificent view.

The villa had always felt more like a prison than a home to her. Especially since anytime she stayed here, it was because Adriano was traveling and she found herself the recipient of a variety of taunts and surprising trash talk, for all the sophistication they claimed, from his parents and his younger siblings Fabiola and Federico.

Gold digger was a common one along with witch , and when Nigella, his mother, got really upset, Nyra had even heard slut sometimes.

She let it slide off her like water over a rock. Sometimes, she even wondered what Nigella’s, and this privileged family’s, reaction would be if they truly found out her background. If they knew what a taint she could bring on the mighty Cavalieri name.

Although it was anticipating Adriano’s reaction anytime she considered telling the truth that worried her the most. The idea of seeing contempt—even disgust, in his gray-green eyes when he set them on her—made her stomach clench tight.

Her husband was an intensely private man and nine months later, Nyra still didn’t know why he’d married her. Not that she had ever probed him about it. Gift horses and all that.

When he wasn’t there, when his touch didn’t anchor her to this reality, like the last four weeks, this life he’d given her felt like a particularly colorful daydream. Maybe Nigella’s name-calling didn’t bother her because Nyra felt like she was all those things in his world. An impostor who could be found out at any moment. She’d even tried to tell Nigella in a roundabout way that her position as the Cavalieri matriarch was not threatened.

She much preferred the cozy apartment near Lake Navigli. Not that she had ownership there either. She had followed Adriano with nothing but the hotel uniform she’d been wearing. All she had was her art supplies, gifted by him. But still, that space—with its huge four-poster king bed and the sunroom where she painted, and the small balcony with its view of the busy lakefront with all its charming cafés and sparkling Italian water, was theirs.

They’d stamped every inch of it with their lovemaking and their comfortable silences and their whispers and laughter long into the night.

And now, all of that was going to change. Irrevocably.

A tremor started in her legs and traveled up her spine, and the glass of water in her hand rattled on the table. Both excitement and dread filled her.

For months, she’d floated along on a different plane with him and this was a thud of reality. And it had made her realize how much she wanted to build this life with him, how bright and wonderful the future could be for them and their…growing family.

Family… the word moved through her like a giant gong. This was a new chance, a real start at something she’d never even dreamed she might have.

Though, how was she supposed to convey this huge news to him if he wouldn’t even look at her? Why did she get the sense that something was terribly wrong?

He’d gone up those winding stairs as soon as he’d stepped inside, barely sparing her a glance as she came running in to see him, from the orange grove where she’d been hiding. Then it had been cocktails with the lot of them, blinking back tears when Nigella commented on his lack of a greeting for her.

It was the first time her mother-in-law’s acerbic comment pricked.

Butterflies, no , it felt like dragons were flying in her belly as she sat at the table with all of them now.

How would Adriano react to the news of her being pregnant? Of them being pregnant.

Especially after the strange evening they’d had before he had left four weeks ago.

As usual, he’d exhausted her with his mouth and his fingers, but there had been something more intense to him in those few hours. As if he was equally fascinated and frustrated by her.

Since neither of them was a great phone person, that fraught silence between them had grown thorny and thick over four weeks.

Was it her fault, she wondered, twisting the fake diamond ring on her finger.

Was it her own distracted mind that she’d seen reflected in his edgy words and movements that evening and today?

She had disturbed the easy, harmonious rhythm their lives had fallen into with her lies and her stealing and her secret trips to London. But how could she have not tried to help…

Her gaze flicked to his for a horror-stricken moment.

Did he know? Had he discovered what she had been up to?

Just then, his gray-green gaze collided with hers. And then it seemed to spear and skewer her as if she were a helpless fish.

Heat and desire and panic and a host of other things she couldn’t name flooded her, and she stared back helplessly.

All she wanted was to be held in those arms. To know his touch again. To have him give her that crooked smile that no one else got.

Longing burned a path through her as his attention broke away from her. One of the cousins asked him something.

Damn it, it had been four weeks.

Wasn’t she allowed to greet her husband without the audience of his family members? Why did they have to sit down for this elaborate, six-course meal every freaking Friday? And today, of all days?

It wasn’t as if Adriano was close to either of his parents. She’d got the sense that he mostly tolerated them and they tolerated his…controlling dictates because he was the source of their continued wealth and jet-setting lifestyle.

So why was he allowing them to see his anger, or whatever it was he was putting out, with her today?

Suddenly, she felt like a Cinderella whose carriage and dress might disappear any moment. Only the clock was malfunctioning and stuck at a minute before midnight.

After what felt like an eternity of letting the Italians around her nearly drown her, she cleared her throat loudly enough that it came to a sudden stop. “Adriano, may we talk please? In private,” she finally managed to say.

Gray-green eyes held hers once more, and his protracted silence clearly said he didn’t want to.

A cold sweat drenched her.

He knew.

He knew that she was sitting on a pile of lies and half-truths as tall as her.

“I have arranged a grand party to celebrate your…wedding,” Nigella cut in. “Late as it is, it has become necessary, Adriano. Everyone is talking about you now. Not just her.”

Nyra wasn’t sure if she was glad to be released from the end of the line like a floundering fish or angry that Nigella had cut into their angry, angsty eye-fuck across the room.

“What do you mean, Mama?” Adriano said.

“They’re saying it’s not a marriage at all. That you’ve kidnapped some barely adult girl from Vegas and are keeping her prisoner as your mistress. And that’s why you don’t dare show her to polite society.”

“One look at her,” Federico, Adriano’s younger brother and a privileged brat as far as Nyra was concerned, said with a laugh, “and they would know she’s more maid than mistress, Mama.” He dug an elbow into his twin Fabiola’s side. “You’re the social media queen, Fabi. Can’t you release a ‘candid’ of her and let people see our brother is simply suffering from temporary insanity?”

Across the table, Adriano’s chin reared down, shock radiating from his entire posture. He sat back in his chair and folded his arms, the tight lines around his mouth belying his calm facade.

Was he waiting for her to defend herself or to see how much worse his family’s taunts could get?

Fabiola’s dark gaze swept over Nyra—from her thick curls she’d bound tight in a braid to the loose, off-shoulder sweater, pausing at her bare neck and ears—and then she sneered. “Her hippie hobo look hardly matches my fashionista grid, Federico.”

A scoff and a snort came at Nyra from the others at the table.

“She can hardly be expected to match our family in fashion or conduct,” Nigella replied to her grown children’s giggles. “But what I really don’t like is that she won’t even make an effort. You’re ruining his name and—”

“Basta, Mama,” Adriano said, the two words soft and yet pelting through the room as if they were bullets.

To anyone else, he looked unmoved, even bored. Like one of the white marble busts spread over the estate. As if, even dead, they had to shout about the great Cavalieri name, lest anyone forget.

He’d never seen his siblings or his mother attack her so directly. He didn’t have an inkling of the kind of stuff they said to her. Because she’d never even hinted at it. The why of it suddenly baffled him.

More importantly though, what he didn’t get was that they were bolder today, taking their cue from him. Like a rabid pack that followed the alpha and would tear open something weaker at one command from him.

No, she was not weaker than him, she told herself.

She was younger, had zero power while his thrummed around him like some magnetic field. She didn’t have a dime to her name, but she was not weaker. She had survived before he had stormed into her life, had lived through much worse than his family’s taunts. Alone.

Whatever this was, she could withstand his temper, the cold burn of his anger.

As for Federico, she’d dealt with men far more dangerous than him. “If you think being a maid is worse than a mistress, Federico,” she said, meeting his eyes and letting her mouth curve into a mockery of a smile, “you’re well on your predestined way to becoming nothing but a footnote in the great history books of the Cavalieri family. Sorry, but no marble bust for you, buddy.”

“I’m not your buddy,” Federico retorted with as much disgust as he could pack into the word.

Nyra shrugged, and she thought she saw Adriano’s eyes, watching and drinking in every nuance in her face, gleam with something.

Humor maybe. Or acknowledgment.

But when she looked again, desperate for it, all she saw was the killing frost.

Nigella turned her glacial gaze to Nyra, any pretension to warmth gone. “How dare you talk to him like that? Adriano—”

“What is it you think Adriano will make me do, Nigella? I’m not his pet dog for him to give me orders.”

The silence that followed was deafening because she’d never retorted before. But things had to change.

It wasn’t just her anymore. She wouldn’t tolerate anyone speaking to her children like that. Neither could she hide in that apartment.

“Dogs are loyal creatures,” Adriano said, raising his glass to his lips.

“I agree,” Nyra said, everything inside her quaking.

Did he think her stealing a few trinkets from his mansion made her disloyal?

Okay, for a man with such exacting standards that his stellar reputation in the finance world had reached even her ears, maybe stealing and lying made her disloyal.

But wasn’t he going to give her a chance to explain? And why was he doing this in front of everyone?

In the ten months she’d known him, Adriano had never, ever , flexed his power to show off or to punch down. It was the very thing about him that had turned her head.

She licked her trembling lips, refusing to show her internal panic. “I guess I should have picked something better as an insult for myself.”

Then she turned to Nigella, whose glare should have ground her into dust. “I have no idea why you all are so—” she included the twins in her gaze too “—threatened by me but I’m not playing this game anymore.”

A soft gasp fell from Fabi’s mouth as if Nyra had given voice to something unmentionable in open company.

“I never wanted your power and position in the family. And your constant venom is…exhausting. But, yes, if you want to arrange some damned party and show me off to the society, I’m willing to try.” Then she looked at the man who was watching her with that intense focus. “If that’s what you want from me,” she said to him.

She didn’t know if he could hear her desperation.

A flash of dark humor flashed across those penetrating eyes. “I have already made the mistake of having expectations of you, cara . And you dashed them. Quite spectacularly, I might say.”

Nyra’s belly swooped, as if she were standing in an elevator car whose cords had been cut off abruptly.

Shocked gazes turned to her, then him, like greedy spectators at some bloodthirsty sport.

“What are you talking about?” Nigella asked, curiosity dripping from her tone. “Was I right that she’s the thief?”

Every drop of blood fled from Nyra’s face, leaving a strange tingling sensation behind.

Adriano folded his napkin and dropped it onto his plate, having barely touched his food. “There will be no celebrations. At least the world hasn’t witnessed my temporary insanity, as Federico put it so aptly.”

Glee filled Nigella’s and her hell-spawn twins’ eyes, a glee that they barely hid. “What do you mean, Adriano?” Nigella said, crying fake disappointment, and doing Nyra a favor.

Her own throat refused to work and Nyra suddenly became aware of two things at once. Her stubborn, naive decision to compartmentalize and keep herself limited to a mere sliver of Adriano’s vast everyday life had been foolish. Resulting in his family and the world at large assuming that he had hidden her away because he was ashamed of her and what they shared. And the second, more devastating thing, the moment she’d been dreading even as they’d stood in that tacky chapel, had arrived.

Midnight had struck and her carriage, and her pretty dress and her glass slippers…were all about to disappear. And with it, her dark, brooding prince.

Adriano pushed up from his seat and stared down that blade of a nose at her, as if she were an insect that had been helplessly caught under his handmade Italian loafers. In a white Armani shirt that was open at his throat and undone at his cuffs, he looked like the hero of some gothic novel Nyra had read ages ago, before giving them up. She’d had enough angst and grief in her life without reaching for it in fiction too.

“We will not be celebrating because this marriage is over. Nyra—” she thought his lovely mouth had flinched a little when he said her name, but then she was already beginning to feel as if she was floating outside of her body, so what the hell did she know “—will be leaving today.”

There was no anger, no heat, no reproach to his words. He said it as plainly and free of emotion and with just as much ruthless finality as he ran his company. Like it was a decision made by his will alone and not a partnership they’d both invested in.

Had it been ever a partnership though? a small voice asked.

“No,” she said, the word automatically falling from her lips before she’d given it permission. Her chest rose and fell. Under the table her hands crawled to her flat belly, as if to reassure the tiny life inside. “Don’t do this, Adriano, please.”

“Bruno will make arrangements for you, physical and financial.”

“No, Adriano. This isn’t you talking—”

“You do not know me, Nyra. And you’ve proved that I do not know you. At all.”

Ending the marriage wasn’t the worst thing he had done to her, Nyra thought, eyes filling with hot, humiliating tears. She bit the inside of her lip so hard that she tasted blood. The pain was so sharp that her brain focused on that instead of the tears.

She held his gaze, even as she was falling apart inside.

It was he who looked down finally, before walking away.

The ruthless billionaire Adriano Cavalieri—whose kindness had touched her more than anything else, walked away from the table and left her to be pecked at by the hungry, gleeful vultures of his family.

Whispers and smug announcements and even relieved laughter abounded around her. All of it urging her to run far and run fast and hide. That was what she’d done once before, what she was good at. Finding little pockets of life and hiding in them, instead of living fully.

And Adriano had been such a pocket made of warm touches and hot kisses and wonderful escape.

No, she wouldn’t walk away without knowing why he was ending this.

Let Adriano Cavalieri face her breaking heart, and then she would leave with its pieces in hand but her dignity intact.