Exiled By My Royal Billionaire Husband (Wives Betrayed #6)

CHAPTER 1

LUCIA

The palace has forty-one rooms and I have spent three weeks avoiding one of them in particular.

It sits at the end of the family wing, second floor, last door on the left.

Pale yellow paint. Antonio picked the color himself, which should tell you everything about how much the man knows about decorating, but I loved him too much to say so.

I still do. That’s the problem with grief. It doesn’t cancel love.

I stand in the corridor outside that door every morning. Some mornings I make it all the way to the handle. Today I make it to the handle. The shaking that starts in my wrist and travels up, and I put my palm flat against the wood instead.

“Not today,” I tell her.

Because that’s whose room it is.

Hers.

Sofia’s.

I say her name out loud sometimes just to prove I still can, that the sound of it hasn’t been confiscated along with everything else.

Downstairs, Bellacosta is already moving on. I can hear it through the floor. The palace runs on a schedule older than my marriage, and grief was allotted its window, and the window, apparently, has closed.

The flags went back up last week. The official mourning statement has been rotated off the website.

Somewhere in this building there are men in suits using the word succession in lowered voices, and they lower their voices not out of respect for me but because they haven’t decided yet how loud they’re allowed to be.

I know because I hear them. Servants talk. Commentators talk louder. Last night the evening news ran a segment on the Villari line with a graphic of a family tree, and there was a small gray question mark where my daughter’s name should have been.

Antonio took the remote out of my hand and threw it across the room.

That was two days ago. This morning he has a council meeting, his fourth this week, and I have a date with a yellow door I won’t open.

“Lady Lucia.” It’s Beatriz, my dresser, hovering at the top of the stairs with the cautious face everyone uses on me now. Half sympathy, half caution. “His Highness asked if you’d take breakfast on the terrace.”

“His Highness is in a meeting.”

“He cancelled it.”

That gets my attention. Antonio Villari does not cancel meetings. Antonio Villari once took a call from the central bank during our anniversary dinner and I had to eat both desserts, which I did, out of spite.

I find him on the west terrace with cups of coffee and the expression of a man who has done something either very good or very stupid. The sea is showing off below the cliffs, all that moneyed blue. I hate it for being beautiful.

“You cancelled a council meeting,” I say. “Should I sit down before the country collapses?”

“The country will survive an hour.” He pulls out my chair. “I checked. There’s a whole government. Elected and everything.”

“Cute.”

“I thought so.”

He pushes the coffee toward me, made precisely how I take it, which he learned nine years ago and has never gotten wrong, not even when I’ve been too tired to notice.

Today I notice. I’ve been taking inventory lately of every small thing he does right, like I’m building a case for something, though I couldn’t tell you what the trial is about.

We eat in the kind of silence we used to be good at. Before, silence between us meant comfort. Now it means we’re both thinking about the same thing and neither of us wants to say it first.

Antonio says it first. “The nursery.”

And there goes breakfast.

“I walk past it every day,” he says. “I know you do too. Maria told me you stand in the corridor.”

“Maria has a big mouth.”

“Maria loves you. They’re all worried.”

“They’re worried,” I repeat. “The palace is worried. Did the palace also lose a daughter, or is that still just me?”

His jaw stiffens, but he doesn’t take the bait. He never does anymore, and somehow that’s worse than fighting. I want a fight. A fight would mean we’re both still in the ring.

“Lucia.” He reaches across the table and takes my hand, and his thumb moves over my knuckles, and I hate how much better that simple gesture makes me feel. “There’s no clock on this. Not for us. I don’t care what anyone downstairs says.”

“Anyone downstairs is already saying it.”

“Then let them say it to me.”

“They are saying it to you. That’s what the meetings are about.

” I pull my hand back, gently, because I’m not cruel, just accurate.

“Four councils in a week, Antonio. You think I don’t know what the Villari family council discusses four times in a week?

The markets are fine. The ports are fine.

It’s the succession. It’s the question mark on the family tree. ”

He looks out at the sea. When he answers, his voice is low and even, the voice he uses in state rooms. It turns my stomach to hear it on our terrace.

“They’re old men frightened of a future they won’t live to see,” he says. “I sit in their meetings so they feel heard. It’s management. It’s nothing.”

“It’s not nothing. They’re talking about replacing her.”

The word lands between us and detonates. Replacing. As if a child were a position to be filled. As if the palace could post a listing.

Antonio is up out of his chair and kneeling beside mine before I can blink, both my hands in his now, and his eyes are doing the thing—the wet shine he thinks he hides well and doesn’t.

“Listen to me.” His grip is fierce. “Another pregnancy doesn’t matter. An heir doesn’t matter. I’ve told them, and I will keep telling them. You are my wife before you are anything else. Before princess, before mother, before any of it. You come first with me. That’s not a policy. That’s a fact.”

I want to believe him.

“Say it again,” I whisper.

“You come first.”

He stays there on the terrace stones, kneeling in front of me, until my breathing evens out. People will say a lot of things about Antonio Villari before this story is over. Most of them will be true. But this morning, on this terrace, I believe him completely.

Keep that in mind.

That night I wake up crying at three in the morning, which is not news. I’ve done it most nights since the hospital. What is news is the bed.

I can’t sleep in it. Not since. The bed is where they let me hold her for a minute before they took her away, in my head, in the version I replay, and the actual bed in our room just inherited all of it.

So I sleep on the chaise by the window like a Dickens character, and Antonio, who has a spine made of old injuries and protocol, sleeps on the floor beside me.

He refuses the bed if I’m not in it. The man runs a country and owns half the Mediterranean coastline, and he’s on the rug with a throw pillow.

I look down at him in the dark. Even sleeping, he keeps one hand on the chaise, touching the frame. Holding my place in the world.

“You’re an idiot,” I whisper.

“Mm,” he says, not waking. “Your idiot.”

And my heart breaks a little, in the good way—the old way.

In the morning there’s an envelope on my breakfast tray. Heavy paper, my name in Marguerite’s handwriting, which is elegant enough to make a death threat look like an invitation.

It’s not a death threat.

It’s close.

Marguerite Villari, my mother-in-law, Dowager Princess, and the only woman I know who can disapprove of you in three languages at once, writes that she hopes I am “resting and recovering my strength” and that the family “understands this difficult chapter requires patience from everyone.” She underlines everyone, which is Marguerite for stop being difficult, dear.

I set it on fire in the fireplace, which is petty and wonderful and I recommend it.

“Was that necessary?” Antonio asks from the doorway, half-dressed, tie loose, watching the smoke.

“Deeply.”

“She means well.”

“Your mother means dynasty.”

He comes and kisses the top of my head, and for a moment we’re just us again, the version where his mother is a punchline and not a power. “I cancelled the Founders planning dinner,” he says. “Tonight. I’m staying in.”

I look up at him. The Founders Ceremony is two months away, the biggest date on Bellacosta’s calendar, and the planning dinners are sacred. Marguerite once hosted one with a broken wrist.

“The council will have your head.”

“Let them have it. It’s heavy. I’ve been told it contains a genius mind.” He crouches in front of me and his face goes serious. “Bellacosta means nothing without you in it. I want you to hear me say that when I’m calm, so you’ll know it’s not something I say to end arguments.”

“Antonio…”

“Dinner. Us. The good wine. You can even pick a film with talking animals in it. I won’t object.”

“That was one time, and it had emotional depth.”

He grins, and God help me, I grin back. It’s the first time my face has done that since, and it aches, and I let it.

We last until four in the afternoon.

I’m in the library with the accounts for my foundation, the maternal-health network, the single piece of my old life that survived marriage into a dynasty, and I keep it sharp.

Mobile clinics in the mountain villages.

Prenatal care for women the official system forgets.

I built it before I was anyone’s wife and I will not let it go soft now.

Beatriz appears at the door with his weather-report face, except this time it’s storm warning.

“Lady Lucia. There are guests.”

“We don’t have guests.”

“Her Highness the Dowager Princess has arrived. With the Duchess of Rinaldi. And her son.”

The pen stops in my hand.

Alessandra Rinaldi. I’ve known the name for days, the name of a storm tracked offshore, getting closer.

Widow. Italian nobility. Old family, older ambitions.

She has been orbiting the edges of Villari events for years, always photographed a half-step closer to Antonio than courtesy requires, always with a smile calibrated to the millimeter.

And her son. A child. Marguerite has brought a child into this palace, into this wing, down this corridor, past a closed yellow door.

I am moving. Beatriz trots beside me, murmuring things I don’t hear.

The entrance hall is made up of marble and afternoon light, and there they are.

Marguerite first, silver and spine-straight, kissing the air beside my cheeks before I can decline.

Then Alessandra, who is somehow more beautiful in person, dark and composed, dressed in the sort of simplicity that costs a fortune.

She extends a hand and tells me how very sorry she is.

Her sympathy is flawless, rehearsed to a shine.

And then the boy. Luca. Nine years old, dark hair, polite shoes, clutching a small suitcase and looking at the grand staircase with open wonder, because he’s nine and palaces are amazing when nobody has explained to you what you’re for.

“This one,” Marguerite says, resting a hand on the boy’s shoulder with proprietary warmth, “has brought life back into this house just by walking through the door. Isn’t that right, Luca?”

The child smiles uncertainly. He has no idea. He is innocent in this, and I will remember that even on my worst days.

I look past them all, down the corridor, toward the stairs that lead up to the family wing.

To the yellow door.

“Why,” I say, and my voice comes out very calm, which should worry everyone in this hall, “is there a suitcase in my house?”

Marguerite’s smile doesn’t move. “Alessandra and Luca will be staying with us for a little while. Family should be close in difficult times. I’m sure you’ll agree, darling.”

Behind them, through the tall windows, I can see Antonio’s car coming fast up the cliff road. He left an hour ago. Someone called him back, and I’d bet the good wine it wasn’t me.

The boy is still smiling at the staircase. The duchess is watching me with her shining, flawless sympathy.

And somewhere upstairs, a door stays shut.