The Sicilian Billionaire Banished His Pregnant Wife

Marcello

“Get to the point, Curzio.”

“Do you want to sit down first?”

“Do I look like I want to sit down?”

Curzio had taught this boy to drive. He’d taught him to shoot, to shave, to keep his face still while other men lost theirs—and now he had to stand on the good carpet in a house he’d known for thirty years and take that face apart with eleven pages.

He wished, not for the first time that night, that he had the power to change the bad to good. But as people in their world knew from an early age, that was impossible. Life often seemed like an endless series of bads, worse, and not-so-bads.

And what he was about to say, well...

“It’s about your wife,” he said heavily.

This was something Curzio would classify as painfully worse, as evinced by how Marcello had whitened at the mention of his wife.

The second-born Bastianelli heir stood at the window with his back to the room while the rain came off the lake, and the desk lamp threw his shadow up the wall until it covered the whole of it.

Six foot four, the characteristic broad shoulders that the men in his family were known for, and an air of violence that could never be washed away, even though it had been years since they were involved in any feud.

Curzio had watched grown men—dangerous men, men who’d done unspeakable things for a living—come into this room and start talking faster than they’d meant to, all because a Bastianelli was present.

“What about her?” Marcello asked finally.

“She’s been talking to Sabatino’s people.” Curzio turned his hat over in his hands, over and over. “I don’t want to be the one saying this to you...”

“Then don’t. Show me instead.”

And so the folder went down on the desk between them. Eleven pages and a paper clip, against four years of hauling this family out of the business one contract at a time, and Curzio hated every one of those pages personally.

“The route,” he went on doggedly. “Not the street. The route itself, the way we ran the Burgess paper in November. Four people knew it, and that includes...”

“My wife was asleep in the car. You remember that?”

“Sì,” Curzio agreed wretchedly. “I remember. But is that proof enough?”

The second page was worse, and they both knew it.

A phone number that had no business existing in this city, dialled from the landline in the front hall at three and four in the morning—and there was exactly one person in this house awake at three in the morning.

The whole staff had heard her on those stairs, five months along but unable to lie down for more than an hour at a stretch.

The last pages were photographs. A restaurant downtown, the good corner table, a man called Nunez sitting across from Marcello’s wife with his hand out for the check like a gentleman.

In this photo, it was the girl’s face that mattered, and Curzio could see, just by the way Marcello’s jaw had clenched—the boy knew it, too.

This was not how it should be, Curzio thought painfully. Marcello’s wife was dear to him, too. He would have sworn, would have staked his life that she wouldn’t be able to do something like this. Ever!

And yet...

Marcello knew he was staring too long at his wife’s face. But even though this was just a photo of her, Chisa’s features were such that her face...

It was the kind that made men stupid, even men who were supposedly tough and smart like him.

Her features were soft in a way that he had once thought was no longer possible for modern women.

Her brown eyes innocent in a way that made her look helpless while making Marcello feel helpless.

When they had first met, her eyes had been swimming with unshed tears, and her fingers shaking as she tied a silk ribbon around the box.

And her voice, it had been shaking just as bad as she finally handed him the bracelet she had gift-wrapped with care.

“Your wife is lucky to have you, sir.”

He remembered how she had smiled valiantly as she met his gaze, and while it was not the same way she was smiling at Nunez in the photo...

Marcello still hated it. Even though the smile was no different from the way he had seen his wife smile at a waiter who had served her water and other random people...

That smile convicted her of nothing. He simply hated that there was a photograph of his wife smiling at someone else.

A restaurant. That was the detail that kept catching on him, like a nail dragging through silk.

Because their first date had been a restaurant, too.

A small one on Halsted, because she had gone pale at the sight of the first place he suggested.

She couldn’t read the menu without her glasses and had been too embarrassed to put them on in front of him, so he had ordered for her, and she had eaten every bite of a dish she later admitted she couldn’t name.

Halfway through dessert, she had gone quiet. Then...

“Can I ask you for something?”

“Anything.”

“When you get tired of me...” She had said it lightly. She had even smiled while she said it, and her hands had been shaking around her spoon. “Because you will, and that’s all right, I’ve done the maths. I know what I am, and I know what you are—”

“Chisa.”

“—but will you tell me to my face? Please? Don’t send someone. Don’t just stop calling. I’d rather have it from you, even if it’s horrible. Especially if it’s horrible.”

She was the first person in his life who had ever asked him for something that cost nothing.

“You have my word,” he had told her.

And Marcello Bastianelli had never once broken his word. Not to his father, not to his enemies, and not to a girl in a borrowed dress who had believed she was asking him for something small.

Overhead, the floor creaked. She was up again, walking off the cramps as the doctor had told her to, humming while she did it, and the sound...

Despite everything, the sound still had both Marcello and Curzio wincing. It was that bad, and it would always be so. Music would never be her gift, and that was why it took them several moments to realize...

Curzio barely managed not to wince when he finally recognized what she was humming. It was the song that she had asked him to play in the car, on their way to the wedding. As in, the day she had become Marcello Bastianelli’s bride. And this had the old man wondering miserably yet again...

Why must it be like this? Why couldn’t Chisa have stayed the girl they all thought she was? Why couldn’t there be an end to all these bad things?

Marcello’s gaze slid back to the photo as Chisa’s humming continued. But this time, all he could see was their wedding night. They had married in a courthouse one late afternoon, with only a handful of witnesses, and then afterward, when he had taken her to his home for their wedding night...

“Is it normal to be this nervous?” She perched on the edge of the bed with her glasses on and her shoes still buckled, as if she might have to leave in a hurry. “I mean, it’s not like I don’t know what’s going to—”

“Cara?”

“Y-Yes?”

“Take off your glasses.”

Despite the gentle tone he had used, the command had still made her cheeks turn red as if he had asked her to undress. She had been so flustered, in fact, that in the end it was he who had removed her glasses before setting them on the table, and when he had turned to look at her...

“I can’t see you now.”

She had whispered the words in a panic, and it had made his lips curve even as he answered her very solemnly.

“That’s the point.”

“W-What do you mean—”

Instead of telling her, he had shown his wife instead what he meant. And he had taken his time, too, so that when she was finally lying under him, she was too dazed with desire to be worried, and when he said, “Guardami...”

Look at me.

Chisa had simply lifted her brown eyes to his, innocent, trembling, and yes, just a little terrified still, even with her body already made captive by need and desire.

And that was how he had made her his.

His wife looking into his eyes, biting her lip hard at first, and then crying his name out as he took her again and again. He had only let her rest when he saw her eyes drifting closed, and he had felt her body growing heavy.

And later, when she woke up in his arms, she had whispered, “I have a confession to make.”

“Go on.”

“That first day. In the shop.” She pressed her face harder against him. “When you bought the bracelet...”

“And you believed I had a wife?”

“Exactly,” she mumbled to his chest. “When you left, I went straight into the stockroom and burst into tears.”

“Ah.”

Her head jerked up. “Why does that sound like...”

“I stayed behind. You didn’t see me. I saw you come out of the stockroom, and your eyes made it obvious you were crying.”

“You knew the whole time, and yet you...” A choked laugh escaped her. “You took so long before letting me know it was for your mother!”

“A punishment,” he said without shame, “for charging me full price.”

“That’s so...”

“What?”

She looked at him helplessly. “Unreasonable.”

“If there is something or someone you want,” he instructed her, “then you must be prepared to do unreasonable things.”

She had tried to argue with him about that, but—

No more, Bastianelli!

Marcello slammed a mental door shut on the rest of his memories. To spend another second dwelling in the past would be a weakness, and he was not where he was now by being weak.

Tomorrow, he would take care of his enemies. They would know what it meant to cross a Bastianelli. And that...was the easy part.

Tonight, however...

Tonight, Chisa was no longer just his wife.

Because of what she had done, she had become a family matter.

And since such matters meant that the entire family must cast their vote...

Curzio found himself holding his breath when Marcello turned to look at him. Obviously, the boy needed to do something about this—

“I need you to call Vico and have him take care of things.”

But when Curzio heard Marcello mention his cousin’s name, only at that moment did it become clear to the old man just how ruthless Marcello could be.

Everyone knew that Vico was the one in charge of...

disposal. And while this wasn’t always synonymous to death, it did mean that Chisa would be as good as banished, her face never to be seen by any of the Bastianellis...

“Marcello...” Curzio’s voice was strained. “Are you sure—”

Marcello interrupted him, “That shall be your task. To ensure that Vico and all the others will obey my orders when it comes to...her.” A muscle started ticking in his jaw. “Nobody touches her. No one. Second: I need her out of the house within the hour—”

“But your wife’s pregnant!”

“And out of the city by morning.”

Curzio started wringing his hat at how fast things were moving. “Marcello, this is not—”

“I have not forgotten she’s carrying my child, Curzio.

That’s why I also need you to stay on top of this.

You’re to make sure that she gets the house she wants, is treated by the best doctor in this country.

Have Brent draw up whatever’s needed, and tell him she’s never to be made to ask twice.

Fly out one if need be. Assign our best men as her security.

Open the necessary accounts for her so that she will not lack for anything. ”

This hardened tone of Marcello was something Curzio had heard before, and it was what Marcello used when he had made up his mind for good.

Down the hall, the nursery door stood open. She’d been painting it herself all week because she wanted to do it with her own hands, and the tins were still stacked outside where she’d left them. She never shut that door—just in case he came up and wanted to see how far she’d got.

The humming finally stopped, and they both heard the door opening, and Chisa calling out sleepily, “Marcello?”

Marcello didn’t answer. From this point forward, she was dead to him.