Tempting the Mafia Twins novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: The Anniversary
On her second anniversary, seven months pregnant, Cassie finds her husband in a hotel suite with a woman in a sheet and loses their daughter on the service stairs.
The picture reached my phone at nine fifteen, in the middle of my own anniversary party.
I was seven months pregnant, standing by the dessert table in a green dress that no longer closed at the back.
Two hundred guests were drinking in the ballroom of the Valenti Grand Hotel, and my husband was late.
The message had no words.
It was a photo of a hotel bed, and a man's arm lying across a woman's bare hip.
The man wore a gold wedding ring and a steel watch.
The ring was the one I had put on Carmine's hand at the church two years ago.
Under the photo was a room number, 1412.
I looked up, and the room kept laughing without me.
"Cassie."
Nico Valenti was beside me with a glass of champagne for himself and a glass of water for me.
He was Carmine's twin, and he wore the same face with a better smile.
"You look like a ghost," he said. "Sit down."
"Where is Carmine?"
Nico's smile slipped by a hair.
"Upstairs, in the family suite. He told me to send you up when you got here."
"Why would he be in the suite?"
"I'm just the messenger," Nico said gently. "Go ahead."
I put the water down.
I did not run, because I couldn't, and because two hundred people were watching the Don's daughter-in-law walk across a floor.
I took the elevator to fourteen with my hand under my belly, where my daughter was kicking me under the ribs.
We had named her Lucia.
We had painted her room yellow.
The door to 1412 was open an inch.
I pushed it with two fingers.
The bed was rumpled, and a woman sat on the edge of it in a white sheet with her shoes in her hand.
She was young and dark-eyed and she did not look surprised to see me.
Carmine stood in the middle of the room in his tuxedo, with his tie pulled crooked and his chest heaving.
He had a key card in his hand.
He looked like a man who had run up fourteen floors.
"Cassie," he said. "It's not what it looks like."
I laughed.
It came out of me before I could stop it, high and cracked, and the woman flinched.
"Is that what you say?" I asked him. "That is the line you have?"
"Listen to me. Put the phone down and listen."
"I got a picture."
"What picture?"
I held up my phone.
He looked at it, and I watched his face go gray.
It wasn't the gray of a man who had been caught.
It was something else, and I was too hurt to read it.
"Cass, I swear on my life, I didn't..."
"Don't swear on a life that I'm carrying."
He took a step toward me, and I took a step back.
I looked at the ring on his left hand.
I thought of my own on my finger, the little diamond he'd picked because it matched my mother's.
I pulled it off.
It came hard, because my fingers were swollen.
There was a silver ice bucket on the table with a bottle of champagne sweating in it.
I dropped the ring in with the ice.
It made a small sound.
"Cassie, don't."
"Tell your father," I said. "Tell him I'm done being the girl from Bridgeport you could keep in a drawer."
I turned and walked out.
I heard him say my name again, and the woman say something, and the door close behind me.
The elevator was too slow, and I couldn't stand to be in a box with a mirror.
I took the service stairs instead.
I would tell the ballroom.
I would walk in with my chin up and say to two hundred people what kind of men they were drinking with.
I took the first flight with one hand on the rail and the other on the baby.
The second flight had a wet patch on the concrete, where a cleaner had mopped and left.
My heel went out from under me, and the rail was not where my hand was.
I remember the sound of my own shout in a stairwell.
I remember hitting the landing on my side, and the cold, and the way the lights went long.
I remember Carmine's voice from somewhere above me, a voice I had never heard, calling my name.
Then a siren, and white light, and hands on my belly.
A doctor with a paper mask stood over my bed for a long time before she spoke.
She had a kind, tired voice.
"Mrs. Valenti, we did everything we could."
I couldn't feel my legs.
I could not feel my daughter kicking.
"I'm so sorry," the doctor said. "There is no heartbeat."
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