The Don's Pregnant Wife Ran to His Enemy novel · Chapter 2 of 24

Chapter 2: Clause Nine

Raf pulls Elena off the platform past her husband's men and shows her what she signed: clause nine gives her unborn child to the Pagano line, and Sandro knew she was pregnant two days ago.

"Why would you tell me anything?" I said into the phone. "You want my husband dead."

"I do," Raf Montano said.

He did not lower his voice or soften it.

"Look at the train, Mrs. Pagano. Third window from the front of car four."

I looked.

A man in a gray overcoat stood in the aisle with his hand inside his jacket.

I knew him.

He had carried my shopping bags to the penthouse for two years.

"There's another in car five," Raf said. "They boarded ten minutes ago. Nobody wakes Sandro at dawn. Somebody woke him anyway."

My mouth went dry.

"I left while he was asleep."

"Then someone else was awake."

Dario stepped closer and said, very low, "Signora. Now. There is a service door by the baggage ramp."

I looked at the man who had taught me to shoot.

"Whose side are you on, Dario?"

"Your father's," he said.

It was the only answer that could have moved me.

I walked.

I did not run, because running makes people look.

I rolled my suitcase past a newsstand, past a family arguing about a stroller, and through a steel door that Dario held open with his shoulder.

Cold air hit my face.

A black car waited at the foot of the ramp with its engine running.

The rear door opened before we reached it.

The man inside was larger than I remembered.

Dark coat. Hair going gray at the temples. Eyes the flat gray of the lake in January.

I had seen him once.

He stood at the back of my father's funeral for the whole service and left before the final prayer.

Sandro told me later that Raffaele Montano had come to gloat.

I got in anyway.

The car pulled away before the door was fully shut.

For a long minute neither of us spoke.

"You have a suitcase," Raf said finally. "And a rosary in your fist."

I looked down.

I had been holding it so tightly that the beads had left red marks on my palm.

"Where are you taking me?"

"Where your husband isn't." He watched me, not unkindly. "You called your aunt. Brooklyn is the first place he will look."

"You tapped my phone?"

"Dario did. For your safety, for three years."

I turned to Dario in the front seat.

He kept his eyes on the road.

"He asked me to," Dario said. "So did your father. In that order, if you want the truth."

Something cold went through my chest.

"My father never spoke to Raffaele Montano. They were enemies."

"They met once," Raf said. "A week before he died."

He said nothing more.

He did not need to.

The whole city had been told that Montano men killed Pietro Rinaldi.

"I'm not going to argue with a dead man's name," I said. "Tell me why I'm in your car."

"Because of this."

He took a phone from his coat and held it out.

On the screen was a photograph of a page of typed legal text.

I knew the letterhead.

"Dario photographed the whole packet in Sandro's study last night, before you found it," Raf said. "Read the ninth clause."

I read it once.

Then I read it again, slowly, because the words would not stay still.

Any child conceived during the marriage, whether born before or after its dissolution, belongs to the Pagano line and remains in the custody of its head.

My hand moved to my stomach on its own.

"I signed it," I said.

"You signed it."

"I didn't turn the page. I just signed where the lawyer put the yellow tab."

"I know."

"I'm pregnant, and I signed my baby away to him."

My voice was almost calm.

That frightened me more than screaming would have.

Raf's eyes stayed on mine.

"Dario," he said without looking away. "Tell her the rest."

Dario cleared his throat.

"The clinic on Dearborn Street, signora. The one you used under your mother's name."

I stopped breathing.

"Two days ago the doctor's office sent a bill to the Pagano accountants by mistake. The name on the bill was yours."

"He knew," I whispered.

"He knew," Dario said. "Before you wrote the note. Before you signed anything. He drew up a clause for a child he already knew was coming."

I looked out the window at the dark brick of the city going by.

All week I had been trying to find the right night to tell him.

He had known for two days.

He had still let Gia sleep in my bed.

He had still planned to put me out and keep what I carried.

"He never wanted me, did he?" I said. "Only the heir."

Nobody answered.

The car turned onto the ramp for the expressway.

Raf took the phone back from my hand and put it away.

"Mrs. Pagano," he said quietly, "I will tell you what happens next, and you can decide whether to believe me."

I waited.

"By nightfall, Sandro will have turned this whole city over looking for you. By morning he will say the Montanos took you."

"Why would he say that?"

"Because it is the one story that lets him start a war and take his heir back in the same breath."

He looked at my stomach, then at my face.

"And I am the one man every family already believes would do it."

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