Traded to His Enemy, Pregnant With His Heir novel · Chapter 16 of 48

Chapter 16: Nothing Left Here

Nobody in that restaurant made a sound.

A hundred people stood frozen between the tables, and the Don of the North End knelt on the tiles in front of me.

He reached into his coat pocket.

He held up my wedding ring between two fingers, the way he had at the warehouse.

"I kept it," he said. "I've kept it every day. Put it on. Come home. I'll give you anything."

I looked down at him.

Five weeks ago I'd been the one on the floor.

I'd looked up at him from exactly this angle, with my knees bleeding through a silver dress.

"Get up, Gianluca," I said. "Your mother's watching."

"I don't care who's watching."

"You did on the warehouse floor. You cared so much about who was watching that you didn't look back once."

His hand with the ring started to shake.

"I left that ring on the concrete where you knelt for her," I said. "You went back for it. You should have let it lie."

"Shona..."

"There's no home. You burned it the same month you burned Misha Lazarev." I said the name clearly, so every captain at the bar heard it. "And there's no child of yours. There's my child. You gave up your share of her on Chelsea Creek."

"Her," he said.

I hadn't meant to say it.

I didn't know yet. Not for sure.

It had just come out of me, the way the truth does sometimes before you've checked it.

He stared up at me with his mouth open.

"You're on your knees for the wrong woman again," I said. "The one you owe is in a cemetery in West Roxbury."

I turned around.

Ilya's arm was already there.

I put my hand through it, the one with his mother's ring, and we walked out through the middle of the room.

People stepped back to let us by.

His mother didn't move from the family table.

But when I passed her, she looked up at me, and she nodded once.

On the sidewalk Donatella was sitting on the curb in her cream silk with one shoe off, crying into her hands.

She looked up when the door opened.

I didn't stop.

Ilya's driver had the door open, and I got in, and Hanover Street slid away with its candles in all the windows.

I didn't say anything until we were on the highway.

Then I started to laugh.

I couldn't stop.

I laughed until I cried, and then I cried until I laughed again, with my face in his coat.

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