Page 47 of The Kingpin’s Bride

The word sat on my tongue like a live coal. I wanted to spit it out so badly my chest ached. I wanted to tell him Dario held the only pure thing left in my life. That every photo, every threat, every night on that stage had been about keeping her breathing. I wanted to beg him to take her instead of me. I swallowed it whole.

“Dario,” I whispered instead.

Matteo’s eyes narrowed a fraction. The unlit cigarette shifted between his lips.

“He’s out there,” I forced out, voice cracking. “He thinks pieces of me belong to him. He has ways to hurt… what’s left. If you kill him, something worse happens. I can’t. Please. Don’t kill him.”

Silence stretched. City lights beyond the glass painted cold bars across the bed. Matteo’s thumb stroked once along my jaw, almost thoughtful, almost cruel. “Give me one clean reason not to put a bullet in his skull tonight.”

The demand was soft. Absolute. The kind of line that would live in my head for years. I stared up at him, tears falling, and felt the truth try to claw its way out of my throat.

Camilla.

One word. One name. That was all it would take. He would know. He would understand why I was so terrified, why I had begged on the stage, why I had whispered those vows.

Yet I could not give it to him.

Not yet. Not when I had no idea what a man like Matteo Ventura would do with a child who was not his blood, only leverage. Not when the man who had bought me looked at me like this.

“I can’t tell you,” I said. The words came out broken. “Please. Just keep him alive. I’ll do everything. Whatever you want. Just don’t kill him. I’m begging you.”

Matteo studied me for a long time. Something flickered behind his eyes, the same crack I had started to notice, the one that appeared whenever Dario’s name came up. Then the cold settled again like a door shutting.

“You’re hiding something that makes a piece of shit like him worth keeping alive.”

He said it like a fact, not a question. I said nothing. My silence was its own confession. He released my chin. For a moment I thought he would leave me there, open, leaking. He picked up the diary again.

I watched him read the last page I had managed before he came home His expression did not change, but something in the set of his mouth told me it was not enough.

“I’m glad to see you’re not censoring your thoughts for me.” He set the diary down and looked at me like he was deciding how much of me to take next. “Did you touch yourself while I was gone?”

“Y-Yes,” I said. There was no point in lying. There was a point in the shower when my fingers betrayed me.

His brow shot up. “Why do you admit it so freely?”

“No point in lying,” I muttered. “You’d probably find out anyway. I’ve seen your creepy surveillance walls.”

His mouth quirked. “I think you’ve earned a punishment, wifey. One, for insulting your husband. And two, for breaking my only rule. Two hundred lines. You will write them now. Every single one. In your own handwriting. I will watch.”

My stomach dropped so hard I tasted metal. “What do I write?”

He considered me for a moment. Then he spoke the line in a voice that left no room for argument and would probably haunt me in my sleep.

“Mrs Morena Ventura.”

The words hit like a second public claiming. Praise and humiliation braided so tightly I could not tell where one ended and the other began.

“Two hundred times,” he repeated. “Neat. Legible. If your hand cramps, you continue. If you cry, you continue. If you mess it up, we start the count over from one. Begin.”

I stared at the blank page. The first line came out crooked.

Mrs Morena Ventura.

I wrote it again. And again. By the tenth line my hand ached. By the twentieth the letters had started to blur. Matteo stood at the side of the bed the entire time, silent, watching.The ink on his forearms shifted every time he adjusted his grip. He did not speak. He did not offer water. He simply existed as the cold, beautiful fact of my new life while I forced the same degrading, grateful sentence onto the page over and over.

Somewhere around line forty the wanting rose again, sharp and dangerous.

I wanted to tell him. I wanted to stop writing, look up, and say the name that lived under my tongue like a prayer and a curse.