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‘You’re pregnant? Tell me that bastardo is not the father. I swear, I’ll kill him.’
Her skin shivered with goosebumps as she tried to make sense of how Carlo had learned the truth. She’d been so careful, and she knew Antonio understood her desire to keep their marriage quiet. So? How had Carlo learned of this?
She clicked into the next voicemail; it was even angrier.
‘Call me back, damn it! What the hell is happening? You married Antonio Herrera? He’ll eat you alive and spit you back out for breakfast. How could you be so stupid? The man is a bastard, capable of only hatred and revenge. He is the devil.’
The next one was just a string of angry Italian, finishing with, ‘How could you do this to me? He’s using you, Amelia—and, damn it, you’re letting him. He’s using you to get to me!’
She was ice-cold and dropped the phone to the bed just as it began to ring anew. Carlo.
She lifted it to her ear. ‘Digame.’
‘Damn it, where have you been, Millie?’
‘Not near my phone,’ she said, sitting down on the edge of the bed, numb.
‘Well?’ The word was bitten out and she swept her eyes shut. ‘Is it true?’
‘I...’
‘You’re married to him?’
‘I...’
‘Damn it! Do you know who he is? He hates us, Millie. How could you do this?’
‘It wasn’t...’ She bit down on her lip and stared at he
r hands, her wedding ring glinting as she looked at it.
‘He’s using you!’
‘No, it’s not like that. Our marriage isn’t...anything to do with this feud.’
He swore in disagreement. ‘He told me he would take everything I care about and destroy it, just for the sake of it. I thought he meant my businesses; I had no clue he was speaking of my own sister. He seduced you and convinced you to marry him purely to hurt me. Can’t you see that?’
‘No!’ She shook her head, her mind clinging to the intimacy she shared with her husband, to the truth of what they’d become.
‘Yes. Do you doubt him capable of it? He who has set out to bring down our whole empire?’
‘You did the same to him,’ she fired at him, her stomach in knots.
‘To get him to back off!’ Carlo grunted. ‘But this was always about him—and his ability to destroy us. His sick need to avenge a generations-old feud. This is the man you’ve married. Is this bastardo to be the father to my nephew?’
She wanted to dispute what he’d said, but memories of conversations spun into her mind—his description of his childhood, the love he’d felt for his father. A father who’d suffered as a result of Carlo’s machinations.
It was all too hard to process.
‘How did you find out about us?’ she asked, turning to the one thing she could attempt to make sense of in that moment.
‘The article,’ he snarled. ‘Tell me you’ve seen it?’
‘I...no.’
‘Then you are in for a wake-up call. Your husband—’ he spat the word ‘—couldn’t help boasting about taking over our family empire. “A perfect merger”, he calls it. You are little more than an afterthought—a bride for the sake of business. This is the man you married.’
Her chest felt as if it were being washed with acid. Panic was curving around her, and the baby in her belly began to flip and flop in response to the adrenal surge.
