The wedding was set for June. Three months to plan what would essentially be the social event of the decade for the Commission.
But two months before the wedding, everything changed.
I woke up one morning feeling off. Not sick exactly, just different. My coffee tasted wrong. The smell of Dante's cologne, which I'd loved for twenty-five years, suddenly made me nauseous.
"You okay?" he asked, watching me push away my breakfast.
"Fine. Just tired."
"You've been tired for two weeks."
"We're planning a massive wedding, dealing with Bratva politics, and running an empire. Tired is my baseline."
But the fatigue got worse. And the nausea. And then I missed my period.
"No," I said to my reflection in the bathroom mirror. "Absolutely not. I'm forty-three. This doesn't happen."
But the pregnancy test said otherwise.
Positive.
I stared at it for a full five minutes, my mind completely blank.
