The Donna’s Exit

"I agree to the divorce," I said as I dialed my mother-in-law's number. "Matteo Bellandi will never agree to divorce me, so you need to arrange a new identity for me. I need to disappear completely. He must never find me."

Despite six years of marriage, I never conceived a child.

In the Mafia world, how many men remarried for the sake of an heir? Yet Matteo always stood firmly at my side.

To have a child, we tried everything—ninety-nine rounds of IVF that resulted in ninety-eight failures. The final pregnancy ended in fetal demise.

Matteo held me and said, "Whether we have a child or not, I will always love you."

Everyone said he was deeply devoted and that I was fortunate.

Even I believed it. I believed it was my body that was defective. I believed I was the one holding him back.

Until that day, when I went to the hospital for a follow-up exam.

I saw him with my own eyes, pushing a mobile hospital bed into a VIP suite. On the bed lay a young woman named Sienna Vale, who had just given birth, holding a pair of twins—a boy and a girl.

The congratulations inside the room were sharp and piercing. They praised his good fortune and Sienna's superior genes. They said the children were born to inherit the Bellandi empire.

They mocked my education and my background and said I could not produce a "high-quality" heir.

"Who do you think you are, daring to speak about her? My wife is not someone you get to judge. If I hear one more word of disrespect toward my Donna, you'd better weigh the consequences yourself," Matteo rebuked them coldly, preserving my dignity as Donna.

In that moment, I finally understood that the marriage I had been so proud of was nothing more than a joke in everyone else's eyes.

If that was the case, I would end this love story everyone envied with my own hands.

The moment I opened my eyes, my head felt like it was splitting apart.

Matteo Bellandi was sitting at the edge of my hospital bed. His suit was wrinkled beyond recognition, and his eyes were bloodshot, veins webbing through the whites.

When he saw that I was awake, his whole body seemed to loosen in relief. He tightened his grip around my hand.

"Giana, you're awake."

I tried to speak, but my throat burned with sharp pain.

He immediately reached for the glass of water on the nightstand, carefully guiding the straw to my lips.

"Slowly. The doctor said your emotions spiked too hard. When you fainted, you hit your head and suffered a mild concussion."

"When... did you get back?" I asked.

"Last night. The second I got the call, I flew back from New York." He reached out and brushed his fingers across my forehead. "I handed that deal off to my team. Nothing is more important than you."

I knew which deal he meant. It was