The pain started behind my ribs and spread downward, slow and mean, like a hand closing around the inside of my stomach.

I kept my face still.

That was something I had learned in three years of marriage to Dante Moretti. Pain did not matter unless someone powerful decided it did. Hunger did not matter. Fever did not matter. A wife crying in the hallway did not matter.

Money mattered.

And I had ten dollars.

The cashier behind the pharmacy counter scanned the small box of painkillers and looked at the register.

“Fourteen dollars.”

I already knew the price. I had stood in this aisle for ten minutes, reading the label, checking the shelf tag, doing the math again and again as if the numbers might soften if I stared long enough.

They had not.

I unfolded the bill in my hand. It was damp from my palm and creased so many times the edges had gone soft.

“I only have ten,” I said. “Can I bring the rest tomorrow?”

The cashier looked up at me.

She was young, maybe twenty-two, with glossy nails and a name tag that said Brianna. Her eyes moved from my face to my coat, then to the scuffed toes of my shoes. I watched her decide what I was before I could say anything else.

“No.”

“It’s just four dollars.”

“That’s still money.”

“I know.” My voice came out too thin, so I tried again. “Please. I can leave something here. My coat, maybe. I’ll come back tomorrow with the rest.”

I started to take off my coat.

It used to be gray. Now it was the color of dirty snow, worn pale at the cuffs, the lining torn near the pocket. I knew how it looked. I knew no one in this part of Las Vegas would touch it unless they had to.

Still, it was all I had.

Brianna stared at the coat for half a second and pushed the box of pills back behind the counter.

“We don’t take trash as payment.”

The man behind me made an impatient sound.

I felt heat rise to my face. Not anger. Shame. Shame was warmer than hunger and sharper than cold.

“I’m not trying to cheat you,” I said.

“Then pay.”

I held the ten-dollar bill tighter.

My fingers trembled. I pressed my free hand against my stomach and tried not to bend over. The old injury under my ribs had been bad all morning, but by evening the pain had turned bright and steady. I had not eaten since yesterday. That made it worse. Everything made it worse.

“I really need the medicine.”

Brianna sighed like I was making her late for something important.

“Lady, everybody needs something.”

She called over the security guard.

I should have walked away before he reached me. I knew that. There was a point in every humiliation when leaving on your own still counted as leaving. After that, someone else removed you, and whatever little dignity you had left stayed behind on the floor.

But I kept looking at the box of pills.

Four dollars.

Dante had once spent four hundred thousand dollars on a bottle of Scotch at a charity auction because a senator had annoyed him. Four dollars would not have paid for the ice in his glass.

The guard took my arm.

“I’m going,” I said.

He did not loosen his grip.

“I said I’m going.”

He walked me to the door anyway. His hand was not rough, exactly. He was not trying to hurt me. That almost made it worse. To him I was not even worth cruelty. I was just a problem to move outside.

The door opened. Cold air hit my face.

My knee caught the metal threshold when he let go. I stumbled, tried to catch myself, and fell hard onto the sidewalk.

The ten-dollar bill slipped from my hand and landed near a dark patch of rainwater.

For a moment, I stayed there.

The pavement was wet. Grit stuck to my palm. My knee burned through the thin fabric of my dress. People moved around me without slowing down. Las Vegas had a way of swallowing small disasters. A woman on the sidewalk was nothing. A woman without money was even less.

I reached for the bill before the wind could take it.

That was when the giant screen across the street changed.

A news segment flashed over the glass side of the building, bright enough to make my eyes ache.

Dante Moretti stood on the deck of a private yacht, the black water behind him broken by soft gold reflections. He wore a dark suit, no tie, his shirt open at the throat. He looked calm. Untouchable. Like the city had been built for men like him to stand above it.

Celeste Vale stood in front of him.

She tilted her head, laughing, while Dante fastened a sapphire necklace around her throat. The stone rested against her skin like a drop of midnight. His fingers brushed the back of her neck. He was careful with the clasp. Patient.

I knew those hands.

I knew the weight of them at my waist when he had still wanted me close. I knew the warmth of his palm against my cheek the night he had found me shaking in an alley outside my college dorm. I knew the way his thumb had once rubbed circles over the scar beneath my ribs and how he had whispered, I will never let anything touch you again.

The headline rolled beneath the video.

MORETTI DON GIFTS SAPPHIRE NECKLACE TO CELESTE VALE DURING PRIVATE HARBOR CELEBRATION

Someone stopped beside me.

“Oh my God, is that Dante Moretti?”

“Who’s the girl?”

“Celeste Vale. She’s everywhere with him lately.”

“I thought he had a wife.”

A laugh.

“That gold-digger? The one who demanded five million dollars at the wedding? Please. If I were him, I’d keep a woman like Celeste too.”

The words landed cleanly.

Gold-digger.

I used to flinch when people said it. Then I learned not to. A word could only cut so many times before the skin grew numb around it.

But tonight, sitting on the sidewalk with blood on my palm and ten dollars in my hand, it hurt again.

Dante lowered his head on the screen. Celeste turned her face, and he let her kiss the corner of his mouth.

He did not pull away.

I looked down at my left hand.

My wedding ring was loose now. I had lost weight. The simple band slid a little when I moved my finger, but it still caught the streetlight. Inside it, in tiny uneven letters, Dante had carved a promise himself.

Till my last breath.

He had done it with a small knife at three in the morning, sitting on the kitchen floor of the first apartment we shared. His hair had been wet from the shower. His sleeves had been rolled up. He had looked younger then, not softer exactly, but less guarded.

“You’ll ruin it,” I had told him.

“It’s mine to ruin,” he had said.

Then he had looked at me and corrected himself.

“Ours.”

I almost laughed at the memory.

The ring had outlived the promise.

My phone buzzed in my coat pocket.

I took it out carefully. The screen was cracked from the corner to the middle, a white spiderweb over Dante’s name in my contacts.

The message was from St. Agnes Mission Hospital.

MARGARET HART: PAYMENT OVERDUE. PAIN MANAGEMENT WILL BE SUSPENDED AT 12:00 A.M. UNLESS ACCOUNT IS UPDATED.

My mother’s name made the noise of the street fade.

Margaret Hart.

Once, she had taught literature at a community college and wore pearl earrings even to the grocery store. She had smelled like lavender soap and black tea. She had corrected my grammar at dinner and kept every birthday card I ever made her.

Now she lay in a charity hospital bed with a failing liver, weak kidneys, and a body that seemed to shrink every time I visited.

I had promised her I would bring money tonight.

I looked back at the pharmacy door.

Fourteen dollars for pills I could not buy. Three hundred dollars, at least, to keep my mother’s pain pump running. Five million dollars, according to my husband, before I was allowed to leave him.

My chest tightened.

Not from pain this time.

From the old, useless instinct to call Dante.

I hated that instinct.

I hated the part of me that still remembered the man he had been before our wedding day, before the check, before his mother’s lies, before he looked at me as if I had sold myself in front of his entire family.

Three years ago, I had stood in a white dress under a ceiling of roses and asked him for five million dollars.

I had not wanted the money.

I had wanted my mother to live.

Vittoria Moretti had made sure those two things became the same in Dante’s eyes.

I could still feel the cold of the small room behind the chapel. Vittoria sitting with her legs crossed, a phone in her hand. On the screen, my mother lay unconscious with tubes taped to her mouth.

“Ask for the money,” Vittoria had said.

“No.”

“Then the oxygen stops.”

I had believed Dante would ask me why.

I had believed love meant he would see the terror on my face and know something was wrong.

He did not ask.

He signed the check.

Then he put the ring on my finger and said, in front of God and both our families, “Expensive little bride.”

After that, every kindness in him closed like a door.

My phone buzzed again.

Low battery.

I stared at Dante’s name.

Calling him was stupid. Calling him would give him another chance to spit on what little pride I had left. Calling him would not save my mother.

But I did not need his love tonight.

I did not even need his belief.

I needed his signature.

My thumb hovered over his number.

Across the street, the video replayed. Dante fastened the necklace. Celeste smiled up at him. The world watched and called it romance.

I pressed call.

The phone rang once.

Twice.

Five times.

For a moment, I thought he would ignore me. Relief and disappointment twisted together in my stomach.

Then the call connected.

I heard music first.

A violin. Soft laughter. Wind moving over open water.

Then Celeste’s voice, close to the phone.

“Is it her again?”

I closed my eyes.

Dante said nothing yet.

Celeste laughed, light and pretty.

“Put her on speaker, darling. I want to hear what Mrs. Moretti is begging for tonight.”

The Mafia Don’s Betrayed Wife — Chapter 001: Four Dollars Short

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