Chapter 1

Eight months pregnant, I carried a folder of papers up to Cassian's private office in the Falcone tower.

Inside, the air was scorching, some forty-six degrees, thick enough to choke on. Just as I reached for the climate control on the wall, the girl at his side stopped me. She'd been placed there by the family, a courier who'd learned to smile at the right men.

"Signora," she said sweetly, "it's my time of the month. I get cold so easily. Please, don't touch it."

I looked at her from the side. My child was growing inside me, and heat like this could kill us both. Without a word, I turned the cooling on anyway.

That evening Cassian came back from a dinner across town and pushed through the door already burning with anger.

"Adriana, Serafina is on her period! Do you even understand that thirty-eight minutes and nineteen seconds of cold air put her in a hospital bed with cramps that nearly gutted her?"

I stared at him, not believing my ears.

"Cassian, are you mocking me because I don't bleed the way she does? I am eight months pregnant. If the heat takes me, that isn't discomfort, it's two coffins. Are you drunk?"

He curled his lips into a mocking smile and nodded slowly. "You're right. That was foolish of me."

That night he held me the way he always had, whispering soft nothings against my hair until I slipped into sleep.

But when I woke, I was no longer in our bed. I was inside a walk-in freezer, walls of glass on every side, the kind they used in the family's front warehouses to move product that couldn't spoil.

Beyond the glass stood a crowd of the crew's sons, the hangers-on and made men's boys, laughing and pointing at me. Cassian stood among them, his arm wrapped around Serafina's slender waist. They looked at me and chuckled.

"Afraid of the heat?" he sneered. "Then let's cool you down properly tonight, cara."

My heart sank.

Calmly, I drew out my phone and photographed every face beyond the glass. Then I dialed a number I knew by heart.

"Papà," I said coldly, "I don't want a single one of these people to see the sun come up tomorrow."

——

There was silence on the line. Then I hung up.

The laughter around me erupted.

"Adriana, your father was dropped into the open sea and fed to the sharks six months ago. Has the cold frozen your brain? Or were you always this stupid?"

"Still playing the Falcone heiress? Not even in your wildest dreams do you get to imagine that anymore."

Cassian watched with pride as his crew tore into me. He slid the fur from his own shoulders and draped it gently over Serafina, then walked slow and easy toward the glass.

He tapped the surface with one finger and smiled, cold as the room he'd put me in.

"Adriana, are you cold now? Do you finally understand what you did wrong?"

The red thermometer outside read minus fifty.

I was shivering, still in the thin nightclothes I'd worn to bed the night before. Where my skin met the frozen floor it had turned blue and numb. The cold pierced like knives.

Shaking hard, I stumbled to the glass and slammed my fist against it.

"Cassian, what did I do wrong? It was forty-six degrees in that room. I only turned on the air! A woman carrying a child cannot take that heat. If I had collapsed, it would have been two lives lost!"

A pain twisted sudden and sharp through my belly.

I clutched myself and folded down onto the ice, eyes bloodshot as I glared up at him.

"Cassian, let me out. You know better than anyone what I suffered to carry this child. I cannot lose him."

Something flickered behind his eyes.

He, of all men, knew what I had gone through.

An accident years back had left Cassian unable to father a child. For eight years I endured thousands of injections, needles the length of my forearm, just to draw out eggs that might hold. Only after all those years had we finally made this baby.

Eight months of careful rest, flat on my back, everything I had given to protect him.

I still remembered the night a servant brought me sugar water that had gone lukewarm, and how the rage took him. He broke her arm for it.

And now, for Serafina's period, he didn't think twice before sealing me inside a freezer.

My chest tightened with bitter despair. Just as I opened my mouth to speak again, Serafina peeled off the fur Cassian had just given her and pressed herself to his arm, tears brimming at the edges of her eyes.

"Cassian, let your wife out," she said softly. "She's delicate, she's frail. She won't survive this. Not like me. I'm only a poor girl, used to going without. I've fainted in freezing rooms before, and I never even dared to complain."