Part 2: He ignored 11 emergency calls from his pregnant wife to stay with his mistress, totally unaware she was being abused as a servant in the very mansion he bought for her.

"Babies?" Dante Russo repeated, the word tasting like ash and iron on his tongue. He stood in the sterile white hallway of Northwestern Memorial Hospital, his tailored charcoal overcoat unbuttoned, his pulse hammering against his ribs like a war drum.

Dr. Ronald Miller, the chief of obstetrics, adjusted his glasses, his expression carved from stone. He was one of the few men in Chicago who didn’t flinch under the lethal gaze of the Russo syndicate’s boss. "Yes, Mr. Russo. Twins. A boy and a girl. Did you genuinely not know?"

Dante felt the floor drop beneath his Italian leather shoes. "She... she was having stomach complications. That’s what I was told."

"Stomach complications?" Dr. Miller let out a bitter, disbelieving laugh. "She is thirty-three weeks pregnant with twins. She has been coming to this hospital every three weeks for high-risk monitoring. And today, your wife was brought in by a city paramedic after suffering blunt-force trauma to her lower back and pelvis."

The doctor stepped aside, gesturing toward the observation window.

Dante slowly moved forward. Through the glass, he saw Emily.

The breath was violently stolen from his lungs. The woman he had married three years ago—the woman with radiant honey-brown hair, laughter that could disarm his darkest impulses, and porcelain skin—looked like a ghost discarded in a gutter.

She was drowning in an oversized, coarse black cotton maid’s dress, the white collar frayed and stained with dark drops of dried blood. Her delicate wrists were bruised purple, the shape of harsh fingers etched into her pale flesh. Her lip was split, and her face was paper-white, obscured by an oxygen mask fogging with every ragged, shallow breath.

"What is she wearing?" Dante’s voice came out as a gravelly whisper, dangerous and trembling. "Why is my wife wearing a maid’s uniform?"

"I was hoping you could answer that," Dr. Miller said coldly. "The paramedics found her on the floor of your foyer. The staff claimed she tripped. But these contusions around her arms and shoulders are defensive wounds, Mr. Russo. Someone put their hands on her before she fell down those stairs."

Dante’s mind flashed back to his phone. He thrust his hand into his coat pocket, pulling out the encrypted device.

Eleven missed calls. All between 9:00 AM and 10:30 AM.

During those exact hours, he had been sitting in the VIP lounge of the Drake Hotel, sipping Macallan while Vanessa massaged his shoulders, whispering that Emily was just having another one of her emotional, demanding tantrums to pull him away from business. *‘She’s just jealous, Dante. Let her calm down. You know how dramatic she gets when she wants attention.’*

He had flipped the phone face down on the mahogany table. He had ignored her.

While his wife—carrying his son and daughter—was falling down a flight of stairs, bleeding and begging for help, he had let another woman pour him whiskey.

A terrifying roar of fury, raw and suffocating, clawed up Dante’s throat. His knuckles turned white as he slammed his fist into the reinforced drywall, shattering the plaster. Several nurses gasped, retreating down the corridor.

"Is she going to survive?" Dante choked out, his eyes bloodshot, fixing on Miller. "Are my children going to live?"

"She has placental abruption," Miller said bluntly. "We’ve stabilized the bleeding for now, but she is in critical condition. The next twenty-four hours will decide if she goes into premature labor. If she does, we cannot guarantee the survival of either infant. And if the hemorrhage restarts, you could lose your wife, Mr. Russo."

Dante leaned against the glass, placing a trembling palm against the cold surface right where Emily’s pale, motionless hand lay on the other side. "Save them," he whispered, his voice cracking with an agony no rival bullet had ever inflicted. "Take my blood. Take my heart. Just save them."

Footsteps clicked rhythmically down the corridor.

Dante didn’t turn around, but the faint scent of French lavender and expensive vanilla warned him of who had arrived.

"Dante, darling!" Vanessa Laurent’s voice was breathless, theatrical, dripping with manufactured worry. She hurried toward him, dressed in an ivory cashmere coat, the five-carat diamond pendant Dante had purchased for Emily’s twenty-fifth birthday resting prominently against her collarbone. "I rushed over as soon as I heard! The housekeeper told me Emily had an accident. God, I told her not to carry laundry down those slippery stairs, but she simply wouldn't listen—"