Page 211 of Falling for the Wife

Tonight should have been something celebrated. My son—my beautiful baby—was born, yet I had to deal with the biggest blow any man could fathom. And knowing myself, I couldn’t set it aside and wait for tomorrow. No. If I wasn’t going to get any peace of mind, my mother shouldn’t be afforded a restful night.

The torrent of emotions made me manic. The disbelief, the anger—I was spinning in a whirlwind of emotions. I could almost shake from the intensity of it. I wanted to hurt someone, hurl something,anything.

Driving through the familiar streets of Rome, I raced towards my parents’ home, past caring that my father was most likely home. He deserved to understand the depth of my mother’s lunacy.

The second I saw my childhood home, my temper skyrocketed to new heights. I was so consumed by my emotions that I didn’t bother to park my car, nor did I shut off the engine. The second the car stopped, I got out of it and furiously marched into the house, walking past the loyal staff who were in the middle of greeting me, their words left hanging at the very sight of my riled up demeanor.

“Mama!” I screamed into the foyer before scouring the living room. “Mama!” Once I found it empty, I carried on to the formal dining hall.

“Luca?” My father’s bewildered voice met me halfway before entering the dining area.

So they were dining, and I had interrupted it. Great. It was just as well that Papa was here. It was best to deal with this bundle of surprise with both of them in the room.

“Where’s that wretched bitch you married?” I demanded.

My father’s appalled expression didn’t faze me, not one iota. Before I got the chance to say another word, the devil incarnate decided to show her face.

“Luca?” The woman who called herself my mother appeared behind my father. “Why are you calling me such filth? Don’t you have any respect for your own mother?” Her eyes flashed at me, livid as her voice shook, staring me down with disdain. “Do you see how your son treats me?” she said in outrage to my father.

“Oh, this is just the beginning. Count on it!”

I wasn’t swayed by her display of being the loving, wounded mother. She was a snake, and I wasn’t one to be bought by her ploy.

The very thought of my son riled me further to my cause. I was seeing red, and I wasn’t going to stop until she was feeling the despair I was experiencing.

Gazing her dead in the eye, I seethed more. “How fucking dare you play God! I could fucking choke you for trying to kill my child. My fuckingson!”

Her eyes widened, appearing paralyzed. She knew I was about to expose how she had wretchedly manipulated my life.

As our eyes connected, I waited until I drew fear, until it danced before me, basking in the sight of her being beyond unbalanced.

“Oh, you think I wasn’t going to find out? You’re fucking with thewrongdi Medici! I am not like Papa. I am not going to fucking close my bloody eyes and ears while you do your dirty work on the side.”

“Luca, what is this about, son?” My father disregarded the rest, honing in on the one information that stood out above the rest. “You have a son? I don’t understand …” His face contorted as he watched the pale, horrified expression on my mother’s Botox-filled face. “Felicia, what have you done?”

What had she done? The damage was irreversible. I couldn’t even begin to analyze the depth of it, nor could I fathom how to begin fixing it. My mother hadn’t simply burned a bridge. She had poured gas, changed her mind, then decided to nuke it, but at the last minute, she retracted her decision before she decided to drag it to Hell or Purgatory. What made it worse was the very idea that she was condemning her own flesh and blood, her own grandchild, as if he were rubbish to be discarded. And for that, I couldn’t forgive her.

“You are no mother!” I spat at her. “I wouldn’t have found out that he had been born had the baby not needed me for a blood transfusion. Do you haveanyfucking idea how thatfeels?Do you!”

My father knew now that I was beyond restraint. The look in his eyes told me that he sympathized with my pain.

I didn’t dare come near her in fear that I might choke the life out of her. No words could fully describe how violated, how rabid I was. I felt borderline psychotic. I was ruled by an uncontrollable cloak of emotions. There was no escaping it. It ravaged me until there was nothing left.

“The web of deceit you have weaved, the master of it all, simply because you feel it’s in your right to fuck with my life as you have all this time. Well, no more. You’re going to pay for this! I don’t fucking care how or when, but—”

“I did it for you, Luca. I did it out of my love for you, all for the good of this family,” she admitted in a slight whisper as she tried to compose herself, pale as a sheet of paper. “I had her followed because she’s the only woman you kept going back to. I needed to know everything about her—if she was planning to trap you for money like most of those women do. The day the investigator revealed she was pregnant after she had actually gone to get an x-ray before she even realized she was … I knew I had to take care of the problem. I just wouldn’t allow it. No di Medici in history was ever born disabled or retarded. I didn’t intend for this generation to start now.”

Porca Madonna.“You think my son, your own flesh and blood, is a fucking problem?”

“How could I let my only son have a retarded child? Do you know what that means? I was doing everyone a favor. I only did it to protect you!”

“Protect me?How is that possible? You’ve taken the only chance of happiness I could ever have. You took that away from me! How could you see my son in such a manner? He’s an innocent baby. Whether there were complications or not, he’s still my son! I will never forgive you for this, Mama. From now on, you’re dead to me.” My unforgiving eyes stared straight into her black, ruthless heart. “Mark my words, this is the last time you’ll see me,” I vowed. There was no recovering from this. She had best realize that.

My burning gaze was immediately directed towards my shell-shocked father. “If you want to be a part of my life still, and my son’s, then you better leave this wretched woman. I am not going to have a snake in my family, even by association.”

“In case you have forgotten, Felicia”—I refused to call her mother any longer—“I am a di Medici, and my son is, too. You should pray that you die before Father, because you will be atmymercy. You won’t get a cent from me. Everything you have and own is temporary. They’re all mine. Don’t ever bloody dare forget that beautiful fact.”

With those words, I departed without a backwards glance. She was so bent on preserving a lineage, a history that wasn’t even hers to begin with. She had married into it, so she could easily be expelled from it, too … through divorce. The last name was the only thing she had going, and without that false sense of entitlement, she would be nothing. She should have known better than to fuck up the relationship with Kim, but to involve Gian Luca in her madness … That was what I simply couldn’t get past. Nothing would come between my son and me. Not a goddamned thing.