Page 13 of The Sicilian Billionaire’s Neglected Wife (A Painful Kind of Love #14)

T HE ELEVATOR DOORS are closing.

Silver steel sliding shut on the only thing that’s ever mattered, and I’ve been too fucking stupid to realize it until now.

Time moves wrong in dreams. One second the doors are open. The next they’re halfway closed. No in-between. No chance to run.

Sienah stands in the back corner, bracketed by Eusebio and two of my father’s men. Her face is pale porcelain, those brown eyes that used to look at me with stars now empty as abandoned rooms. She holds herself carefully, like movement might shatter her into pieces too small to put back together.

Our eyes meet for one suspended heartbeat.

The air goes solid.

Then the doors seal shut, and she’s gone.

“No.” The word rips from my throat as I lunge forward, jabbing at the button. Down arrow lights up mockingly. Too late. Always too fucking late when it comes to understanding what matters.

My fist connects with the elevator panel. Pain shoots through my knuckles, sharp and real and welcome.

The stairwell door crashes against the wall as I burst through. Five flights down, taking them three at a time, my Testoni loafers skidding on concrete. My lungs burn but not as much as the panic clawing at my chest.

Mine. She’s mine. They can’t take what’s mine.

Except she isn’t, is she? Not when I’ve spent ten years treating our marriage like a business merger. Not when I filed those fucking papers. Not when I let another woman touch me while my wife watched.

The lobby is empty.

Silent.

Wrong .

Marble and glass and sophisticated emptiness where my whole world should be standing. The security guard barely glances up from his newspaper. Normal Tuesday afternoon in Monaco. No sign that everything has just gone catastrophically wrong.

The air conditioning hums, people walking all around me, the world spinning the way it always has...even when my own world has crashed into an agonizing stop.

Fuck, no.

A sound has finally permeated my shock, the distinctive whump-whump-whump of helicopter blades cutting through sea air, and my blood becomes ice water as I sprint outside just in time to see the family chopper lifting off from the building’s pad.

Through the glass bubble, I catch one last glimpse of dark hair, of slim shoulders curving inward like she’s trying to disappear.

My phone is in my hand before conscious thought. Speed dial 1 has always been my trainer. But sometime in the last week of hell, muscle memory has changed that.

But before I can even call her, my own phone rings, and of course, of course...

It’s my wife’s kidnapper calling.

“We do not hurt our own, Aivan.”

And he’s no one else but my own father.

“I know how it looks,” I grit out, watching the helicopter become a speck against the azure sky. My free hand clenches and unclenches, still feeling the phantom weight of her in my arms from all those mornings I carried her back to bed. “But I swear, I never touched another woman—”

“Then that makes it worse.” The temperature in his voice drops another ten degrees. “You broke your wife’s heart for nothing, and that brings even greater shame to our famiglia.”

Shame.

That word.

It lands between us, heavy as stone.

“Just let me explain—”

“It is too late. I made a promise to Sienah’s mother. If you hurt her daughter, she could ask to have her back.” A pause weighted with finality. “She has asked.”

No.

No.

No.

“And so I must keep my word.”

“I will never give Sienah up—”

“I know.” My father sighs, and in the background I can hear the helicopter rotors, can hear my whole life flying away. “Why do you think I’m flying her out myself?”

The line goes dead.

My phone screen cracks under the pressure of my grip. Or maybe that’s the sound of my ribs cracking, heart trying to beat its way free from the chest that’s caged it for thirty-eight years of emotional cowardice.

The concrete burns through my suit as I stand there. Watching. The helicopter is gone now, swallowed by sky and distance, but I keep staring at the empty blue like she might rematerialize.

She won’t.

Back through the lobby. The guard looks up this time, something like pity in his weathered face. Back up the elevator. The ghost of her still clings to the small space. Back to Adriano’s office where Myca is standing too close to my friend, probably already calculating her next move.

Her smile falters when she sees my face.

Good .

“You’re fired.”

The words come out arctic, final. Myca’s perfectly outlined mouth falls open.

“Excuse me? You can’t just—”

“I can. I am. HR will send your final check and a generous severance package.”

My voice sounds dead. Matches how I feel.

“This is about that little scene earlier, isn’t it?” She steps closer, swaying her hips in what she probably thinks is enticing. “I was only trying to help. You looked so tense in the limo, so I offered to...relax you. It’s not my fault your little wife got the wrong idea.”

Little wife.

The words echo in the space between us.

How dare she call my Sienah like she’s something insignificant and disposable?

“Nothing happened,” I say flatly. “Because I don’t cheat on my wife. Not with you. Not with anyone.”

The truth of it sits heavy on my tongue. Ten years. Ten fucking years and not once did I stray. Not because of honor or love or any noble emotion.

Because no one else was her.

“You’re insane, you know that?” Myca spats. “That mouse of a wife obviously can’t keep you satisfied if you’re already filing for divorce after ten years.”

My hands curl into fists, the knuckles I bloodied on the elevator panel throbbing in time with my heartbeat. I want to throttle her for talking about my wife in such a wife, but I despise myself even more, knowing that the only reason she’s here in the first place is because of me.

Myca shoots a furious look at my direction as she grabs her briefcase. “When you get bored playing devoted husband, don’t come crawling to me.”

The door slams behind her, and nobody moves for several seconds. The office air feels too thick. Then Shayla steps out from behind Adriano’s desk, her face several shades paler than normal.

“Where’s Sienah?”

“With the worst possible person she could be with.”

Her hands fly to her mouth. The gesture is so like something Sienah would do that it cuts fresh wounds. “What do you mean?”

Adriano is the one to answer, silver eyes grave. “He means his all-powerful father, who—if memory serves correctly—already has the ball rolling as we speak.”

****

T HE NEXT DAYS ARE TORTURE .

Hours bleed into each other, formless and wrong. Time moves like it does in nightmares: racing when I need it to slow, crawling when I need it to fly.

I take leave from racing, the first time in twenty years I’ve voluntarily stepped away from a car. Gabriel Contini can keep his three hundred million euros. What good is being the world’s highest-paid driver when I can’t drive to the one place that matters?

My apartment becomes a mausoleum. Her coffee cup still sits by the sink, burgundy lipstick staining the rim. I can’t wash it. Can’t throw it away. Can’t do anything but stare at that perfect imprint of her mouth and remember all the mornings she kissed me goodbye with those same lips.

Five thousand mornings.

Gone .

Sicily rises from the Mediterranean like a warning.

Mount Etna smokes in the distance as my chartered plane descends toward Catania, the same airport where I first saw Sienah as something more than the housekeeper’s daughter.

She’d been picking up a package, nineteen and lovely and completely unaware that her fitted jeans and simple ponytail had made me forget how to breathe.

The irony tastes like ash.

I know exactly where she’ll be.

The rental car protests as I push it harder than its engine was meant to go. These winding mountain roads require respect, patience. I have neither. Just this burning need to see her, explain, beg if necessary.

I know champions don’t beg, but fuck being a champion.

My mother-in-law answers the door of the modest townhouse, and I catch the briefest glimpse of pain before her face turns completely blank, her expression closing off like storm windows.

“No.”

One word. Delivered with quiet finality.

“Lynette, please. If I could just—”

Her hand tightens on the door frame, knuckles white. For a second, I think I see her eyes glisten. Then the door closes with a soft, final click.

I stand there, stunned. The afternoon sun beats down, merciless. Somewhere a dog barks. Normal neighborhood sounds while my world falls apart.

I try again the next day. This time she doesn’t even open it all the way, just enough to show one dark eye and half a mouth pressed into a line that could’ve been carved from stone.

“She doesn’t want to see you.”

“I need to explain—”

SLAM .

The wood vibrates from the impact.

The third day, I make it as far as “I’m sorry” before the skies open up, as if Lynette has heaven itself on her side. The rain comes down in sheets, soaking me within seconds.

I stand there on the doorstep while she watches from the second-floor window. Not gloating. Just...sad. Like she’s looking at the ghost of another man who broke promises to another Posada woman.

By the time I give up and return to my car, I’m drenched. Tomorrow I’ll try again. And the next day. And the next.

As many days as it takes.

I try calling, but everything goes to voicemail, and texts are delivered but never read. Emails bounce back with [USER DOES NOT EXIST], and even expedited registered letters come back unopened, my name slashed through with vicious black ink.

Just silence from the wife who used to text me about everything from grocery lists to the shapes she saw in clouds.

Who used to leave voicemails just to hear my voice on the outgoing message.

Who said “I love you” every night for ten years while I gave her nothing back but physical pleasure and a credit card with no limit.