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

I miss her so damn much it feels like someone’s reached into my chest and is squeezing my heart with a fist made of broken glass.

Every breath cuts.

Every heartbeat is betrayal.

****

A WEEK PASSES, BUT there’s just silence from her end. My phone buzzes, but I let it go to voicemail even when it’s Olivio’s name that flashes on the screen. Can’t handle my younger brother’s questions right now.

Ever since abducting my wife, my own father’s only deigned to answer one— one, dammit!— of my calls.

“At least tell me how she is.”

But instead he changes the subject like my wife is no longer a topic I have any right to discuss.

“How’s negotiations going with the Prince of Contini?”

“I’m calling about Sienah, dammit.”

“I was afraid of that.”

“What do you—”

Fuck.

There’s no point saying anything else, with my own father hanging up on me.

And I think that’s when something in me finally snaps.

****

“W ELCOME HOME, DARLING .”

The voice is Sienah’s, but wrong. Too bright. Too confident. Missing that soft uncertainty that made me want to gather her close and keep her safe from everything, including myself.

She’s standing in a kitchen I don’t recognize, wearing that blue sundress I bought her in Positano but she never wore because she said it was too revealing. Except now she looks comfortable in it, radiant in it, glowing with a happiness I’ve never put on her face.

A man walks through the door. Tall, dark-haired, face blurred like a dream but his presence solid and real.

He drops his briefcase and crosses to her in three strides, pulling her into the kind of kiss I’m only now realizing I never gave her.

Not really. Not the coming-home-to-you-is-everything kind of kiss. *

“I love you,” she whispers against his mouth.

The words I trained her not to need.

“I love you too.” The words flow from him easily, naturally, like breathing. Like they cost nothing. Like they’re not the hardest fucking words in human language.

Her face blossoms. There’s no other word for it. She transforms into something incandescent, and I realize with crushing clarity that this is what she could have looked like every day if I hadn’t been such a coward.

“Come here,” she whispers, taking his hand.

I try to move, try to stop this, but I’m frozen. Trapped. Pounding on barriers that don’t exist while she leads another man toward their bedroom.

She turns back once, and for a moment I think she sees me. Think she’ll stop this nightmare. But she looks right through me like I’m already a ghost, already erased from her life as thoroughly as she’s trying to erase herself from mine.

Then she starts unbuttoning her dress, and I’m screaming but no sound comes out, thrashing against nothing while she offers another man everything that used to be mine—

I wake with her name tearing from my throat, sheets soaked with sweat, heart hammering like I’ve just run five flights of stairs again.

No. Fuck. No.

My phone screen glows 3:47 AM. No messages. No missed calls. Just that digital silence that’s been eating me alive for days.

I check anyway, desperate for any sign of her. A read receipt. A typing indicator that appears and disappears. Anything that proves she still exists in the same universe as me.

Nothing .

Always nothing.

The ring on my pinky catches the phone’s light, throwing fractured rainbows on the ceiling.

Just like her eyes used to catch the light when she smiled.

Used to.

Past tense.

Everything about her is past tense now.

I stumble to the bathroom, splash water on my face. The mirror shows a stranger with hollow cheeks, three-day stubble, eyes like burnt-out headlights. This is what Aivan Cannizzaro looks like without his wife.

Pathetic.

Lost.

Exactly what I deserve.

****

M Y PARENTS ARRIVE FOR lunch at some tourist trap near the harbor. I haven’t slept since the nightmare, haven’t showered, probably look like death walking.

“You look terrible,” Miguel observes calmly. “What have you been up to?”

“Shouldn’t I be the one asking you that,” I bite out, “considering you’re the one who had my wife abducted?”

Selena looks at me with a pained expression. “I know you don’t truly think that, Aivan.”

“What else am I supposed to think when I can’t even talk—”

“It’s not that you can’t, mijo, ” Miguel interrupts. “But it’s that you don’t deserve to after what you’ve done.”

Anger gets the best of me, with my fist slamming hard against the table, but it’s only my stepmother who flinches. “ Basta! You have no right—”

My father’s face hardens. “If I can arrange your wedding, what makes you think I can’t just as easily arrange your divorce...and another wedding for Sienah to another man?”

Did my own father just threaten—

Did I just fucking hear—

I stare at the older man in enraged disbelief. “She’s my wife.”

“She is also my daughter-in-law and the only child of someone we consider famiglia. What I care about is what’s best for Sienah—”

“And you think I’m not?” I explode.

“We know you can be the best for her—” It’s Selena speaking again, and just like how it always with my stepmother, her few choice words are more than enough to knock me off my high horse.

“But did you ever care to try? Were you ever the best for her, Aivan? Because all I remember from the past ten years was your wife doing everything she can to please you while receiving nothing in return.”

Every word she says cuts me to the core, and I just have no fucking way to defend myself because it’s true.

All of it is so fucking true, but...does that really have to mean I’ve lost her for good?

“She might never have said the words, but you knew, Aivan. We all knew that she loved you, but you never...” Selena’s voice falters as she struggles not to cry.

“The whole world noticed every time you broke her heart! She might not have ever said a word, but it is so easy to see how you’ve been taking her for granted.

” Selena’s face finally crumples, and my father covers her hand with his in a protective gesture that makes me swallow hard.

Just looking at them makes me wonder if there were times when Sienah was the one who needed comforting.

But not once was I there for her.

Not once.

“I think it’s time we cut to the chase.”

I tense in my seat at the grimness of my father’s tone.

“Selena and I have discussed several options about what’s best for Sienah.”

What the hell does he mean by options, and why is my father talking about my wife like our marriage is truly done and over with? Does he really think I’d just roll over and let him—

“In the event that we see no evidence of you turning a new leaf, we will arrange to have your marriage annulled—”

Has my father gone mad?

“In fact, we already have someone lined up for her—”

Un-fucking-believable.

“And this time, we’ve made sure he’s your complete opposite.”

“Then you’ve just chosen a man who’ll bore her to death—”

“Better that,” Miguel retorts, “than someone who cheats.”

“I never cheated—”

“There are many ways to betray someone,” Miguel says.

“You may not have touched another woman, but you let them think you might. Let Sienah think she wasn’t enough to hold your attention.

Do you have any idea what that does to a woman?

To watch her husband entertain the flirtations of others while she stands there, invisible? ”

Invisible .

The word Sienah used that last night.

I’ve been invisible for ten years.

The restaurant spins. Or maybe that’s just me, lost without my fixed point, the constant I never knew I was navigating by until she was gone.

“Please.” The word scrapes out of me, raw and desperate. “Just let me see her. Let me explain—”

“I’m sorry, son.” The gentleness of my father’s voice is worse than his anger, with how it makes me feel like I’ve lost all hope of getting my wife back. “She was yours for ten years. But you threw her away. What happens now is out of your hands, and you only have yourself to blame.”

I sit in that restaurant until the sun sets, and the waiters start stacking chairs, and someone gently suggests I might be more comfortable elsewhere.

But comfortable is the last thing I deserve to be.

Not when she’s out there somewhere, probably crying herself to sleep the way she must have done so many nights while I worked late or traveled for races or simply failed to come home because the garage was more interesting than dinner with my wife.

My wife.

Two words that used to feel like ownership.

Now they just feel like the obituary for everything I was too stupid to value while I had it.