88Their Marriage Was Never Supposed to Produce an Heir—Until the Mafia Boss Noticed His Wife’s Morning Sickness

By December, the cold war between Cassian and his uncle Marcus had reached its terminal phase.

The Canadian shipments were secured, the traitors in the freight union had been quietly replaced, and Marcus had been forced to yield two major shipping terminals after the federal prosecutor’s office launched an investigation based on the documents dropped on their doorstep three weeks earlier.

To celebrate the 'reconciliation' of the family, Rosalind Raldi decreed that the annual winter solstice dinner would be held at the Oak Park mansion.

Twenty-two people sat around the long mahogany table.

The air was heavy with tension, thick as grease. Marcus sat three seats down from Cassian, his eyes bloodshot, his hands heavy and quiet against his linen napkin. He had lost thirty million dollars in shipping revenue over the previous month, and everyone in the room knew it.

Adeline sat at the head of the table beside Cassian. She wore a simple silver silk dress that matched her mother’s restored hair clip, which was fastened securely in her dark hair.

The meal proceeded in agonizing silence.

Course after course arrived—oysters on iced silver platters, roasted pheasant with winter truffles, rich mushroom broths served in thin porcelain bowls.

Adeline ate little. For the past three days, a strange, persistent fatigue had clung to her limbs. She had attributed it to her sixty-hour work weeks at St. Brendan’s, but this evening, the smell of the roasted pheasant made her stomach turn with a sudden, violent revulsion.

She set her silver fork down and took a small sip of ice water.

Across the table, Marcus was watching her. His eyes were small, dark, and filled with a bitter, dangerous malice.

"You look pale, Mrs. Raldi," Marcus observed, his loud voice cutting through the quiet room. "Perhaps the duties of being a Raldi wife are proving more... taxing... than nursing poor people in a public hospital?"

Adeline looked at him coldly. "My health is perfectly adequate, Mr. Raldi. Though I appreciate your sudden interest in my physiological welfare."

"I merely observe," Marcus sneered, leaning forward. "A woman who works twelve hours a night and lives in a cold house with a man who cannot give her a family... it must be a lonely existence. Though I suppose the two million dollars at the end of three years makes the loneliness palatable?"

A quiet, dangerous rustle went around the table.

Cassian set his knife down. The sharp clack of silver against china sounded like a pistol shot.

"Marcus," Cassian said, his voice dropping into a register so dark and cold that three people at the far end of the table visibly straightened their spines. "You are speaking to my wife."

"I am speaking truth to this table!" Marcus snapped, slamming his heavy hand onto the mahogany surface. "We are playing a farce! A fake marriage to secure voting stock! A nurse bought with cleared debts! And six medical reports from Northwestern that prove this house ends with you!"

Marcus stood up, pointing a thick, trembling finger at Cassian.

"You have no heir! You will never have an heir! The trust charter clearly states that if the head of the house fails to produce a successor by his forty-fifth year, the voting shares revert to the council! You are holding this family hostage with a bloodless contract and a barren bedroom!"

Silence slammed down on the room.

No one moved. No one breathed.

Ezra Cain, standing near the sideboard, shifted his right hand two inches closer to his coat lining.

Cassian did not stand up. He slowly leaned back in his high-backed chair, his dark eyes fixed on Marcus with the absolute, unyielding calm of a guillotine blade waiting at the top of its wooden frame.

"Are you finished, Marcus?" Cassian asked softly.

Before Marcus could answer, the silver soup tureen arrived.

A waiter set a delicate porcelain bowl of chicken and wild mushroom broth in front of Adeline. The steam rose from the bowl, carrying a rich, heavy scent of thyme, fat, and earth.

Adeline reached for her spoon.

She lifted it halfway to her mouth.

Then, without warning, her world tilted.

The smell of the broth hit her olfactory nerves not as food, but as a violent, toxic chemical assault. Her stomach convulsed with a sudden, uncontrollable surge of nausea so powerful that her vision swam with white spots.

The silver tray slipped from her trembling fingers.

It struck the edge of the mahogany table, tilted, and crashed onto the white marble floor with a deafening, shattering clatter. The porcelain bowl burst into a dozen sharp shards, the hot chicken broth spreading across the white stone like an open, yellowish wound.

Adeline gasped, pressing both hands against her mouth. Her face went white as paper, her eyes wide with shock and absolute revulsion.

She pushed her chair back violently, the wood scraping loudly against the floor.

She did not offer an apology. She did not look at Marcus. She did not look at Cassian.

She turned and ran out of the dining room, her silver silk dress sweeping through the shadows of the hallway as she disappeared toward the ground-floor rest room.

Inside the dining room, twenty-two of the most powerful people in Chicago stopped eating.

No one dared breathe.

At the head of the table, Cassian Raldi slowly set down his knife. He watched the hallway where his wife had just vanished, his face completely motionless, his dark eyes locked onto the empty doorway.

He looked down at the sauce spreading across the marble floor like an open wound.

As his pale, trembling wife vanished into the shadows, a dark, terrifying suspicion took root in the mind of the man whose name the city spoke only in lowered voices.