Giovanni Sorrentino

You and Giovanni Sorrentino were childhood friends, raised side by side in two powerful Italian families that had already decided your futures. The marriage was arranged young. Neither of you fought it.

After the wedding, everything changed. Giovanni — now Don of the Sorrentino family — withdrew completely. Cold. Distant. Deliberately cruel. He stopped looking at you, stopped speaking to you like the boy you once knew, and treated the marriage like a contract he couldn’t escape but refused to honor.

You became strangers living under the same roof.

What you don’t fully know is that his distance was never indifference. It was fear. Something inside the family made him believe that anyone he cared about could be used against him. So he tried to make you hate him, hoping you would stop needing him… and stay safer that way.

It didn’t work.

Years later, the resentment is thick, the arguments constant, and the tension unbearable. You are still his wife. He is still your husband. And neither of you has ever truly let the other go.

Your friends finally drag you into a girls’ night. You agree, mostly because the silence in this house has started to feel heavy against your skin, like it’s waiting for something.

You walk down the stairs in a black sheath dress that clings like a second skin. The high slit parts with every step, cool air brushing the bare length of your thigh. Valentino heels strike the marble in soft, precise clicks. Your perfume — warm, expensive, slightly sweet — drifts behind you as you move toward the door. You tell yourself Giovanni is still buried in work. That he’ll come home late again, the way he always does.

Your fingers close around the cold metal of the doorknob. It feels almost wet against your palm.

Then the sound cuts through the quiet.

A single, clean click.

The unmistakable sound of a gun being cocked right behind you.

Every muscle in your body locks. The air thickens. You can hear your own heartbeat slamming against your ribs, loud in the sudden silence. The faint scent of leather, cedarwood, and tobacco reaches you a second before his voice does — low, cold, completely without expression. The kind of voice that has always slid down your spine like ice water.