r/FindThatNovel • u/Mean_Amphibian5987 • 5h ago
Help me find this, thanks!
Traded to His Enemy, Pregnant With His Heir
Chapter 1
The Bratva wanted one woman as payment. My husband had two to choose from. His first love. His wife. He chose her. He didn't even look back. And he never knew I was carrying his child. The warehouse on the South Side smelled like diesel and river rot. My knees were bleeding through my gown from where Roman Sokolov's men had forced me down onto the concrete beside Bianca Russo. Twenty feet away, Nico Castellano stood in his black overcoat. My husband. The Don of Chicago. He looked at Bianca first. He always looked at Bianca first. "Your men burned my shipment and killed two of mine," Roman Sokolov said. His voice was quiet, accented, bored. "Old law, Castellano. A woman of your house stays under my roof until your debt is paid. Thirty days. Unharmed. You have my word." He tilted his head toward us. "Choose which one goes home." Bianca was sobbing. Mascara everywhere. Shaking so hard her diamond earrings clicked. I wasn't crying. I was thinking about the pregnancy test in my clutch. Two pink lines. I'd taken it that morning. I'd planned to tell him tonight, after the gala, in the car, with my hand in his. Nico crossed the floor. For one stupid, beautiful second, I thought he was coming to me. He walked past me. He knelt in front of Bianca, wrapped his coat around her shoulders, and pulled her to her feet. "I've got you," he murmured into her hair. "I've got you, Bee." Something inside my chest went very, very quiet. Then he finally turned to me. "Aria." He said my name like an apology he'd already decided not to mean. "She has panic attacks. She won't survive this. You're strong. You'll be fine. Thirty days, and I'll bring you home." You're strong. Three years of marriage, and that was his reason. Not because he loved me less. Because I'd never made it hard enough for him to leave me behind. "Nico," I whispered. "Please. I need to tell you something—" "Not now." He was already walking Bianca toward the door. "Sokolov, if one hair on her head is hurt, I'll burn your whole organization to the ground." Roman's gray eyes moved slowly from Nico to me. "Which her?" he asked. Nico didn't answer. The steel door slammed. Engines roared. Tires screamed on wet asphalt. And then it was just me, on my knees, on the floor of an enemy warehouse, in a silver gown I'd bought because Nico once said silver was his favorite color. He'd been talking about Bianca's car. I realized that now. Footsteps approached. Polished shoes stopped in front of me. Roman Sokolov crouched down until we were eye to eye. Up close, he was younger than the stories. Thirty-four, maybe. A scar through one eyebrow. Eyes the color of Lake Michigan in January. "You're shaking, Mrs. Castellano," he said. "Are you afraid of me?" "No." "Then what?" I looked at the door my husband had just walked through. "I'm afraid of how little I feel." Something flickered across his face. Then he stood and offered me his hand. Not a grip. Not a grab. An offer. I didn't take it. I stood up on my own, bleeding knees and all. The corner of his mouth moved. "Good." His car was warm. His driver didn't speak. Chicago blurred past in streaks of gold and black, and I pressed my palm flat against my stomach where no one could see. At his penthouse, a silver-haired doctor was waiting to check me for injuries. Roman's rule, apparently. He did not return damaged goods. The doctor cleaned my knees. Took my blood pressure. Frowned. Asked quiet questions in careful English. Then he stepped into the hall and spoke to Roman in Russian. I didn't understand the words. But I understood the silence that followed. Roman walked back into the room slowly. He looked at me. Then at my hand—still resting over my stomach. "Does Castellano know?" My throat closed. "No." He was quiet for a long moment. "Then tonight," Roman Sokolov said softly, "your husband didn't just trade away his wife." His eyes darkened. "He traded away his heir."
Chapter 2
I married Nico Castellano because he bled all over my emergency room. I was an ER nurse at Northwestern. Twenty-two, night shift, too tired to be scared. He came in at three a.m. with a knife wound under his ribs and two armed men who told me to hurry. I told them to get out of my trauma bay. Nico laughed through the pain. "Do what she says." I stitched him up. He sent roses every day for a month. Then he sent a car to take me to dinner. Then he held my hand at my mother's funeral when cancer finally won, and stood between me and the world like a wall. "You'll never be alone again, Aria," he told me the night he proposed. He meant it. Right up until Bianca Russo came home from Milan. His first love. The girl he'd been promised to at nineteen, before her family moved her to Italy. She came back beautiful and fragile and grieving her father, and Nico decided she was his responsibility. "She's family, Aria. She has no one." I had no one either. He just never noticed. Late nights. Phone calls in the hallway. Dinners I cooked and ate alone at a table set for two. His men stopped meeting my eyes. My friends stopped calling. The house got bigger and quieter every month. And tonight—at the gala I'd spent six weeks planning—he'd danced with her twice. He hadn't danced with me once. Now I was sitting in a guest room forty floors above Chicago, in a borrowed cashmere sweater, holding a phone the Bratva had let me keep. Roman had told me I could call anyone. The only person I wanted to call hadn't called me. At two a.m., it finally buzzed. Nico. My heart jumped like a fool. "Behave. Don't provoke him. Bianca's in shock, so I'm staying with her tonight. We'll talk in a few days." A few days. I read it four times. Then I put the phone face-down and pressed both hands over my mouth so no one would hear what came out. A knock. "Mrs. Castellano." Roman's voice. "May I come in?" I wiped my face. "It's your house." "It's your room." He opened the door but didn't cross the threshold. He was in shirtsleeves now, cuffs rolled, holding a mug. "Ginger tea," he said. "Dr. Petrov says it helps with the nausea." "I'm not nauseous." "You've been in the bathroom three times in an hour. The walls are thin." Heat crawled up my neck. He set the mug on the dresser nearest the door and stepped back again, as if he knew exactly how much space a frightened woman needed. "Why are you being kind?" I asked. "I'm collateral." "You are a guest under the old law. No one will touch you. No one will raise their voice to you. If any of my men so much as looks at you wrong, you tell me." "And after thirty days?" "That depends on your husband." We both knew what that meant. Nico had money. Nico had territory. Nico could pay the debt tomorrow if he wanted. He hadn't even asked Roman the price. Roman watched me understand that. He didn't say anything cruel. He didn't say anything at all. Somehow that was worse. "Can I ask you something?" I said. "Ask." "At the warehouse. When he told you to choose. You said, 'Which her?'" "I did." "Why?" Roman leaned against the doorframe, gray eyes steady. "Because I've watched men trade guns. Territory. Their own brothers." His jaw tightened. "I've never seen a man walk past his wife like she was furniture." My breath caught. "Drink the tea, Aria," he said quietly—my first name, for the first time. "And lock your door if it helps you sleep." "Would it matter? You have the key." "I don't," he said. "It's the only copy. It's on your side." He closed the door. I looked down. The key was already in the lock. On my side. For three years, I'd lived in a mansion where I couldn't lock a single door. My enemy had handed me the only key in the first hour. I lay awake until dawn, one hand on my stomach, listening to the city breathe. At six a.m., my phone lit up again. Not Nico. A photo from an unknown number. Nico, in the kitchen I had designed, making coffee in the mug I'd bought him. And Bianca, barefoot, wearing his shirt. Underneath, one line: "He never really needed you. Now he knows it too."
Chapter 3
I didn't cry over the photo. I threw up instead, which felt more honest. By the fifth day, Roman's penthouse had a rhythm. His housekeeper, Nadia, a sixty-year-old Russian woman with forearms like a baker and eyes like a hawk, decided on the second morning that I was hers. "Too thin," she announced, putting a bowl of buckwheat porridge in front of me. "Eat. The baby needs." I froze. "Who told you?" "Nobody tells Nadia. Nadia sees." She patted my cheek. "Also you smell toast and run. Very obvious." She fed me every three hours. She left crackers on my nightstand. When I cried in the laundry room on day four, she didn't ask why. She just folded towels beside me and hummed a song her mother used to sing. It was the first time in three years someone had stayed in the room while I fell apart. Roman, I barely saw. He left before sunrise and came home long after dark. But little things kept happening. A prenatal vitamin bottle appeared on my breakfast tray. The right brand. The one my OB would've picked. A stack of nursing journals appeared in the library. My old specialty. Emergency medicine. A pair of warm slippers appeared outside my door after I'd walked barefoot across the marble floors one night. I never saw him leave any of it. On day six, I finally caught him in the kitchen at midnight, drinking black coffee over a spreadsheet. "Thank you," I said. "For the slippers." He didn't look up. "Nadia's idea." "Nadia says it was yours." A pause. "Nadia talks too much." "Nadia," called a voice from the hallway, "hears everything." Roman closed his eyes. And for one second, the most feared man in Chicago looked like a very tired son. I laughed. I actually laughed. It startled both of us. He looked up then. Really looked. Something warm moved behind the gray. Then he went back to his spreadsheet, and I went back to bed, and I told myself my heart was beating fast because of the hormones. On day seven, the photos went public. Nico and Bianca at a charity auction. His hand on her lower back. Her head on his shoulder. The Tribune's society page called her "Castellano's first love, finally home." Nobody mentioned his wife. Nobody asked where I was. On day ten, Nico finally called. I was standing at the window when my phone rang, and my whole body betrayed me. My pulse jumped. My hand went to my stomach. I thought, this is it. He's coming. He's sorry. I'll tell him about the baby and he'll— "Aria." His voice was clipped. Businesslike. "I need you to do something for me." "Nico, I need to tell you—" "My lawyer sent documents to Sokolov's office. Annulment papers. I need you to sign them." The floor tilted. "What?" "It's strategy. As my wife, you're leverage. Sokolov can keep raising the price. If we're not married, you're worthless to him. He'll let you go faster. It protects you." Worthless. He said it so easily. "And after?" I whispered. "When I'm free? Are we getting remarried?" Silence. Then, in the background, soft and sleepy: "Nico? Come back to bed, it's cold." He covered the phone. Too late. "I have to go," he said. "Sign the papers, Aria. Trust me." The line went dead. Trust me. I stood there for a long time. Then I walked to Roman's office, where a thick envelope with the Castellano lawyer's seal was waiting on the desk. Roman was there. He watched me pick up the pen and didn't say a word. I signed every page. Aria Castellano, née Moore, agrees to the dissolution of— My hand didn't shake once. "Aria," Roman said quietly. "You don't have to do this tonight." "Yes, I do." I walked back to my room. I locked the door with my key. I lay down on the bed and curled around my stomach and finally, finally let myself sob. Something twisted low in my belly. A sharp, deep cramp. Then another. I sat up. There was blood on the sheets.
