Before the Council Named Me Donna

The next morning, Matteo had already left, but espresso still sat warm on the counter beside brioche under a silver cover. He always remembered small things like that, which was exactly why I had mistaken care for devotion for so long.

I had barely opened my laptop when Vanessa Ashford’s message appeared in the old boarding-school alumni chat.

Private dinner tonight at The Aurelia Club. No excuses. I missed you all.

I would have ignored it if Matteo’s reply had not appeared beneath hers almost immediately.

I’ll be there.

After staring at the screen for a while, I typed my own answer.

So will I.

The Aurelia Club sat behind an unmarked door on Fifth Avenue, and Vanessa had booked the De Luca private room as if she had the right. By the time I arrived, the table was already full, and she sat in the Donna’s chair at Matteo’s right, laughing in black satin as if the room had always belonged to her.

A waiter hesitated when he saw the empty place left near the far end of the table. I handed him my coat and walked there myself.

Vanessa noticed me first, her smile bright and precise. “Elena, you’re late. We were starting to worry.”

“I was working.”

“How admirable.” Her gaze dropped to my bare collarbone, where the obsidian brooch should have been. “Still restoring old things?”

“Someone has to understand value.”

Matteo finally looked at me. His expression shifted just enough for me to know he had noticed the missing brooch, but before he could speak, Nico Ferretti leaned back beside me and laughed.

My childhood rival, my family’s favorite nuisance, and the only person in the room rude enough to enjoy a public disaster.

“Interesting seating arrangement,” Nico said. “I thought Elena was De Luca’s wife.”

The table went quiet.

Vanessa lifted her glass. “Wife? Matteo, I thought you were allergic to marriage.”

Everyone looked at him. For one foolish moment, I wanted Matteo to say my name clearly enough to put me back where he had allowed another woman to sit, but his eyes moved from me to Vanessa, then settled on his wine.

“Elena and I have an arrangement,” he said. “It helped both families.”

Arrangement.

Not wife. Not Donna. Not the woman whose brooch he had fastened, whose bed he shared, whose child she carried.

Vanessa smiled at me with soft pity. “That makes sense. Matteo was always too serious for romance unless someone forced him into it.”

I could have asked about the Donna-wing access, the missing signet, or the ceremony he had abandoned the moment she returned, but there was nothing elegant in bleeding at a dinner table. So I smiled back.

“He’s right. It was an arrangement.”

Matteo’s jaw tightened, while Nico glanced at me with the first trace of seriousness I had ever seen on his face.

After that, the dinner grew louder. Someone joked that Matteo and Vanessa had finally found their timing, someone else said old devotion never really died, and Vanessa laughed while her hand rested on the back of Matteo’s chair. Matteo did not move it away.

The nausea hit hard enough that I had to leave the table. In the powder room, I forced myself through it, rinsed my mouth, fixed my lipstick, and looked into the mirror until my expression obeyed me.

When I returned, no one had missed me. Vanessa was telling a story from school, and Matteo watched her with a softness I had not seen in weeks.

The dinner ended near midnight. Outside the club, Vanessa swayed on the steps with one hand pressed to her temple, and Matteo moved toward her before anyone else could.

“She’s not well,” he said to me. “I’ll take her home first.”

I looked at Vanessa leaning into his side, then at the black car waiting by the curb.

“You should go.”

Matteo frowned, as though my calm unsettled him more than anger would have. “Elena—”

“Good night, Matteo.”

Vanessa glanced back over his shoulder, and the smile in her eyes told me she had enjoyed every second of it.

I watched their car disappear into traffic with one hand resting lightly over my still-flat stomach. Vanessa wanted the old worship back, and Matteo had handed it to her in public; I would not fight another woman for a title, a chair, a signet, or a man who had already shown me how easily all of them could be taken away.

When I spoke to Matteo, it would not be to ask him to choose.

It would be to tell him I was leaving.