The Don’s Exiled Wife Was Not Mad, She Was the Last Witness

On the day my daughter turned one month old, my husband's beloved old flame swept into the estate cradling an unconscious infant against her chest. She struck her own face again and again, pleading with me between breaths. If my own milk hadn't run dry, I swear on my blood I'd never have dared trouble you to nurse my child. I deserve to die for this. Please, I'm begging you, spare my baby. Don't poison her!

In a fit of rage, my husband, Don of the Falcone Family, banished me to the exile-farm out in the forgotten hinterland, the slaughter compound where the disgraced are sent to "learn what real motherly love is." A month later he brought the whole bloodline out to collect me. When he saw me gently coaxing a newborn calf across the mud, he nodded, satisfied. "Looks like a month out here has finally put some real mothering in you."

I acted as if I hadn't heard him, lowering my head to kiss the big yellow cow's face. "What would you and our daughter like for dinner tonight?"

His jaw tightened. "I gave you a month out here to reflect, and this is how you repay me? Playing mad to sicken me?"

Just then the little calf stumbled into a muddy pit and began to cry. I rushed to scoop it into my arms and pressed a bottle to its mouth. "There, there, baby. Don't cry. Mommy's milk will make everything better."

When my husband, Lorenzo Falcone, came out to the compound with the whole Family in his shadow, I was on the pasture, walking a wobbly-legged calf that had been born only a short while before. The men fanned out behind him the way they always did, hands loose at their sides, eyes reading the tree line. "Camilla already forgave you for what you did to the baby," Lorenzo said. "She even told me to hurry and bring you home. Serafina, tell me. Did your time out here change you at all?"

Surrounded by the bloodline and their people, I looked at him with soft eyes, though my attention never left the calf stumbling beside me. "Slow down, little one. Don't hurt yourself."

Camilla smiled at me, gentle as a saint. "Serafina, Lorenzo has set the past aside to come for you himself. Don't hold your grudge against him any longer, or he'll call you proud again." Her tears sat perfectly in place, then vanished the instant Lorenzo's eyes drifted off her.

Lorenzo seemed to be in good humor, the faintest curve at his mouth. "Serafina's temper is as stubborn as ever, but a month on the exile-farm has put a deep sense of motherhood in her. My efforts weren't wasted."

I ignored their little performance and walked straight to the mouth of the cowshed, slipping off my shoes at the threshold. "Baby. Mommy's home."

Lorenzo's pupils constricted and he came in after me, eager. "Why did you leave our daughter with these animals in the shed? My precious girl, let your father see you."

They all stared at me as I cradled the calf against my chest and hummed low. "Rock-a-bye, rock-a-bye, down to Grandma's bridge we go..."

Lorenzo was angry and anxious at once, his chest rising hard. "Where is our daughter? Serafina, what madness is this? You're holding a calf."

The little thing startled and flinched. I held it tighter, my eyes fixed warily on Lorenzo. He looked disturbed under that gaze and turned to the keeper of the exile-farm, his face going dark. "I sent my wife here for a quiet month. How is it she's lost her mind entirely in that time?"

Nunzio Bramante wrung the filthy rag between his hands and ducked his head lower. "Don Falcone, on my life, I don't know what came over her. I set aside the best room on the compound for her and the child. She wouldn't have it. She insisted on moving into this shed."

Lorenzo frowned, thinking. Camilla clutched her chest at once, tears welling right on cue. "I understand now. Serafina still blames me in her heart. It's my fault for being a widow with no husband to lean on, leaning on Lorenzo instead and bringing him trouble. Lorenzo, you've been so good to me. Whatever Serafina does to me, I won't complain. If she hadn't harmed the child, I never would have spoken of it, and she'd never have been sent out here for a month's 'rest.'" Her voice broke on the word, and the moment his attention shifted, the break sealed over, dry and clean.

Those few words of hers lit Lorenzo's anger like a match to oil. "Serafina, I truly believed a month out here would put some remorse in you. I never imagined your nature ran so deep that you'd sink to something this low, working for my pity and making things impossible for Camilla."

Lorenzo lunged toward me, trying to tear the calf from my arms by force. "Stop clinging to this stupid animal and playing crazy! I don't have time for your act. Where is our daughter?"

My eyes burned red as I screamed, completely losing it. "No one touches my baby!"

To protect the whimpering calf, I bit down hard on a chunk of flesh on Lorenzo's hand. Lorenzo's face contorted in pain, clutching his bleeding hand as he stumbled backward in disbelief. A Falcone Don, marked by a woman's teeth. Behind him, the soldiers at the compound gate went rigid, hands drifting toward their coats. Camilla cried out, rushing to Lorenzo's side with a look of distress. "Lorenzo, are you alright?"

Before Lorenzo could speak, she dropped heavily to her knees and wrapped her arms around my leg. "Serafina, this is all my fault. I never should've traded on the old bond between our bloodlines to beg Lorenzo for shelter in my most desperate hour. I never meant to disrupt your family, and I never should've asked you to nurse my baby just because my own milk wouldn't come. That must've pushed you over the edge and made you lose control."

"I only told Lorenzo because I was terrified when the baby suddenly went still. I wasn't thinking straight. Otherwise I never would've said a word, and you'd never have been condemned to the exile-farm. This is all my fault. If you want to strike someone, strike me. Lorenzo is your husband. He only wanted to see you healed. He did nothing wrong. Why take it out on him like this, bite him so hard?"

I stayed silent while Camilla pleaded on without rising. Even as her forehead bruised against the packed dirt, I remained unmoved by that hollow performance. And I noticed the thing no one else did: her weeping cut off a half-second too cleanly each time she glanced away to see who was watching. At that time my own daughter was just a month old. As a mother myself, I felt nothing but the pull toward anything small and soft and helpless. I had treated Camilla's child as my own, poured every tenderness into her. And she had the heart to destroy her own child and hang the guilt around my neck.

"Camilla, don't kneel to her. Serafina is heartless and stubborn. She doesn't deserve your kneeling." Lorenzo pulled Camilla up with a pained expression and held her tightly against him. Then he turned that gaze on me, the one that made made men lower their eyes. "Serafina, I think you've gone mad. I'm your husband. Biting me so badly. Do you even want to keep living?"

The words had barely left him when a low 'moo' drifted from the mouth of the cowshed. When I heard that familiar sound of the big yellow cow, my eyes suddenly lit up. I brushed past all of them to reach him. "Honey, you're back."

Not just Lorenzo. Every man in that yard went still and silent, the way a room goes quiet when the Don enters. It took Lorenzo a long moment to find his voice. "Serafina. What did you just call that animal?"

Ignoring him, I lowered my head and gently kissed the big yellow cow's face. "What do you and our daughter want for dinner tonight?"

"Serafina!" Lorenzo's jaw locked. "I sent you to the exile-farm for a month of peace, and this is how you repay me? Playing crazy, treating an animal like your husband to disgust me?"

While he stared at me in disbelief, I calmly fetched a basin of water and knelt to wash the yellow cow's feet with practiced care. "You've been out in the fields again, all muddy. If you don't clean up properly, you're not allowed in bed tonight."

One of the bloodline murmured, uneasy. "Lorenzo, I think Serafina might really be losing it. She doesn't look like she's faking."

Lorenzo drew a slow breath. "Serafina, enough. If you're truly unwell, I'll bring a physician to you right now."

The instant a physician was mentioned, Camilla rushed forward again, sobbing. "Yes, Serafina, you've had fresh milk and clean vegetables out here at the farm, the purest air, the most peaceful and comfortable life a woman could ask for. Even if you were lonely sometimes, it was only a month. Please stop being stubborn. If you go on like this, you'll only make yourself and Lorenzo a laughingstock."

Lorenzo's voice was quiet, the kind of quiet that made men lean in to catch every word. "That's right. It's only been a month. I don't believe any experience could turn someone completely insane in such a short time. And this place is well removed from the world. A quiet corner of Falcone land where a woman is left in peace."

His face darkened inch by inch as the thought settled in him. Two fingers found the signet ring on his hand and turned it once, slow, deliberate. "Serafina, I'll give you one last chance. If you remain stubborn, then you can stay on this compound forever and live among the animals with the rest of the disgraced."

Hearing his words, Camilla gave me a triumphant little smirk that no one else caught, her lips curling with a satisfaction she couldn't quite hide. Seeing that I remained unmoved, Lorenzo lost patience fast. The men around the pen straightened when his jaw set. He bit down on each word. "Serafina, you really don't know what's good for you. Since you're beyond saving, I won't waste another second on you. Hand over our daughter. I'm taking her out of this place tonight. I won't have my daughter raised in filth to become something less than human."

Because I gave him nothing, he turned to the keeper of the exile-farm and his tone dropped to something colder. "Where's my daughter? Where is she?"

The hunchbacked keeper's legs nearly buckled. Nunzio wrung the filthy rag between his hands, dipping his head, working his mouth without a sound coming out. "I've been paying you a hundred thousand a month to look after them both, mother and child," Lorenzo said. "What are you hiding? Why don't you even know where my daughter is?"

Under the Don's sharp, suspicious gaze, Nunzio went the color of ash, cold sweat sliding down his forehead. The rag went still in his fists and his eyes flicked sideways.

"Lorenzo, don't frighten him like that," Camilla cut in gently. "The baby's only two months old. She can't be far from her mother. Truthfully, besides Serafina, no one knows where she might be."

Then she turned to me, working her voice into something that sounded like sincerity. "Serafina, the keeper's just a lowly man, an associate who's done his best by you this past month. Please don't make it harder on him than it already is, all right?"

Lorenzo caught her meaning at once. He fixed me with a cold stare and warned, low, "Serafina, where have you hidden our daughter? If anything's happened to our little girl, don't blame me for what I do next."

I finished washing the big yellow ox's feet and fetched a basin of water to go find the little calf. "Baby, be good. Mommy's here to change you."

Lorenzo's face went bloodless and he knocked the basin clean out of my hands. "Serafina, I've had enough of you."

He drew a pocket watch from inside his collar and opened it, and there was the custom photograph of our daughter, soft and small, taken the day she was born. "That's a calf. An animal. Open your eyes and look at Piccola Rosa. This is your own daughter."

I stared at the little watch, at the soft, round baby resting inside it. She was so small; her eyes hadn't even opened yet. Then the stench of blood and rot filled my nose out of nowhere. Terrible images surged up through me. It was as if the tiny baby, still wrapped in her swaddling, hadn't even had time to cry before countless sharp teeth tore her apart.

It was as if a knife was stabbing into my body, gouging out my heart and scraping my bones, bit by bit. Slow, but each cut deep and bloody. My whole body shuddered, and I came back to myself at the soft, tender "moo-moo" of the crying. Then, careless of everything and everyone, I rushed to the little calf where it had slid into the mud pit and gathered it up tight against me, aching for it. "Don't be afraid, don't be afraid. Mommy's here."

Lorenzo was on me in an instant, his eyes bloodshot, and struck me hard across the face. "Serafina, don't push me."

The blow sent my head spinning, a buzzing filling my ears. I didn't care about any of that. All I could see was the wronged little calf in my arms. So I lifted my shirt the way I knew how and moved to feed it. "Good baby, don't cry. Once you drink Mommy's milk, everything will be all right."

"Dio."

A ripple of gasps went through the men gathered at the edge of the pen, and every one of them looked away, as if the sight itself broke some code. Utter shock washed over Lorenzo, as though he'd been struck by lightning. "Serafina, you. All I did was send you and the child here for a month. Was I so wrong? Did you have to throw all of this in my face, to blur the line between people and animals, just to spite me?"

He snarled and wrenched my hair so hard my neck cracked. I felt no pain. I only kept nursing the little calf, patting its head. "Don't be scared, don't be scared. Mommy's here. Everything's fine."

After the brief break in him, Lorenzo let out a cold, cruel laugh. His fingers left the ring entirely. "Serafina. Such a fine actress. Let's see how long you keep up the performance once I roast your precious little calf."

He tore the calf from my arms. I lunged after it, frantic, but Nunzio pinned me to the ground and held me there. Under the heat of the fire the iron griddle turned scorching in seconds. Its legs bound, the little calf cried out in misery, its wet eyes turning to me, helpless, as the heat began to sear its flesh.

Meeting those clear, innocent eyes that knew nothing of death, I was struck all at once by the memory of my daughter's bewildered gaze on me in the moment before she was torn apart.

"Don't be afraid, Mommy's coming." Ignoring the searing pain in my already twisted arms, I threw myself onto the red-hot griddle, over the sound of Lorenzo's hysterical roars.