I Crawled Through Hell. Turned To Be My Don Husband’s Loyalty Test Chapter 08
Dominic’s POV
Luca. We still had Luca.
She’d hauled bodies for five years to save him. She wouldn’t walk away from her own son.
She couldn’t.
Marco’s message came through. No sign of her.
I tore the city apart. Every contact, every lead, every man I had.
Hospitals. Bus stations. The mountain routes.
First order: pull surveillance from the hospital and the kindergarten. Every camera. Every angle.
Sienna came by that evening to play with Luca. Same routine.
He wouldn’t look at her. My son, who’d always lit up around her, sat on the couch like a dead battery. Arms limp. Eyes on nothing.
Then I walked through the door, and he looked past Sienna like she wasn’t there.
“When is Mom coming back? I want to see her.”
That stopped me.
Luca almost never asked about Linnea. He was sharper than any kid his age.
He understood the plan. He’d volunteered for it. He played his part better than most of my men played theirs.
I crouched down. Put my hand on his shoulder.
“Soon. I’m going to find her.”
…
The kindergarten principal showed up at my door unannounced.
She set a package on the table. Heavy. Dense.
“Mr. Marchetti, I’m returning this to Ms. Sorrento. She came by the day after the ceremony and paid for all the damages. Two hundred thousand.”
She opened it.
Stacks of bills, squared and bundled with rubber bands. Perfectly organized. Every edge aligned.
The first bill had a smudge of dirt on it.
That was Linnea. Nobody else handled money like that. Every dollar counted. Every dollar real.
I didn’t touch the pile.
I knew what it was. I knew what every single bill had cost her.
Digging bodies in war zones. The most brutal work there was.
All manual labor. Running through gunfire with a corpse on your back, dodging sniper lines, pulling the dead out of the wreckage while the living kept shooting.
She carried the dead on her back so my son could live.
I did it to harden her. The family doesn’t carry the weak.
The principal sat with her hands folded. Quiet for a long time.
“I want you to know, I was the one who called her. Luca had missed every parent event. I thought the graduation was important enough to ask her to come.”
She paused.
“I’ve reviewed the security footage. Your son threw a pair of scissors at her. And I heard the conversation outside the gate.”
She didn’t call it a conversation. That was her being polite. It wasn’t a conversation. It was me tearing into Linnea while she bled.
“I’m a teacher, Mr. Marchetti. And in my profession, we believe all honest work carries equal dignity.”
Every sentence was calm. Measured. Gentle, even.
Each one landed like a blade between my ribs.
She left without touching the tea my staff had poured for her.
I stood in the living room. The money on the table. The silence in the room.
Two hundred thousand. That wasn’t damages for a ruined ceremony.
That was Luca’s medical bill. The one the hospital had been calling about. The one that kept Linnea crawling through rubble month after month.
She’d taken the money meant to save her son and used it to clean up the mess I’d made.
A tug at my sleeve. Small fingers.
“Daddy.” Luca’s voice cracked. “I’m sorry.”
His chin was trembling. His eyes were red and swollen.
He’d been sitting on this. For days. Too scared to tell anyone.
“That day. When Mom reached for me.” He swallowed. “I saw her arm. The blood. It kept dripping.”
I looked at my son. I looked at the money on the table.
The moment she crouched down outside the car and asked to speak to him. One minute. Just a few words.
That was goodbye.
She knew. Maybe she’d known everything. The fake name. The fake bankruptcy. The test. All seven years of it.
So she left. Not just me. Not just the apartment.
Us.
Luca’s fever hit that night. One hundred and four. His body went limp, his skin burning under my hands.
Somewhere between sleep and delirium, he grabbed my wrist.
“Is Mom coming back?”
His voice was thin. Barely there.
“Does she still love me?”
“Then you need to sleep. And take your medicine. Mom would worry if you didn’t.”
The words came easy. The one thing I couldn’t say was the one thing he needed to hear.
I stayed until his breathing evened out. His hand loosened around my wrist, finger by finger.
I stepped onto the balcony.
The city was quiet. Just wind and the low hum of traffic fourteen floors down.
I lit a cigarette.
Her face kept coming back. The way she’d looked at me that night. Not angry. Not desperate.
Empty.
The way she’d stepped back when I reached for her hand. The way she’d smiled at Luca through the car window, like someone memorizing a face for the last time.
I lit another cigarette off the first one.
Then another.
By 3 a.m., the butts had piled around my feet like a small graveyard.
Seven years. I’d spent seven years testing a woman who would’ve walked through fire for me without being asked.
And I made her prove it. Over and over.
Every day. In the dirt. In the cold. On her hands and knees in the rubble.
She proved it a thousand times.
I just never stopped asking.
The wind picked up. Ash scattered off the railing.
She wasn’t coming back.
I knew that the way you know a body’s gone cold. Not because someone tells you. Because the stillness is different.
I sat there until the sun came up. The cigarette between my fingers had burned down to the filter.
I hadn’t taken a single drag.