"What a pity. You're still nothing but outsider filth. Leaving you here would only taint the Valente name. Today, I'll clean house on the Don's behalf."
Terror flooded every fiber of my being. My voice came out barely above a whisper.
"He is the Don's child. You must not harm him."
Seraphina's brows twisted together, and she fixed me with a look of pure contempt.
"You wretched civilian. To save this bastard, you'd tell a lie that absurd?"
"The Don's power is beyond measure. A woman with no Family blood could never carry his heir."
The other soldiers chimed in.
"Exactly. The Don's reach is so vast that anyone outside the bloodlines would be destroyed just trying to get close to him."
"You're a nobody. You don't even have the standing to be with him, let alone bear his child."
"This bastard is obviously the product of some affair with a low-ranking guard. And you have the audacity to pass it off as the Don's heir? The nerve."
They weren't entirely wrong. The gap between a civilian and the head of the Valente empire was vast beyond reckoning.
The Don, above all, was a man no outsider should have been able to touch, let alone conceive a child with.