THE WIDOW OF A MONSTER

CHAPTER 5

A MAN TWICE HER AGE

Serafina had known Alessandro’s age long before she understood what it meant.

Numbers were harmless things when spoken aloud—forty-two sounded abstract, distant, something that belonged to a future she had not yet imagined. It was only after she began to live beside him that the number gained weight, that it settled into her days and nights like a second shadow.

He had lived an entire life before her.

It showed in the way he moved through the world with certainty, as though nothing could surprise him. In the way he spoke to men who were twice her size and expected obedience without ever raising his voice. In the way he carried himself—unhurried, deliberate, confident that time would bend around him if he demanded it.

Serafina was eighteen when she became his wife.

Eighteen felt unfinished. Her thoughts still arrived in fragments, her emotions raw and unguarded beneath the discipline she was learning. She was still discovering who she might become, still reaching for pieces of herself that slipped through her fingers before she could grasp them.

Alessandro did not reach.

He took.

The difference revealed itself in a thousand small ways.

At dinners, he spoke while she listened. When she offered opinions—rare, cautious—he dismissed them with a wave of his hand, amused rather than threatened. “You’ll understand one day,” he said often, as though understanding were something he could grant when she had earned it.

He spoke of the past with authority, recounting wars she had never heard of, betrayals that shaped the city long before she was born. Names meant nothing to her, but to him they carried weight and consequence. His memories filled rooms, crowding out her present.

Sometimes, when he drank, he reminisced about women he had known before her.

Not lovers—conquests.

“They were different times,” he said once, reclining in his chair, his eyes distant. “Women knew their place. They didn’t pretend to be equal.”

Serafina sat silently across from him, her hands folded in her lap. She had learned by then that responding—agreeing or disagreeing—would only prolong the conversation.

“You’re lucky,” he continued. “I chose you young. Untouched. That matters.”

The word lodged in her throat like a splinter.

Untouched.

As if she were land waiting to be claimed. As if her value existed only in what had not yet been taken from her.

When they attended events, the age gap became spectacle.

Women her husband’s age regarded her with thinly veiled pity or envy, sometimes both. They studied her youth as if it were a luxury item, something beautiful but impractical. Men looked at her with curiosity, admiration, or calculation—some saw her as Alessandro’s weakness, others as proof of his power.

“She’s barely more than a girl,” someone whispered once, not quietly enough.

Alessandro heard.

He smiled. “Girls become women quickly in the right environment.”

Serafina smiled too, because that was expected.

The imbalance between them was not just measured in years—it was measured in control.

Alessandro controlled money, movement, time. He decided where they went, who they saw, what she wore. He corrected her speech, her posture, her expressions. He treated her confusion as ignorance, her fear as immaturity.

When she hesitated, he reminded her of her inexperience.

“You’re young,” he said dismissively. “You don’t understand how things work yet.”

And when she tried to understand, he punished curiosity as disobedience.

Isolation deepened quietly.

There was no one her age in the mansion. No friends, no confidantes. Women invited into their circle were carefully selected—wives who had already learned the rules, who wore their submission like polished armor. They smiled at Serafina kindly but distantly, offering advice that sounded more like warnings.

“Don’t push,” one of them murmured during a charity luncheon. “It’s easier if you don’t push.”

Serafina nodded, storing the words away.

She learned that Alessandro preferred silence not only because it gave him control—but because it emphasized the gap between them. Silence reminded her that he was the one who spoke, who decided, who mattered.

At night, the difference in age felt heavier.

He slept easily, his breathing steady, his body relaxed in a way hers never was. He had no nightmares, no restless hours. His sleep was earned, he said once—bought with experience and power.

Serafina lay awake beside him, staring at the ceiling, counting seconds between breaths, listening for changes in his rhythm. She learned how to remain perfectly still, how to make herself smaller even in the dark.

Youth made her vulnerable.

He used that.

“You’ll thank me one day,” he told her when she cried quietly, thinking he slept. “I’m teaching you discipline. Stability.”

She wondered what stability meant to a man who could unmake lives with a phone call.

Alessandro’s age granted him credibility the world denied her. When he spoke, men listened. When she spoke, they smiled indulgently. When he demanded, the city obeyed. When she hesitated, she was corrected.

He treated her reactions like inconveniences.

“You’re too emotional,” he said once, after she flinched at raised voices during a meeting. “That’s what youth does to you.”

She wanted to ask if fear ever left with age. She did not.

The imbalance bled into every interaction.

He interrupted her freely. He decided when conversations ended. He touched her without asking, withdrew affection without explanation. He reminded her constantly—sometimes subtly, sometimes explicitly—that her life existed because he allowed it.

“You would have nothing without me,” he said during an argument that wasn’t really an argument. “Remember that.”

She remembered.

The age gap also shaped how others treated her.

Men addressed Alessandro, not her. Deals were discussed around her as if she were furniture. Even when conversations involved her—her schedule, her appearances—she was spoken about, not to.

“She’ll attend,” Alessandro said once, without looking at her.

“Yes,” Serafina echoed softly.

Her voice sounded small even to herself.

Only once did she forget herself.

It was during a dinner with an international guest—a man Alessandro respected, someone older even than he was. The conversation turned to education, to universities, to young people and ambition.

Serafina, emboldened by a glass of wine and a rare sense of being included, mentioned a book she had read recently. It was an offhand comment, nothing more.

The table fell silent.

Alessandro’s smile did not waver, but his eyes hardened.

“That’s enough,” he said lightly. “My wife tires easily.”

Later, in the privacy of the mansion, he asked her why she thought her thoughts were worth sharing.

“I didn’t mean—” she began.

“You never do,” he replied. “That’s the problem.”

That night, she understood something with painful clarity: her youth was not something he intended to outgrow. It was something he intended to preserve.

Inexperience made her malleable. Fear made her obedient. Time, he believed, would not make her stronger—it would make her accustomed.

The realization hollowed her out.

She began to feel suspended between stages of life—no longer a girl, never allowed to be a woman. She existed in a liminal space shaped entirely by his expectations, his rules, his patience.

Sometimes, she caught her reflection beside his.

He looked solid, assured, fully formed. She looked fragile by comparison, her youth stark against his age. The contrast unsettled her, emphasized the imbalance she lived inside.

Only one person seemed to notice it for what it was.

Luca Romano did not treat her like a child.

He did not indulge her or dismiss her. When he spoke to her—rarely—it was with the same measured respect he offered others. No condescension. No ownership.

Once, during a meeting that ran late, Alessandro waved her away impatiently.

“Go,” he said. “This doesn’t concern you.”

As she turned to leave, Luca met her gaze briefly.

There was no pity in his eyes. No judgment. Only acknowledgment—as if he understood the position she occupied, the space she was forced into.

It unsettled her deeply.

Because acknowledgment meant someone saw the imbalance. Someone recognized the cost.

The mansion, the silence, the obedience—all of it weighed heavier under the knowledge that Alessandro had chosen her precisely because of the distance between them. Because her age made resistance unlikely. Because time had taught him how to dominate, and youth had not yet taught her how to survive without yielding.

Isolation became her constant companion.

She belonged to a man twice her age, in a world shaped entirely by his past, his power, his rules. Her future stretched out before her like a corridor with no doors—beautiful, polished, and impossibly narrow.

And Serafina learned that being young in such a world was not an advantage.

It was a vulnerability.

One that would be exploited until there was nothing left of her youth but memory—and nothing left of her voice but silence.