A WIFE AT STAKE

Laura Volonto is the youngest child of a family that settled in Puglia when she was sixteen. They came from Naples, carrying with them more questions than answers. Two of her brothers had died there under violent, murky circumstances—events rarely spoken of, but never truly forgotten. Whether the family fled or simply disappeared remains unclear.

After finishing school, Laura did not have the luxury of dreams. She joined her parents on the road, selling clothes in the Bria markets, moving from town to town, living out of vans and temporary stalls. It was a harsh life, but one that sharpened her instincts early.

That’s where she met Mario, a fruit and vegetable vendor who worked alongside her father. Ten years her senior, Mario watched her from a distance at first—quietly, patiently—like many men did. Laura was noticed everywhere she went. Admiration followed her as naturally as dust followed the market roads.

When Mario’s father died, his business faltered. Unable to manage on his own, he struggled to keep things afloat. Laura offered to help him temporarily, just until he found a solution. She became that solution.

Together, they worked well—too well to be a coincidence. Sales improved. Customers lingered. Money flowed more easily. Before long, their partnership turned into something deeper. They fell in love, despite her parents’ clear disapproval. Laura didn’t care.

Many people couldn’t understand the match. How could a woman like Laura—so striking, so confident—choose a man like Mario, despite all his decent qualities? Whispers spread quickly. Some said it was Laura who truly ran the business. That she had a natural sense for commerce. That she knew exactly when—and with whom—to use her charm.

Perhaps she was simply independent. Ambitious. Or perhaps she saw in Mario’s modest enterprise an opportunity—an entry point into a life she intended to control on her own terms.

Only Laura knows the truth.

When Mario first noticed Laura, he was twenty-eight. She was eighteen.

At the time, he worked alone with his father, a man already worn down by life and newly widowed. Mario’s mother had died ten years earlier, at just forty, from an aggressive form of breast cancer—poorly treated, badly timed, and never truly accepted. Since then, Mario had learned to live without expecting much.

He was an old-school kind of man. Not a flirt. Not a charmer. He didn’t lack interest in Laura—far from it—but he lacked time, confidence, and any real belief that someone like her would ever look his way. Compared to the local smooth talkers circling her, he simply assumed he didn’t stand a chance.

Everything changed when his father died suddenly. The business faltered overnight, and Mario found himself overwhelmed, barely holding things together. Laura offered to help him—just for a while, she said. Until he got back on his feet.

She stayed.

Working side by side, something shifted. Days grew longer, silences more comfortable. Practical gestures turned into habits, habits into closeness. Slowly, almost against expectation, they became a couple—an unlikely one, according to everyone else. Mario took a quiet pride in it. Against all odds, he had won her over, right in front of men who had always seemed more obvious choices.

Mario is a decent man. Hard-working. Intelligent enough. Neither handsome nor unattractive—just unremarkable in ways that don’t demand attention. The age gap between him and Laura has always been visible, and as the years pass, increasingly so.

In the eight years they’ve been together, he has never truly doubted her fidelity. At least, he has never seen anything. Nothing has ever given him a reason to ask questions. Mario isn’t jealous by nature. He prefers trust to suspicion.

There was only one moment that unsettled him—a brief fascination Laura showed for a young, successful actor-singer. He dismissed it as a passing thing. Youth. Fantasy. He let it go.

He always does.

Vincenzo was born twenty-eight years ago in Naples, into privilege rather than warmth. His family was wealthy, influential, and deeply traditional. His father’s business—respectable on the surface, unmistakably Neapolitan in spirit—always seemed to revolve around power and loyalty. Vincenzo, however, was never the chosen one. That role belonged to his older brother. From an early age, Vincenzo learned what it meant to be overlooked, measured, and found lacking.

He left Naples for Rome to study graphic design, determined to build something of his own. Fame came looking for him instead.

At twenty-two, he was cast in a minor role in a television series aimed at teenagers. He was meant to be background. Decorative. Disposable. Then the letters arrived—handwritten, desperate, affectionate. Viewers didn’t just watch him; they felt him. The production reacted immediately. Scripts were rewritten. Screen time expanded. The camera lingered.

Success followed fast and without mercy. The series exploded. Music contracts appeared. Songs, concerts, tours. Vincenzo understood instinctively how to move, how to look, how to let people project onto him whatever they needed to see. By twenty-four, he was rich, famous, and dangerously exposed.

And then the machine turned on him.

At twenty-six, he found himself dragged into court, accused of domestic violence. The accusations were false—he never stopped saying so. The trial lasted a year. He was acquitted. Legally cleared. Publicly destroyed. The tabloids had already decided who he was, and they had no interest in correcting the narrative. Scandal sold better than truth.

Vincenzo paid the price of visibility. Used, elevated, then sacrificed to satisfy an audience hungry for downfall.

So he disappeared.

Not out of shame, but out of intelligence. He waited. Observed. Learned. When the time was right, he prepared his return with restraint and precision. That comeback was made possible by Silvio, the head of Canale 6—an experienced architect of public amnesia, who understood that time, silence, and the right exposure could erase almost anything.

When Vincenzo returned, he was no longer reckless. He spoke less. Watched more. His charm had changed—deeper, slower, more controlled. There was something bruised beneath the surface, something that made him feel real, wounded… and irresistible.

People don’t just desire Vincenzo.

They want to save him.
They want to be chosen by him.
They want to believe that with them, things would be different.

Laura understands that instinctively.

And that is why he is dangerous.

Gloria built her career in the margins of visibility.
A lifetime of supporting roles. Film extras. Advertising brochures where her face was recognizable, but never iconic. Television commercials—mostly national. For a time, even a weather presenter on RAI. Always present. Never essential. Always close to success, never quite allowed to claim it.

She married young. Very young. Her husband, a cook, was her childhood sweetheart. A safe choice. A stable one. She spent the rest of her marriage betraying him—with discretion, regularity, and no intention of leaving. Gloria traveled often. He stayed in his restaurant in Bria. Opportunity did the rest. He never knew. And she never chose another man over him.

You never know what tomorrow might require.

Gloria has always taken meticulous care of herself. Her body. Her image. Her presence. In that regard, she succeeded where others failed. Time has not been kind to everyone—but it has negotiated with her. And she knows it.

Financially, she lacks nothing. With no children of her own, she sees little reason to hold onto a property that is too large, too costly, too symbolic. So she sells it—en viager. A practical decision. A controlled risk. Gloria has always preferred arrangements that leave doors open.

When she meets Laura and hears about the project, her interest is immediate. Natural. Calculated. She believes in her chances. Perhaps she even imagines herself as part of the story—not at the center, but close enough to influence its shape.

Gloria doesn’t rush.
She observes. Measures. Waits.

And when the time comes, she will offer Laura her help.
Her advice.
Her experience.

Always with a smile.
Always with options.

Rodolfo was fourteen when his mother walked out of the house to live with another man—from Naples. An only child, he was left alone with his father, who chose not to explain, not to rage, and not to collapse. They adapted. Quietly. Efficiently. Over time, they became a solid pair.

With a father often away for work, Rodolfo was granted a freedom most boys his age never knew. He earned it. He did well at school, stayed out of trouble, and learned early how to manage himself. Independence came naturally to him. So did movement. Curiosity. Risk.

It didn’t take long for him to realize he had been favored by nature. Looks. Ease. Presence. Women noticed—girls at first, then women who should have known better. Attention followed him wherever he went, and Rodolfo accepted it as something normal, almost inevitable. Adventures turned into habits. Habits into reputation. In Bria, his name began to circulate.

After a brief and unremarkable year working for a company, he was fired. Officially for professional reasons. Unofficially, gossip blamed the boss’s wife. Rodolfo never bothered to deny it. He was already looking elsewhere.

That was when he sold his old scooter—to Laura.

Until then, he had never met her. Living outside the city with Mario, rarely going out, she had simply remained outside his orbit. But once he saw her—first on television, then in person—something shifted. Laura was no longer just another conquest. She was a challenge. A temptation that refused to stay abstract.

Rodolfo isn’t calculating. He doesn’t hunt methodically. He adapts. Depending on the path taken, his approach changes—charm, provocation, patience, boldness. Seduction, for him, is not a plan. It’s an instinct.

The question isn’t whether he will try.

It’s whether, this time, it will be enough.

Lucia has just turned eighteen and finished high school—painfully. Studying was never really her thing. Sitting still, following rules, imagining a distant future built around a hypothetical degree… none of that appealed to her.

She prefers the concrete. Movement. People. Money earned quickly and honestly.

Seeing this, her great-aunt Gloria decides to place her with Laura and Mario. Not as a favor, but as an opportunity. And it works.

Lucia proves herself almost immediately. She’s good at sales. Outgoing. Talkative. Sharp. She reads people instinctively, knows when to joke, when to insist, when to smile. At the street markets, she’s a natural. Customers linger. Conversations stretch. Sales follow.

Mario, in particular, gets along well with her. Lucia is easy company—lively without being invasive, present without demanding attention. Her presence subtly lightens his workload… and gives Laura a little more freedom.

Lucia is not naïve, though. She knows Bria. She knows reputations. She knows Rodolfo—or at least what is said about him. Carefully, without accusation or implication, she mentions him to Mario. Just enough to warn. Never enough to suggest doubt. Laura’s integrity is never questioned. Lucia is far too young—and far too careful—for that.

Officially, she has no agenda. No strategy. No reason to be suspected of anything.

But Lucia observes.
She listens.
And she understands more than people assume.

The player might too—eventually.

Paolo has been Mario’s friend for as long as anyone can remember. Like him, he works the markets, running his own food truck, moving from town to town, season after season. They share the same rhythm, the same early mornings, the same roads.

Like many others, Paolo noticed Laura when she first appeared on the regional markets with her parents. He noticed her immediately. Quietly. He always had a soft spot for her. He still does. But Laura chose Mario. And Paolo accepted it—at least on the surface.

Paolo is a good man. Kind. Reliable. He has never had much luck with women. Not because he lacks intelligence or looks, but because he lacks that something—the ease, the instinct, the confidence that can’t be taught. And perhaps because his tastes have always aimed a little higher than reality usually allows.

It is Paolo who unknowingly sets the story in motion when he mentions the television game show to Mario. A casual conversation. A door opened without realizing what might pass through it.

When Rodolfo enters Laura and Mario’s life, Paolo reacts immediately. Not because he is the only one to sense danger—others do too—but because it touches something personal. Paolo is jealous. He always has been. The idea of Laura being drawn to Rodolfo affects him more deeply than it ever did Mario.

That jealousy sharpens him. He watches closely. He interferes when he can. Quietly. Without drama.

To Rodolfo, Paolo is not a rival in the usual sense.
He is a variable.
A persistent presence.
A problem that cannot simply be seduced away.