While He Protected Her, I Stopped Loving Him

Adriana's POV

Earlier that day, I lost my baby in a hit by freelance shooters, the kind of men who answered to no Family and no name, who came and went like smoke off a gun barrel. And while it happened, while my body was failing on the cold stone of the courtyard, my husband, Lorenzo, was strolling the garden path with his capo at his shoulder.

Lorenzo was the Don of our Family, the Moretti Family, and Carla was the captain he had raised up beside him.

He saw my dress soaked through with blood, the dark stain blooming across the silk like something obscene, and he turned Carla's curious eyes away with one hand, the way a man shields a child from a body in the street. Then, coldly, almost bored, he murmured, "Don't go near her. It's bad luck."

They walked on. Their footsteps faded into the dark of the estate, and they were gone.

I was devastated. How could my own husband, the man bound to me by blood vow before two bloodlines and a priest, do that to me?

After that, one of the shooters found me where I had fallen, and the world went black.

When I came home from the Family physician, still moving like a woman made of cracked glass, I found a black lace thong twisted into the sheets of our bed. So that was where they did it now. On our bed. In the room where I had once believed myself loved.

I could not endure this heartache anymore. I would not. So I took my phone from the nightstand, my hand steady in a way the rest of me was not, and I dialed the Don of the Falcone Family, Lena, and when the line connected I kept my voice smooth as poured wine. "Hello, Don Falcone. I've thought it over. I've decided to seek release back to your Family."

There was a pause on the line, the kind a careful man takes to be sure he has heard correctly. I imagined him on the other end, reaching out to set right some glass or lapel that had drifted a fraction out of place, the small ritual of a man who controls everything within his reach before he closes his hand on what he truly wants.

Then his voice came, warm and certain. "That is welcome news. I'll see to the arrangements myself."

Don Falcone ended the call. The moment the screen went dark, the bedroom door opened and Lorenzo walked in, thumb already moving across his phone, eyes nowhere near me.

He was always on that phone now. It had become an extension of him, a thing more present in our marriage than I was.

He had come home late again. Ever since Carla took over her father's seat three months ago, claiming her made rank in her own right, Lorenzo left before the morning fog burned off the bay and returned long after the house had gone quiet around me.

"Were you on the phone with Nico?" he asked, sparing me half a glance. My brother's name in his mouth, like it was the only person I could possibly have to call.

"No, it was" I began, but his phone cut across me, ringing, and his attention snapped to it like iron to a magnet.

"Forget I asked. I need to take this." He lifted the phone to his ear, and his thumb found the heavy gold signet ring on his other hand and began to roll it, slow, idle, a habit I had stopped reading meaning into a long time ago. "Let's keep it to text," he said into the line. "I have company." Then he hung up.

His phone chimed almost at once, a message landing, and he grinned down at the screen. The grin was not for me. It had not been for me in months.

It hurt, the way a small thing can hurt more than a large one, that he would not even let me finish a sentence before turning away. And I wondered, the way I always wondered now, who had earned what I could not. Was it Carla?

"Where are my pajamas?" He looked up from the screen at last, frowning at the empty bed. "You always lay them out at night."

Before I could answer, he went on, his tone shifting into the flat, administrative register he used for Family business. "We've looked into the shooters. It's handled. It won't happen again." A beat, an afterthought tacked on like a courtesy he'd been reminded to extend. "How are your wounds, by the way? Dottore Greco said they'd heal soon enough."

"They're healing nicely," I answered him curtly, my eyes fixed on my phone, scrolling through nothing, seeing nothing.

After the attack, they had carried me to the Family physician. Dottore Greco had removed his glasses and folded them slowly before he spoke, the way he always did before words that would draw blood, and only then had he told me. A concussion. A fractured arm. And the child I had never even known I carried, gone.

I had not known I was pregnant. Motherhood had been my one private dream, the thing I held quietly beneath all the cold marble and colder vows of this life, and now it lay shattered on a clinic floor while my husband called it bad luck and walked away.

I felt Lorenzo's stare settle on me. I refused to lift my eyes to meet it.

"Who are you texting?" he asked, and I nearly laughed.

Did he truly think I texted only because he did? That my world was a mirror angled at his?

"No one," I said, still watching the screen.

"I" he started, and then his phone rang again, and he picked it up.

"Carla, you could never disturb me. I live for the sound of your voice, you know that. You're the only good thing in my day." I heard him say it through the half-open door, his voice gone soft in a way it never went for me, as he drifted out of the bedroom with the phone pressed to his ear like something precious.

Carla was the only good thing in his day. And what was I? The lawful wife. The name on the marriage register. The woman whose bloodline had been welded to the Moretti Family in a sacred vow before God and every Don in the territory, and who now sat alone at a dining table built for two while her husband whispered devotions into a phone for another woman.

I pressed my left hand flat against my thigh, folding my bare ring finger inward against my palm, that old reflex, that phantom reach for the band I'd stopped sliding on each morning. There was nothing there to touch anymore. There hadn't been for a while.

My phone hummed against the marble, dragging me up out of the dark water of my own thoughts. A message. From Vito, one of Lorenzo's own capos, a made man who answered to my husband and yet, for reasons I had never asked, kept finding small ways to put truth in my hands.

[Look at what the Don posted tonight. You should see it.]

A link sat beneath the words. My thumb hovered over it for a long moment, the way you hover at the edge of something you already know will cut you. Then I tapped it.

A video bloomed across the screen. Lorenzo. My Lorenzo, the man who barely lifted his eyes to me across a room, leaning close to the camera with that lazy, indulgent warmth he reserved for her. "I'm sorry, Carla," he said, and even his voice in the recording was velvet. "I should never have told you to text me when you wanted to hear me on the phone. From now on, whatever you want, you'll have it. That's a promise from the man who'll always take care of you."

I sat very still. Five years ago, after we'd been bound, I had asked him once if he kept any accounts on the social platforms the younger associates used. I'm not on any of that, he'd said, dismissive, already turning away. I don't have the time for it.

So it had been a lie. Of course it had been a lie. He simply hadn't wanted me watching. Hadn't wanted me to see the soft underbelly of a man who had none of it left for the wife who wore his crest.

The phone hummed a second time. An email this time, and the sight of the sender's name sent a different sort of cold through me. Don Lena Falcone. The release papers. The formal documents that would return me to the Valente Family, my own blood, the bloodline that ran older and deeper than anything the Morettis could claim. I downloaded the file and let the screen go dark in my palm. Tomorrow, I told myself. Tomorrow I would print it. Tomorrow I would begin to climb out.

In the morning the doorbell rang just as I set down my fork. I'd eaten alone again, the way I always did now, a plate of pancakes going cold in a house full of silence and the faint, lingering ghost of Turkish tobacco that clung to Lorenzo's study.

I rose to answer it, but before I'd taken two steps Lorenzo came out of the living room in a rush, moving with a speed he never spent on me, and reached the front door first.

Minutes passed. When he came back into the dining room he carried two bouquets, one in each hand. Roses, deep and bloodred, and peonies, pale and lush.

"You bought flowers," I said, and I heard the foolish hope thread through my own voice before I could strangle it.

"Here. These are for you." He held out the peonies, almost without looking at me. I didn't take them.

"I'm allergic to peonies. I've told you. More times than I can count." The words came out flat, my mood sinking like a stone dropped into deep water.

His face did something between surprise and irritation. "You've never said a word about it. Not once in five years."

"I have." I let my hand drift toward the roses instead, toward the only thing in his grip that wouldn't make my throat close. "Just give me the roses, then."

He stepped back. The roses moved out of my reach, deliberate, a small precise withdrawal, and a scowl settled over his features as his voice dropped to that cold, clipped register the men in the Family knew to fear. "If you don't want the peonies, throw them in the bin. But these aren't yours."

My heart clenched so hard it stole my breath. "Then who are they for?"

Were they for her? For Carla? How could he stand in his own dining room and treat his mistress more tenderly than the woman whose hand he'd taken in front of the whole territory?

He didn't answer. He set the peonies down on the table between us, the way a man sets down something he no longer cares to hold, and the silence in the room grew thick enough to choke on.

I reached to the chair beside me and lifted the thing I'd found that morning, tangled in our sheets. A black thong, fine lace, not mine. I held it up between two fingers, my face carefully smooth, carefully empty.

"Whose is this?"

"I" he began.

"Is it Carla's?"

For half a heartbeat the mask slipped and something close to panic crossed his face. His thumb found the heavy signet ring on his hand and began to roll it, around and around. "I don't know how that ended up here," he said quickly. "Give it to me. I'll see that it's returned to her."

He plucked it from my fingers and was already moving, already shifting the air of the room toward the door. "Come on. I'll take you out for breakfast."

I stared at his back, genuinely thrown. He never took me anywhere. He took her, always her, to every restaurant on the family's turf, every quiet table in every front the Morettis owned. And yet here he was, offering it to me now.

But I was standing in the dining room. The empty plate sat plain on the table, the fork laid across it, the pancakes long finished. Any man with eyes would have known I'd already eaten. It seemed he hadn't looked at me at all, not once, not really, in longer than I cared to remember.

Adriana's POV

It happened in an instant. Lorenzo's mouth curved into a smile, and I knew without question that it was not meant for me. I had learned the difference between his smiles the way a woman learns the difference between thunder that passes and thunder that brings the storm down on her roof.

He glanced at his phone, the screen lighting his face, and murmured, "I'll take you out another time. Carla just messaged that she's here. We need to be at the club office. Now."

The "club" was what the family called the front, the elegant social hall on Mulberry Street where business was conducted behind velvet and brass, where men kissed rings and ledgers were never the kind anyone wrote down. I opened my mouth to answer him, but there was no one left to answer. He was already through the door, his shoes silent against the obsidian floor, his cologne and the faint trace of Turkish tobacco fading down the hall.

I rose to my feet just as her voice reached me, carrying clean and bright across the marble. "There you are, Lorenzo."

"My Carla." The two words came soft, intimate, the kind a man saves for the woman he means to keep. Their voices drifted, growing smaller, which told me they were walking together toward the car, side by side, the way a Don and his lawful wife were meant to walk and never did.

He was the Don. Not a soul in this family would dare let his name fall from their lips without a title chained to it. Don Lorenzo. Boss. Sir. No one called him simply by name except me, his wife, and now her. And he let it slide off her tongue like it belonged there. Was their arrangement truly only business, the way he swore it was? I held the question in my chest and did not let it breathe.

"Here. I bought roses for you. I know how much you love them." I could hear the grin in it, the pleasure of a man giving a gift he wanted to give.

So it was exactly as I had thought. The roses were for her.

He had never once bought roses for me. Not on a wedding anniversary, not on a name day, not on a single morning of our marriage. I turned my bare ring finger inward and pressed it into my palm, a reach for a band that was no longer there, a wound my own hand kept finding in the dark.

I let out a slow breath.

I knew they were going to the office for family work, real work, the careful arithmetic of a syndicate that touched every dock and casino in the city. So why this sickness pooling low in my stomach, this curdled, queasy thing?

The truth was simple and it shamed me. I wanted to go to the office. I wanted to stand at my husband's side. I was the Lady of the Moretti Family, and that title was supposed to mean we ran this house together, that we sat down over the books and the alliances and the quiet dangers as one. Instead he did all of it with her.

So my days had narrowed to the small things they left me. Checking on the family's people. Visiting the sick in the family physician's care. Cooking the Sunday meal that bound the men to the table and the table to the blood. Except that Carla had taken even that. The check-ins were hers now. Some of the cooking too. There was less and less of the family that was still mine, and I was the only one who seemed to notice the borders shrinking.

"I've won the bet. Don Lorenzo gave Capo Carla flowers." It was Lucia, one of the family's women, her voice carrying as she came into the house with her friends. She dropped it to a thrilled hush and I could picture her manicured fingers rising to cover her mouth, the way they always did right before she said something cruel. "It's obvious. They'll be wed soon enough."

"From what I've heard," Marcella answered, "they already are. In every way that counts."

"How can they be wed when he already has a wife?" Elena asked. Her voice was nearer, just outside the dining room, careful and low the way a sensible woman keeps her voice when she suspects the wrong ears are in the building.

Lucia muttered it like a secret too good to keep. "Well. I've heard the Lady Adriana isn't his true match at all. That it's Carla who's his lawful match by blood and bond, and the rest was just paper."

"And you believe that?" Elena asked, disbelief thinning the words.

"Yes," Marcella and Lucia said together, in one breath, two heads nodding.

Marcella's smile was in her voice, the way she nodded twice, too quickly, when she dressed up what she'd seen. "I saw them out at the lake house Friday night. Just the two of them, alone in the dark. Tell me that isn't romantic."

A small sound left my lips, and the floor seemed to tilt beneath me. My knees gave out. I went down against the cold marble, the world narrowing to a ring of white light and the impossible loud rush of my own blood.

They rushed in. I heard the scrape of chairs, the panic in their footsteps. Elena gasped, going silent first and then finding the words, glancing back over her shoulder the instant she understood who had overheard. "Oh. Lady Adriana. We had no idea you were here."

That was the last thing I heard before the dark folded over me.

When I surfaced again, the ceiling above me was unfamiliar and then it wasn't. Lorenzo stood beside the bed where someone had laid me, his frame blotting out the lamp. The second he saw my eyes open, the worry I might have imagined drained out of his face and left only irritation. He rolled the heavy signet ring around his finger with his thumb, slow at first, then faster, the way he did when he was lying to himself about something.

"Why weren't you answering my messages?" he scowled.

"Maybe because I was unconscious," I murmured, and pushed myself up against the pillows.

The scowl melted from his face into something he meant to pass for tenderness, and he slid one hand into the pocket of his tailored slacks. He drew out a gold necklace, the chain pooling across his palm like something dredged up from a vault. "I wanted to ask you what kind of necklace you like."

My heart didn't flutter. No warmth rose in my chest, none of the foolish softness that used to flood me whenever Lorenzo placed a gift in my hands. There had been a time when a man of his standing offering me anything felt like the whole Family had turned to face me. That girl was gone, buried somewhere under the obsidian floors of this house.

"I don't like gold," I murmured, Lucia's words surfacing in my memory, sharp and unbidden. "I prefer diamonds."

He frowned and tossed the necklace onto the bed, where it landed without a sound against the silk. "Fine. Don't take it."

He turned on his heel and walked out of the bedroom, pulling the heavy door shut behind him with a force that rattled the framed photographs on the wall. The slam carried down the corridor like a gunshot in an empty church. His anger was a living thing tonight, prowling the halls of the estate. I didn't care. I let my ring finger curl inward against my palm, a small reflex, reaching for the band that no longer sat there.

The door opened again. Carla walked in as though she owned the threshold, the diamonds at her throat catching the lamplight, matching earrings winking beside her jaw. Everything about her gleamed with the certainty of a woman who knew exactly where she stood in this house, and it wasn't beneath me.

"How are you feeling, Adriana?" she asked, and the smirk arrived before the question finished leaving her mouth.

Before I could answer, her gaze slid to the gold necklace abandoned on the bed, and her grin widened, slow and pleased. "Oh, did Lorenzo give you that? He gave me one too." Her fingers rose to the diamonds at her collar and touched them lightly, reverently, the way a made man might touch the crest pinned to his lapel. "You can see it's quite expensive."

She let out a small laugh, soft and curling, the kind of laugh meant to remind me precisely how little I was worth in the arithmetic of this Family. She touched the jewels again, almost stroking them, as if their weight at her throat were the deed to everything I'd lost.

"I'm fine," I said, keeping my voice level, keeping my eyes off her so they wouldn't betray the heat building behind them. "Why haven't you gone home yet? It's nine o'clock."

"I had no idea it was this late." Her hand fell from her necklace and she gathered herself in a flurry of practiced surprise. "I'll go now. Bye!" And she was gone, slipping out of the bedroom and into the dark corridors of the Moretti house as though she belonged to them more than I did.

I rose from the bed and crossed to my closet, my footsteps silent on the cold marble. The tears came as I pulled the first garments from their hangers, blurring the rows of silk and wool I had once chosen so carefully to stand beside him at every sit-down and gala. I packed quietly, methodically, the way you do when grief has burned itself down to resolve.

Just as I closed the last of it, the door opened. Lorenzo walked in. His eyes moved across the emptied closet, lingered on the suitcase standing beside it, and I felt the room hold its breath waiting for him to speak. He said nothing about it. He simply looked, and then looked away, and that silence told me more about how little he cared than any accusation could have.

"Adriana, I'll be travelling to another Family's turf in a few weeks. With Carla. Family business." He rolled the signet ring on his finger with his thumb, slow at first. "The Falcone interests down south. What do you want me to bring you back?"

"Nothing," I said, and walked past him to sit on the edge of the bed.

He looked genuinely confused, as though my refusal violated some natural law. "Are you still sulking about the necklace? Don't be petty, Adriana. I'd have bought you a diamond one. It was sold out." The ring turned faster under his thumb.

I didn't answer. My silence struck something in him, and his composure cracked. "You should be grateful I bought you a gift at all!"

When I still said nothing, the muscle in his jaw worked and he threw the next words like a man tossing a coin to a beggar. "I'm going for a run."

I lifted my eyes only in time to watch his back disappear through the doorway.

It was an old script between us. Whenever we fought, Lorenzo would announce he was going running, and I would trail after him into the night and end up apologizing for sins that were never mine, soothing him until the storm passed and order was restored. He counted on it the way a Don counts on the loyalty of his men.

Not anymore. I stayed where I was, hands folded in my lap, the suitcase a quiet promise in the corner. I didn't follow. I didn't even care that he was angry. The thread between us had already gone slack.

He didn't come home that night.

The hours dragged through the dark house, and I lay awake in the cold expanse of the bed, wondering if Carla had run beside him, wondering if he'd spent the night in her bed instead of mine, her diamonds glittering on the nightstand while my side of this marriage rotted quietly in the dark. The estate creaked around me, all its locked rooms and watchful men, and I had never felt more alone inside its walls.

The next morning I woke to the door opening.

Lorenzo walked in, disheveled, his shirt wrinkled, the scent of someone else's perfume clinging faintly to his collar. He glanced at me, the scowl already set into his face like something carved there overnight.

"Make me two very beautiful dresses before evening."

I had spent my life with a needle in my hand, dressing the women of the Moretti Family and Lorenzo's own sister in silk that cost more than most men earned in a year. I knew the difference between a wife's commission and a lie. And I knew, the moment he set that bundle of fabric in front of me, that this dress was not for Gianna.

I answered him in a voice clipped down to the bone. "I can't have it finished before evening."

He sighed, the sound thick with irritation, his thumb already rolling slow over the gold signet on his finger. "When, then?"

"Tomorrow morning." I kept my eyes on the bolt of cloth, not on him. "I'm going out now to buy the materials."

Relief loosened something in his shoulders, and he nodded. He drew his wallet from the inside of his tailored jacket and peeled off a thick fold of cash, more than the work was worth, the way a man overpays to silence a question he doesn't want asked. "Here. For the materials."

I took it without comment, crossed to where my purse sat against the cold marble of the bedroom floor, and tucked the money inside.

His phone rang. He answered before the second ring had finished, already turning, already walking out of the room with the device pressed to his ear and his back to me.

Lorenzo did not like to answer my calls. Yet here he was, lifting the phone for someone else as though the act cost him nothing at all. In all the years I had been bound to him as his lawful wife, sworn before the Family and the priest, he had answered my call exactly five times. I had counted. A woman counts the small mercies she is denied.

Our husband doesn't want us anymore, Lucian murmured in the back of my mind, blunt as a blade laid flat against the throat.

"Don't worry," I told that buried voice, drawing in a long breath and letting it bleed out of me slow. "He won't be ours for much longer."

I rose from the edge of the bed and walked to the bathroom, and I caught my own reflection in the glass without meaning to, my left hand curled into my palm, the bare finger turned inward where the marriage band used to sit. I made myself open it.

The next day I was in the living room of the family estate, eating lunch in a silence broken only by the distant tick of the grandfather clock in the hall, when Lorenzo's message lit up the group chat. It was a small thread, the four of us only, Lorenzo and Carla and Vito and me, the kind of intimate circle that should have meant something.

[Adriana, the dresses you made are gorgeous.]

Carla answered before I could, gushing into the screen.

[Yeah, they're so beautiful! I could have bought them from a boutique, but you know how they'd cheat me. I can't tell the fine work from the cheap. Lorenzo just doesn't want me to get scammed.]

I knew the dresses were for her. I had known it from the first cut. And still he had let me believe they were for his sister, the way he let me believe so many things, gently, almost kindly, so the betrayal would have softer edges.

I typed back a single word. [Okay.]

Carla wasn't finished. [I'm wearing one of them to a friend's party. You can come too, it's four doors down from the estate, we'll be up on the balcony.]

Then Lorenzo, fast as a man slamming a door: [There's no need for you to come.]

I decided to let it lie, to swallow it the way I had swallowed everything else. But a few minutes later my phone buzzed again, this time a private message, just from her.

[I'm craving chicken wings. Pick some up on your way over.]

So designing her dress had not been enough. Now I was to run her errands as well, fetch and carry for the Don's favored woman like an associate's wife sent to the market. I scoffed at the screen, shaking my head slowly in the quiet of that big empty room.

Half an hour later I walked into the house four doors down. Music poured from the speakers, loud enough to swallow my footsteps, and bodies moved against each other in the front rooms, the kind of careless gaiety that belongs to people who have never been made to wait for anything.

I carried the box of wings out to the balcony.

Lorenzo and Carla sat alone at a table set for four. They were the only two there, the empty chairs like a statement, and they had pulled close, far closer than the space required. He was looking into her eyes. She was looking back into his, and neither of them noticed the night air or the music or the world that held them.

The sound of my heels on the tile finally turned their heads. A scowl came down over his face like a shutter, and he pressed his lips into a thin, white line, the way a man does when he is holding his temper by the throat.

Carla grinned, slow and mischievous, her fingers drifting up to the diamonds at her collar, brushing the proof of her place. "You made it."

Lorenzo's brows drew together. He spoke through his teeth, his thumb rolling fast over his signet now, faster and faster. "I told you not to come."

Her grin only widened, and she lifted both hands in mock surrender, the stones at her throat catching the light. "Guilty. I texted her to bring me some chicken wings."

Lorenzo seized her hands and drew them down from her face, his voice softening into something I never heard him use for me. "You have nothing to feel guilty about, Carla tesoro."

How could he always stand on her side of every line?

The question burned and went nowhere, the way it always did. I remembered the real reason I had come into this room, the reason that had nothing to do with the woman draped on his arm, and I made myself reach into my bag and draw out the release papers. The grandfather clock in the corner of the study ticked through the silence, each stroke landing like a small judgment.

I pulled in a slow breath and let it out before I trusted my voice. "I came here for something important. A woman I know wants to be released to another Family. Her bound match belongs to them. I need your signature on her transfer." My thumb pressed the folded paper flat. My ring finger curled inward against my palm, a phantom reach for the band I had stopped wearing, and I forced my hand still before he could read it.

He glanced at me, a frown gathering between his brows as though the request needed weighing.

"Just sign it. Please." I set the words down quietly, the way Rosa would have, and he took the paper from me.

He scrawled his name across the bottom without reading a line of it, grumbling something low in his throat, then handed it back. The signet ring on his finger caught the lamplight as he passed it over, and his thumb was already rolling it, that slow restless turn I had learned to watch for.

Relief moved through me like cool water as my fingers closed around the form. Soon. Soon I would finally be free of this ache that lived under my ribs like a second heart.

"Is this why you interrupted us?" he asked, eyes flicking back to me.

"Yes." The single word was all I could spare.

His jaw set hard. His eyes narrowed, and he scoffed and turned his face away, as though the sight of me had curdled something in him. The mistress at his side watched the whole exchange with the patient amusement of a woman who has never once doubted whose name comes first.

"That mark on your wrist," Carla said, her gaze settling on my right arm where the word Mates was inked into my skin. "It looks just like the one Lorenzo wore a few months ago. The one that vanished. He told me he had it taken off." Her manicured fingers drifted up to the diamonds at her throat, a small reflexive touch, the gesture of a woman reaching for proof of where she stood.

I looked at his wrist. She was right. The matching token we had inked together five years ago, after he marked me before God and the Family as his lawful wife, was gone. Bare skin where the vow had been.

"It's only a tattoo," I told her, and the anger rose hot and bright behind my sternum even as my voice stayed level. "You can have one made for yourself if it means that much to you."

I was going to have mine removed today. It didn't mean anything to Lorenzo. There was no reason it should go on meaning everything to me.

I didn't wait for her answer. I turned my back on both of them.

My phone began to ring against my hip. I glanced at the screen and saw my brother's name. Nico.

I picked up at once, and his voice came warm down the line. "Adriana. How are you? Is Lorenzo treating you right?"

I sniffed, swallowing the thing in my throat. "I'm good. How's Mamma?"

He let the unanswered second question slide past, the way only family knows how to do. "Rosa's well. We've been missing you, all of us, but her most of all. When are you coming home? You told her it would be this week."

"I've missed you too." The truth of it nearly broke me. "Don't worry. I'm coming home in two days."

I was glad past words that he didn't ask why I was leaving Lorenzo. The Valente name carried its own weight, and Nico would not press at a wound until I was ready to show it to him. That mercy was its own kind of love.

As I ended the call, I heard footsteps cross the marble behind me, unhurried, certain. I turned to find Lorenzo walking toward me, his guards holding their places by the door, eyes lowered, the way men learn to stand when the Don moves through a room.

I couldn't tell whether he had overheard me or not. If he had, he said nothing of it.

"We'll stay here tonight," he murmured, already moving toward the staircase.

I didn't understand why he wanted us under this roof when the Family estate sat barely a mile down the road, every comfort waiting. But I followed him up the stairs the way I had followed him for five years, out of a habit my heart hadn't yet learned to break.

I woke to find his side of the bed cold and empty. The clock on the wall read one in the afternoon. The house was quiet around me, the particular hushed quiet of a place where men with guns stand somewhere out of sight and nothing happens that the Don does not permit.

The door opened and Lorenzo came in.

His gaze found me. "I had a special lunch made. Come down to the dining room and eat."

I climbed out of the bed and followed him down, his thumb turning that ring the whole way, faster now, around and around, as though there were something he was working very hard to convince himself of.

Adriana's POV

There were waffles set at the two ends of the long dining table, golden and perfect on cold white china, and I crossed the obsidian floor to take the chair at the far end. The morning light came in thin through the tall windows of the safe house, catching the silver and the crystal, the kind of quiet luxury Lorenzo surrounded himself with the way other men surrounded themselves with guns. The room smelled of espresso and warm sugar and, beneath it, the leather of his coat draped over a chair near the door. A grandfather clock somewhere down the hall ticked, slow and patient, and it was the loudest thing in the house.

Lorenzo sat at the other end of the table, far enough away that we might have been seated at two separate tables in two separate lives. He watched me the way he watched men he hadn't decided whether to trust.

"Why did you change the passcode on your tablet?" he asked, his eyes fixed on me.

The tablet had been a gift, bought for my twenty-fifth birthday, and he had been the one to set the passcode for me with those careful, possessive fingers, as though programming a thing he owned. I had changed it the day I learned he'd gone driving up into the hills with Carla, the two of them alone on a road that led nowhere a man takes his wife.

He hadn't even noticed until now. That was the part that sat coldest in my chest. Weeks of silence between us, and the first thing to draw his attention back to me was a string of four digits he could no longer command.

"No reason," I said, and I chewed my waffle slowly, letting the word settle without weight, without invitation.

A frown gathered at his brow. His thumb moved to the heavy signet ring on his hand and began to turn it, a slow roll against his knuckle, the way he did when he was telling himself something he half believed. "The sit-down is tonight. The inter-family gala. You've always wanted to stand at my side at these things." His voice had gone cold and even, the tone he used in rooms full of men who answered to him. "Do you want to come as my wife?"

I almost laughed. Carla had been the woman on his arm at every Family affair since the day he made her a capo in her own right, paraded through every gala and every neutral-ground meeting like a trophy he was daring the other Dons to covet. I went with my friends, or I went alone, or I did not go at all and no one marked the empty chair. So what had changed? Why now, when the alliance of bloodlines between us was already a corpse he simply hadn't buried yet?

But if I refused him, he would grow suspicious, and a suspicious Lorenzo was a careful one. He had signed my release back to the Valente Family without ever reading what his own hand was putting its name to, and that signature was the only thing standing between me and the rest of my life. I would not give him a reason to look twice at anything. Not yet. Not while the ink was still drying somewhere in my luggage.

Under the edge of the table, where he could not see, I turned my bare ring finger inward against my palm, pressing the empty place where his band used to sit until the phantom of it ached.

I didn't look at him as I rose from the chair. "Sure," I said.

That night the sit-down took place in the grand hall of an old marble building the Families used for their fragile truces, neutral ground where four bloodlines could share the same air and pretend the air wasn't thick with old debts. Chandeliers threw warm gold over men in dark suits and women in silk, over the slow circling of capos who never quite turned their backs to one another, over the quiet shapes of bodyguards standing along the walls like furniture that breathed. I sat at our table with Lorenzo beside me, close enough that the other Dons would see it, far enough that I felt nothing of his warmth.

"Are you enjoying yourself?" Lorenzo asked, his gaze sliding sideways to the boredom I hadn't bothered to hide.

I nodded, and I did not spare him so much as a glance.

Playing the part of Don Lorenzo Moretti's wife was nothing like the gilded fantasy I had once let myself imagine. The gala unfolded around me in a haze of crystal and candlelight, a sit-down dressed up as a celebration, where the heads of three Families circled one another beneath a chandelier the size of a small car. I knew none of the other wives, none of their husbands, none of the made men who lined the walls like well-tailored statues. And Lorenzo, who had brought me here on his arm as if I were an ornament he might or might not bother to wear, had not spoken a word to me in over an hour.

The silence between us had its own weight. I felt it in the cold marble beneath my heels, in the way the Turkish tobacco smoke curled toward the high ceilings and dissolved into nothing, the way I seemed to be dissolving too.

"Are you" he began, finally, as if remembering I existed.

He never finished. Her voice cut through the murmur of the room first.

"Lorenzo!"

We turned, and there she was, crossing the obsidian floor like the whole evening had been arranged for her arrival. Carla. She moved without hesitation, without the careful deference the rest of the room afforded the Don, because she had never needed it. The men did not stiffen for her the way they did for him, but they watched her, and she knew it, and she wore that attention like silk.

She reached him and folded herself against his chest, both arms around him, holding him tightly in front of everyone.

"You look marvelous," he murmured, and his eyes traveled the length of her body in a way that made the wine turn sour on my tongue.

Carla took his hand and laced her fingers through his, slow and certain. "Thanks."

Then she noticed me. Her gaze flicked to where I stood, half a step apart, the lawful wife and the unseen one, and her eyes widened in a performance of surprise so smooth it could only have been practiced. She slipped her fingers free of his, her hand rising at once to the diamonds at her throat, a small reflexive touch, fingertips grazing the proof of her place.

"Oh no. Lady Adriana, I'm so sorry. It's just that we're very close."

I curled my bare ring finger inward, pressing it into my palm where no one could see, a phantom reach for a band I no longer wore.

"You don't have to apologize, Carla." Lorenzo answered her before I could open my mouth, before the room could even turn to me for my reply. His voice was the most generous it had been all night, and it was not aimed at me.

It was at that moment that Don Lombardi crossed the floor toward us, the temperature of the gathering shifting subtly with his approach, and he drew Lorenzo aside into the low, measured talk of men who decide things. I was left standing beside Carla and her diamonds, two women who shared a husband, neither of us speaking.

"Outsiders!" someone shouted from the far end of the hall. "Shooters at the perimeter!"

The word moved through the gala like a blade. Glasses were set down. Men reached beneath their jackets. The wives scattered toward the walls in a rustle of silk and panic, and for one breathless instant the whole gilded room remembered what it truly was.

"Come on, Carla," Lorenzo said, and his hand closed around hers.

He pulled her toward the back door, fast, his body between her and whatever might be coming through the dark. He did not look for me. He did not reach for me. He had a wife on one side of the room and a mistress on the other, and in the one second that fear stripped away all the careful manners, his hand had chosen her.

He didn't try to protect me. Instead, he was protecting Carla.

"Everyone, calm yourselves. There are no shooters." Don Lombardi's voice rolled across the hall, unhurried, and he lifted one open palm, calm as a man stilling water. The room obeyed it the way it would never obey a shout. "A boy at the gate saw the shadow of a hedge moving in the wind and thought it was a man with a gun. There is no one here who does not belong."

The men's hands eased away from their jackets. The wives drifted back from the walls. And I watched Lorenzo walk back into the hall with Carla still at his side, her color high, her diamonds catching the chandelier light, the danger already turning into a story she would tell prettily later.

I glanced at the time on my phone.

My flight would take off in the cold dark hours before dawn, and I needed sleep before then, needed to be steady for what tomorrow would cost me. So I did the only thing left to do at a party where I had never been wanted. I made my way out of the hall, past the made men at the doors who did not so much as turn their heads, and I had a car carry me back to the Moretti estate alone.

I did not curl my finger against my palm anymore that night. There was nothing left to reach for.

The next morning I was already in the air, the city falling away beneath the wing, when Lorenzo's voice tore into my head, frantic, stripped of all his cold composure.

Adriana! Why am I feeling pain from the blood vow breaking? Why are you leaving? Where are you going?