The Don’s 999 Roses Couldn’t Buy My Freedom

Eight years into my blood-bound union, the Don of the Falcone family sent me nine hundred and ninety-nine roses.

I'd just come off the surgeon's table when I called him and, perfectly calm, asked to be released from the bloodline.

On the other end, his young confidante's tearful apology came through:

"Donna Russo, it's all my fault, I went ahead without asking. Please don't take it out on Don Falcone."

Lorenzo Falcone murmured to soothe her for a long while, then said only to me: "As you wish."

By the time I saw him again, half a month had passed.

"Make me a bowl of pasta."

Lorenzo came back to the estate in the small hours and, for the first time, didn't find a hot meal waiting at his place at the table.

His handsome brow drew together on reflex. He gave the order the way he gave every order, expecting it carried out, and walked off toward the bathroom.

By the time he came out trailing steam, I was still staring idly at the television. The house was quiet the way only a guarded house can be quiet, the men outside the windows moving and the silence inside thicker for it.

He pulled a designer bag out of his case. "Here. See if you like it."

A pink bag, the kind young girls obviously go for at a glance.

He used to win me over by taking me anywhere I wanted to go, past every guard and every closed door, as if the territory itself bent for me.

Now it was just dull gifts to keep me quiet.

I couldn't be bothered to give it a second look. I changed the channel and asked him:

"When do you have time to bring it before the elders? To sever the union."

Lorenzo was busy. So busy that even an anniversary gift had to be picked out by his personal courier.

When it came to making time, it was always me working around him.

"Stop making a scene. Vittoria Bianchi didn't know you hate roses. It won't happen again."

He poured himself a small glass of whiskey and settled into the single armchair across from me. His thumb traced once around the rim of the glass before he gave me that not-quite-a-smile.

Vittoria had come up alongside Lorenzo since they were children. She'd adored him all that time, and the moment she'd proved herself she came running to become his personal courier, the one who carried his word through the Family.

The two of them were always paired off, even sharing the same suite when business took them across territory lines.

The truth was, I didn't blame Vittoria for chasing Lorenzo so relentlessly.

Flies don't land on an egg without a crack.

If he hadn't given her an opening, no woman could have gotten close.

I let out an exaggerated yawn, and tears pricked at the corners of my eyes without my meaning them to.

Hearing no answer from me for a while, Lorenzo assumed the matter was closed.

He asked how our seven-year-old son had ranked in his last lessons.

I shook my head. "I don't know."

It wasn't to spite Lorenzo, withholding it on purpose.

I genuinely didn't know.

The Falcones believed the heir to the bloodline should be raised hard and raised close. Matteo had been kept at the compound since he was small, his days packed under the watch of his minders, one drill after another.

It was almost funny. I was the one who'd carried him, yet the times I got to see him could be counted on one hand.

I'd cried over it, fought over it, but the Falcones couldn't have cared less.

The way they saw it, an outsider with no Family blood marrying into the bloodline was already a blessing earned by my ancestors.

Anything beyond that was pure wishful thinking.

Lorenzo pinched the high bridge of his nose and told me to put more of my attention on our son:

"Keep this up and Vittoria will be more of a mother to him than you are."

I knew what he meant.

Yesterday was Friday, the one day I was allowed to bring our son back from his lessons.

I'd arrived an hour early. I waited until dark, until the gates were drawn shut and the men changed their watch.

Only then did Vittoria call to tell me the Donna wanted her to bring the boy back to the estate for the Sunday table early.

Through the phone, I heard Lorenzo's voice.

He was asking Vittoria, with a smile in his voice, whether she wanted any soup.

My thoughts came back to the present, and I gave Lorenzo a smile that didn't reach my eyes:

"Then isn't that exactly what you want? I'll leave right now. Let her be your so-called Donna."

Something in those words must have stung Lorenzo. He went quiet for several seconds, then erupted:

"My patience has its limits.

Adriana Russo, stop being impossible."

He stood and had taken only two steps when I said, flat and unhurried:

"Oh, right, I forgot to tell you. I lost the baby."

A month ago.

The night he got Vittoria's call and walked out the door to drink in her place,

the pain in my stomach got so bad I drove myself to the emergency room, past the guards at the compound gate who didn't think to ask where the Don's wife was going alone at that hour.

And there they told me I'd been pregnant for just over two months, that the baby had no heartbeat, that it was already gone.

The most absurd part: when I learned the baby was gone, I felt relieved.

I came down off the operating table alone and thought, it's time to end this.

In the sitting room, Lorenzo stood with his back to me, gripping a glass of whiskey, his knuckles white. The clock on the mantel ticked into a silence so complete it seemed to belong to a house where someone had already died.

He didn't demand to know why I hadn't reached out to him.

He knew exactly how many times I'd called him that night.

The phone simply rang and rang, and no one ever answered.

"Better off gone. You've proven you'd make a terrible mother."

He walked into the study and shut the door with the ease of long habit. The lock turned. A made man can order a body buried before sunrise and never lose a minute of sleep, and I understood then that closing a door on me cost him exactly nothing.

Eight years of a blood-bound union, countless fights and arguments.

I was always the one who gave in first.

But this time, Lorenzo never heard the meek little knock at the door.

Half an hour later he opened it, searched every corner of that enormous estate, and never saw me again.

I was Lorenzo Falcone's first love.

No one could have imagined that the cold, handsome heir to the Falcone bloodline, groomed from the cradle to one day sit at the head of the table,

would fall for a non-conformist street girl who spent her days smoking and burning her nights in the clubs that paid tribute to families like his.

Our first meeting wasn't pretty. A reeking, smoke-filled alley, the young heir being shaken down for cash by some neighborhood thugs who didn't yet know whose son they had cornered.

I happened to be passing by, and one of them leered at me and whistled.

So I rode my bike straight into the crowd, and while I was teaching the punks a lesson, I accidentally got the shy young heir out of a life-or-death jam.

After that, Lorenzo stuck to me like glue.

He waited for me after school, trailed behind me, and no matter what I did I couldn't shake him.

He gave me roses. I'd toss them into the toilet with a cold face, let them soak, then drop them back on his desk.

He'd have a lunch made for me by hand that cost a frightening amount of laundered cash, and I'd hand it off to the beggar by the road.

The girls teased me for keeping a rich, lovesick puppy.

Anyone could see we came from different worlds. His blood was old and feared. Mine ran in the gutters his Family owned.

But this was the same person who, when my drunk of a father beat me so badly I couldn't go to school, broke into our home, scooped up my barely breathing body, and ran with me into the hospital.

While the doctor stitched me up, he stood with his back to me, his shoulders shaking beyond his control, the back of his hand wiping again and again at his face.

The doctor, helpless and half-laughing, asked him why he was crying when he wasn't the one who was hurt.

He said he didn't know why, his chest just ached so badly he couldn't stand it.

And he asked, dead serious, whether they should run an EKG and check his heart.

In the hospital room, Lorenzo clumsily peeled an apple.

"I never want to feel this awful again. Adriana, please, just stop getting hurt. I'm begging you."

I ate the popsicle he'd bought me, mumbled okay, then shot him a fierce glare.

"So do you want to be my boyfriend or not?"

That whole day, the two of us went red in the face and couldn't get a single word out.

I once told Lorenzo a secret no one else knew.

Every time my father drank himself into a rage and beat my mother half to death, the next day a single battered apology rose would show up in the house.

So if he ever wanted to break it off with me, he didn't have to say it.

One rose would be enough.

"Silly. We'll be together forever."

The eighteen-year-old boy held me tight and wouldn't let me say another foolish word.

To get me out from under my father's fists, Lorenzo took me abroad with him while he studied the family's overseas interests.

And the old Don, determined to break us apart, cut off every dollar of his allowance.

Back then, on top of his studies, the two of us worked two jobs apiece, hustling in a city where the Falcone name meant nothing.

That stretch of life should have been nothing but exhaustion and worry, and yet even in the space between brushing our teeth, Lorenzo and I couldn't help acting like fools and laughing at nothing.

In that little walk-up we bickered, we made noise, and our eyes were full of each other.

If we could have spent our whole lives like that, how wonderful that would have been

"Mrs. Falcone? Are you feeling all right?"

The doctor's concern pulled me back.

Today was the third day since I'd walked out of the compound, and my old habit of insomnia had only gotten worse.

Holding the prescription the doctor had written me for sleeping pills, I went to collect them alone, and that was when I ran into Vittoria.

"Mrs. Falcone, what brings you to the hospital all by yourself?"

Vittoria blinked at me, all wide-eyed innocence, and when I said nothing she went on, her voice soft with pity:

"Lorenzo told me about the baby Don't take it too hard. You're both still so young. You're sure to have another."

"Don't worry. There won't be another."

The words had barely left my mouth when I saw Lorenzo coming toward us, his hard, handsome face dark as a coming storm.

I didn't know why he was angry. I only saw the medical spray clenched tight in his hand.

In a coy, petulant little voice, Vittoria told me she hadn't been careful on the steps and had twisted her ankle.

It was nothing that needed a hospital at all, she said. It was all Lorenzo's fault for insisting on bringing her, for dragging her away from her work running errands for the Family.

It was simply my turn at the pharmacy counter. Seeing the bag in my hand, Lorenzo couldn't stop himself from asking:

"Where does it hurt?"

When I treated him like air and turned to leave, he actually snatched the bag from me and opened it to look inside.

"Insomnia? Since when did you have this?"

"Adriana, I'm talking to you. Tell me, how long do you intend to keep up this performance?"

Lorenzo thought my leaving home was nothing more than a whim, some new way to make him pay attention to me.

So even now, he had never once bothered to learn where I'd actually been staying these past few days, or what I'd been doing with myself.

The cold edge climbed in his voice without his noticing, and people around us slowed and turned to look. In that world a Don who raises his voice has already lost, and somewhere beneath the anger he knew it.

A flicker of disgust crossed my eyes. I took the bag back from him and said quietly:

"I'm not performing anything for you."

Maybe my tone was too gentle, too unbothered, because Lorenzo read it as me softening, giving in.

He offered to take me home first, then bring Vittoria back to the Family's offices.

But I shook my head.

"Your work matters more. I can get back on my own."

By "back," I meant back to my own home.

When my drunk of a father died in a car wreck, he left me more than a next-of-kin payout.

That house I had once been so desperate to escape, where I was always being beaten, had become my one and only safe harbor.

Watching my lonely figure walk away, Lorenzo pressed his lips together and was about to start after me, when Vittoria caught his arm.

The color drained from her face as she said she'd come over very unwell.

Probably her blood sugar, she said.

Lorenzo hesitated a moment, then chose not to follow the way I'd gone. He turned and walked toward the vending machine instead.

On the very day my lawyer finished drafting the papers to sever the blood-bound union, I happened to get a call from Lorenzo.

His voice was urgent and heavy:

"Our son is sick. Come to the estate before six."

Before I could ask what was wrong with the boy, the man had already hung up.

I printed out the agreement and let myself smile in relief.

It was only when I reached the Falcone estate that I realized the whole Family was there.

They were in the middle of their Sunday sit-down, and our son had been wedged into the seat between Lorenzo and Vittoria.

To anyone looking in from the outside, the three of them were the real little family.

My eyes stinging and red, I walked toward the son I hadn't seen in so long, stroked his face, and asked gently what was wrong.

The boy's features were almost a shrunken copy of Lorenzo's.

My son's face twisted with distaste as he slapped my hand away and glared at me warily, then turned to Vittoria as if asking to be saved.

A needle-sharp pain went through my chest.

Vittoria pulled my son cozily into her arms and said in that innocent voice:

"But Matteo isn't sick at all. Adriana, did you take the wrong dose of your sleeping pills and get things confused?"

The moment she said it, every Falcone at that table turned a look of disdain on me.

I knew they were sneering at me in their hearts, the way they always did, especially Lorenzo's sister, Gemma.

She had always believed I was gutter blood, never good enough for her brother, never fit to sit among the bloodline.

In the past, every snub and every petty cruelty of hers I had swallowed for her brother's sake, taking it all without a word.

What a pity that this time, I had no interest in playing the spineless doormat anymore.

I rounded on Lorenzo. "You told me on the phone that our son was sick. You told me to come.

I dropped everything to get here, and your little errand girl says he's fine.

So which of you is lying? Or are the two of you the ones who are actually sick?"

Vittoria clearly hadn't expected me to push back this hard. Panic surfaced in her eyes.

Her lips parted, ready to explain something, but I gave her no opening. With my eyes lowered, I warned her:

"Vittoria, if you want to play lapdog to a married man, that's your business.

But don't use my son as a tool to fight for affection, or don't blame me for what comes after."

The mockery was too blunt to dodge. Vittoria's face went through every shade of green, and her tearful expression held a half-second too long before her eyes welled up red with self-pity.

Lorenzo threw down his fork with a sharp clatter against the china, his face cold and hard, his eyes burning as he stared at me:

"Adriana, all you ever do is stir up jealousy. Our child has had a cold for days. Have you, his mother, shown the slightest concern?

And we agreed on six. You've kept this whole table waiting for ages.

Since you have such a poor sense of time, get out to the side room and eat with the help."

Lorenzo's word was always final.

Under that roof, no one dared cross him. The made men at the lower end of the table kept their eyes on their plates and said nothing.

A flash of secret glee crossed Vittoria's eyes. She pressed her lips together, arranging a sympathetic face, settling in to enjoy the show.

Gemma arched a brow at me, her eyes full of naked contempt.

With every Falcone watching, I walked over to the head of household, Rosa Greco.

"Rosa, when you have time, come to my place. I'll cook for you."

I didn't want Rosa to think that eating with the help was something shameful.

Then I met Lorenzo's eyes and gave him a faint, scornful smile:

"You truly disgust me."

Seeing me lift my foot to go, Lorenzo finally lost his composure. He shot up, locked his hand around my wrist, fury plain across his face:

"Where do you think you're going? Did I say you could leave?"

His shamelessness genuinely infuriated me.

"None of your damn business. Let go of me."

Catching Vittoria's signal, Gemma delicately set down her fork, let the silence sharpen the knife, and then came at me with cold sarcasm:

"Adriana, after all these years you're still exactly the same. Not a shred of breeding. Gutter blood is gutter blood. You'll never be fit to sit at a real table."

At that, Lorenzo actually turned his head and snapped at Gemma:

"Shut your mouth."

While he was distracted, I finally wrenched free of his grip.

The hot, stinging pain in my wrist set fire to the anger I'd buried for years.

I swept my gaze across the table, and that chilling look finally settled on Gemma's ugly, self-satisfied face, the one that thought itself a cut above everyone. I asked her:

"Do you want to know what someone with truly no breeding looks like?"