He Let Me Drink His Poison, So I Sold His Empire to His Rival

Lorenzo Corsetti was allergic to drink. In the three years we'd spent building the operation together, blood and business fused into one, I sat through every tribute sit-down where the cups came laced, and I never once let a drop pass his lips. I took them for him. All of them.

At the grand feast celebrating the Corsetti Family's rise to a made operation, I stepped up again, taking on ten men at a time, draining every glass raised in his name so nothing that came to that table would reach him.

Halfway through the meal my stomach began to turn, the old wound waking, so I slipped away to take something to steady it.

Instead I found him slipping my medicine between his little courier's lips.

"Don Corsetti, if you give me your pill, what will Miss Bellandi do?"

"She was born to drink. She could down eight bottles of the strongest stuff and still stand. Worst case, she makes a fool of herself, that's all."

The girl covered her mouth and giggled. "What kind of fool?"

"Doing a full striptease in an associate's car... and the next morning she actually thought she'd done it with me..."

Every woman at the table burst out laughing.

Only I stood there as if nailed to the floor, going from numb, to a sharp sting, to something hollow where my heart used to be.

No wonder he'd always said the Family owed everything it had become to the way I'd given myself up for it.

The next second, he picked up the girl's glass and drained it in one swallow. His fingers found the knot of his tie, and his eyes flicked once toward Adriana Vitale, the way they always did before he decided anything.

Then he pinched her cheek. "Same rule as always. Don't tell Francesca Bellandi, or I'll have no one left to take my drinks for me."

So even the poisoner's weakness had been a lie.

I didn't expose him. I pressed two fingers flat against my stomach, against the old scar, and forced myself to turn away. With a single tap I sent the word that liquidated my entire stake in the Family, every share of everything we'd built.

From now on, I would never take another drink for him.

Behind me, the stunned laughter kept rolling on.

"Don Corsetti, so it's not that you can't drink, it's that you don't want to?"

Lorenzo made a shushing gesture, careless and easy.

"Francesca loves to drink, and she loves that feeling of the beauty rescuing the hero when she takes drinks for me. As her man, I have to indulge those little fancies of hers!"

His courier, Adriana Vitale, chimed in sweetly. Her hand drifted to her sleeve, smoothing away a wrinkle that wasn't there.

"Actually, the first time Don Corsetti had an 'allergic reaction,' it was because he'd eaten the mango cake I made. Miss Bellandi just assumed it was the drink."

The others gasped in admiration.

"Adriana, you're really something! You knew Don Corsetti that far back?"

Adriana laughed, all coy charm. "I was the only stray he ever took in off the street, brought under the Family's wing. Back then I had no way to repay him. The only thing I could offer was a cake I'd made with my own hands. Who knew it would cause such a huge mix-up!"

"Still, it's a beautiful misunderstanding. Now Don Corsetti never has to drink at a single sit-down for the rest of his life. Even if he struck me or cursed at me for it, I'd take it!"

Lorenzo shot her a mock-scolding look. "As if I'd ever raise a hand to you or curse at you. I coddle you every single day, and you still have the nerve to go blabbing our little secret!"

The doting in his voice came through crystal clear, even from the other side of the door.

A cold shudder shot up from the base of my spine to the crown of my head.

The grief and rage of being deceived were swallowed whole by that cold.

That night had been the first time for Lorenzo and me.

Candlelight, red wine, a rose-topped cake. Everything had been so perfect.

The only flaw was that Lorenzo suddenly flushed red all over, his throat swelling shut.

I panicked out of my mind, sobbing, ready to send for a doctor, but he stopped me and said a pill would fix it.

Afterward, I asked him how he could have had a reaction out of nowhere.

He told me it was the drink. That his body couldn't take liquor.

It was never a misunderstanding at all. It was his way of covering for Adriana.

Because the wine was something I'd bought. The cake was something Adriana had made.

That night, drowning in guilt, I did everything I could to please him, and for the three years that followed I took countless poisoned cups for him at every table where the Family sat down.

Three times I woke in a hospital bed with my stomach torn open, and more drunken nights of pain than I could count, and he'd tell me over and over, eyes red, that he loved me, yet he never once told me the truth about that lie.

And he certainly never told me he'd once taken a girl in off the street.

How laughable that I'd treated that night as our most precious memory.

That I'd treated all those days of taking drinks for him as the foundation stones of the future we were building together, bloodline and business, side by side.

It never once crossed my mind that it had only ever been my own one-sided fantasy.

That night was where our paths began to split.

Adriana's coquettish voice piped up again, sweet as poisoned wine.

"Fine, fine, I won't push. Then, Don Corsetti, at least tell us how Miss Bellandi did her little striptease. That's fair, isn't it?"

Lorenzo tapped her forehead lightly, the gesture of a man who owned everything he touched.

"Don't you already know all the details?"

Adriana swung on his arm, wheedling.

"I just want to hear it one more time. Come on, will you tell it or not?"

The other girls joined in, pouting and coaxing around the low table, their glasses catching the candlelight.

"Don Corsetti~ Just tell us! We all want to hear it~"

With a whole cluster of pretty young things fawning over him, Lorenzo put on a mock-stern face, the same face he wore when he wanted a room to believe he was being generous.

"Enough of this nonsense! It was just your Miss Bellandi mistaking me for the associate at the sit-down, stripping down to her underwear, scaring the poor man so badly he tried to get out of the car. She locked the doors and wouldn't let him leave. If I hadn't gotten there in time, an allied Don's dignity would've been gone right there in the back seat"

As his voice rose and fell through the story, the jumbled memory I'd been forced to bury got mercilessly rewritten. I pressed two fingers flat against my stomach, against the old wound, the way I always did when a lie was being told in front of me.

No wonder he'd looked at me so strangely after I sobered up.

I'd asked him what was wrong, whether I'd made a fool of myself while drunk, and he'd said:

"Francesca, thank you for everything you've given me. I promise I'll never let you down. Once the operation is made, once we're recognized by the other families, I'll marry you."

After that, he rarely touched me. He poured more and more of himself into the Family instead, into building the operation out beyond the hotels and the docks.

And I sank deeper into the dream he'd built for me, taking every poisoned cup at every tribute sit-down, throwing myself even harder into making the operation bigger, stronger, harder to touch.

All so I could become his bride that much sooner.

But the operation was made, blessed at the grand feast in front of every Don who mattered, and he said not a single word about marriage.

Instead, to keep Adriana and the other girls entertained, he turned my most humiliating moment into a punchline.

Lorenzo gave the crowd another order, his tone doting, indulgent.

"That's enough now. Everyone treat this as a joke, and I don't want it leaving this room."

They all laughed and swore to it, the way you swear to anything a Don says when his hand is on his glass. But after I stepped into the powder room, a few of the girls came in after me, their heels clicking on the marble.

"Hey, what do you think Don Corsetti meant by all that tonight? Are we getting a new lady of the house or something?"

"Feels like he's putting the old workhorse out to pasture. Once a thing is spoken out loud, it stops being omert. Miss Bellandi's probably not far from getting cut loose"

"Then we'd better cozy up to Adriana. As crazy as Don Corsetti is about her, she'll be moving up fast. Adriana actually told me the Don had those allied men get Miss Bellandi drunk on purpose, so tonight's proposal would fall through because she was too wasted to stand"

"It's almost funny. She bled for him at every sit-down, took every cup meant for his lips, and got nothing out of it. Talk about pathetic."

"You sure that proposal was even for Miss Bellandi? Look at her. She has no idea about any of it."

Their mockery drove into my heart like a dozen knives.

I clamped a hand over my mouth to keep the tears from spilling out.

Because just last night I'd asked Lorenzo if he had a surprise for me tonight, and he'd told me flat out that he didn't.

My phone buzzed against the cold marble. A message came in:

Heard you're liquidating your entire stake in the Family. Would you transfer it to me? Name your price.

I looked at the sender, genuinely surprised.

I never expected Dominic Falcone to want what was in my hands.

He was the allied Don I'd mistaken for Lorenzo that night, the one I'd stripped for.

I hesitated two seconds, then asked him:

Why?

Call it a debt of honor. For taking advantage of you back then.

Come out and we'll talk it over on neutral ground. And I'll take you somewhere you can breathe. You look like you need to.

I couldn't help freezing.

Dominic had been at the feast tonight too, seated among the made men. Could he have just overheard everything?

I asked him outright.

He only said:

That night I should have stopped you from drinking so much. It was my fault, and a man settles his debts.

So was that the reason his Family, with far better arrangements available to a Don of his standing, still chose to put its name beside mine on the blood oath?

That was what I thought, and what I asked.

The other end went quiet for a long time before a single line came through:

Don't carry any guilt over this. Buying your stake out of the Corsetti operation won't cost me a thing.

I stared at the word Corsetti, and my eyes stung for reasons I couldn't name.

The operation had first carried both our names, Lorenzo's and mine, when we swore it into being with our blood.

But before the Family was made, before the grand feast that would put us on the map, Lorenzo brought in some old woman who read omens the way the old country did. She said the sound of our names bound together carried a curse, a promise of ruin, so he had the whole operation rechristened.

Now every man on the street knew only the Corsetti name. The ones who remembered it had ever been ours, both of ours, were vanishingly few.

Corsetti. Adriana Corsetti. It sat on the tongue like it had always belonged there.

What was there left for me not to understand?

And I understood something more: whether it was the arrangement or the offer to buy the stake I meant to liquidate, Dominic was only doing it to make up for what they'd done to me that night.

But the man I'd bled for, the man I'd loved for years, had never once thought I shouldn't be draining those poisoned cups at every sit-down for him.

He'd taken my ruin with his own two hands and turned it into a party trick to keep other men happy.

Fine. Wait for me.

I slid the phone away, waited for the women to file out, and walked out of the restroom.

A hand caught my arm out of nowhere.

"Francesca, I've been looking all over for you. Where did you go? I still need you to take the cups for me tonight!"

I caught the faint scent of his cologne, expensive, familiar, and I didn't turn around.

"Something's come up. I'm leaving. Drink if you can hold it, and if you can't, don't."

He went still for a beat, then stepped around in front of me, his face darkening. Behind him a soldier by the door shifted his weight, watching us the way men watch a fuse.

"What's this about? You're sore I haven't made it official yet? We just haven't gotten to the main event. You think I'd go back on my word to you?"

So he still remembered the promise. The one where he'd swore he would put a ring on my hand the night the Family was finally made.

I had waited, at peace, all this time.

And what I'd waited for was the cruel truth.

He drew a velvet box from inside his jacket and gentled his voice.

"Once everyone's been seen to, then it's your moment. Aren't you happy?"

Inside the box sat the diamond I'd longed for.

But I smiled and pried his fingers open.

"I really do have somewhere to be. Go drink with them."

Lorenzo's brow knit. His hand went to the knot of his tie, and his eyes cut sideways, toward the private room where the others still sat, before they came back to me.

"No. What's gotten into you? You know I can't hold a drop, the stuff makes me sick. Come back in with me, Adriana and the rest are still waiting to raise a glass to you!"

His voice was so righteous it turned my stomach.

"Is that true? That you can't hold a drink?"

I looked at him steadily, waiting to see whether he'd tell the truth.

But there wasn't a flicker of guilt on his face. He only took my wrist and pulled me toward the private room without another word.

"You barely drank anything tonight. Why are you talking nonsense all of a sudden!"

I pressed two fingers flat against my stomach, against the old wound that always knew a lie before I did, then shoved him off hard and ran for the restroom, where I hugged the toilet and threw up until the world spun.

Lorenzo waited two impatient minutes. Then Adriana, who'd come looking for him, steered him back toward the room.

"Don Corsetti, go and rest. I'll see to Miss Bellandi."

And Lorenzo truly walked off without a backward glance.

Adriana carried over a glass of red wine and laid a hand on my back.

"Miss Bellandi, what do you push yourself so hard for? A woman with too much fight in her, no one ever loves her."

"Or is it the truth from earlier that you can't stomach?"

My head snapped around, and I looked at Adriana with bloodshot eyes.

"You did this on purpose?"

Adriana watched me, savoring it, and tipped the red wine straight down my front, her lip curling.

"What else? The Don's put up with you for a long time and couldn't bring himself to cut you loose, so someone had to play the villain. You don't know how every time he lies down beside you, all he sees is you stripping down for some associate at a sit-down. How sickening is that."

"And in the places he can't see, you've probably been passed around by half his associates, haven't you? Where do you find the nerve to keep clinging to him?"

Red wine dripped, soaking through the white of my gown.

I looked down at the wine bleeding across my chest, dark as old blood on silk, and laughed out loud.

"Three years at the sit-downs, taking every cup that should have finished you, and all you ever did was carry the garbage out for me. Take the trash. He's yours."

"You're calling the Don garbage? You think you've earned the right?"

Adriana smiled and lifted her hand.

I threw my arm up to block the blow, but she only smiled wider and slapped herself. Twice. Hard.

She showed her own face no mercy. Her cheek swelled red in an instant.

"Ah! Francesca! Why did you hit me?"

She shrieked it loud enough to carry down the corridor, ripped open her own collar, and screamed for someone to help her.

When Lorenzo came through the door, he caught her at the precise moment she looked her most broken.

He didn't care that it was the women's washroom. He crossed the tile in three strides and pulled Adriana into his arms.

He stripped off his jacket and settled it over her shoulders, gentling her like something wounded.

"I'm here. Don't be afraid."

Then he turned to me, and the warmth went out of him like a door closing.

"Francesca! You're drunk!"

"Apologize to Adriana!"

He didn't ask a single question. In a world built on who you trust, he had already chosen. He believed her without condition.

I shook my head and refused.

"I didn't touch her. She threw the wine on me, then staged all of this"

Adriana wept harder, right on cue.

"Don Corsetti, don't blame Francesca. It's my fault. I saw her reaching for another glass right after she'd been sick, so I told her to go easy. I knocked the wine from her hand so she couldn't drink. I deserved to be hit."

At that, Lorenzo struck me across the face.

The sound of it cracked flat in the tiled room. Somewhere out in the corridor a glass was set down too carefully, and the murmuring stopped.

"Francesca. Are you sober now?"

He pointed at Adriana's swelling cheek, his voice gone cold and level.

"Look at what you've done. If you can't hold your liquor, then you don't sit at the table. And now here you are, drunk, out of control, shaming yourself in front of the whole Family."

"Do you have any idea what you become with a few cups in you? The last sit-down, you mistook one of the associates for me and put on a show in the back of the car. I let it go. I didn't want you disgraced in front of them. And now you've raised your hand to Adriana and you still won't own it."

"Did you take one of the associates to bed and get caught, and now you'll hide behind the wine for that too? Do you think every man in this life is me? That they'll swallow whatever you hand them, no matter what it costs?"

Had I truly been drunk, I would probably have parroted every word back to him and gone down on my knees to Adriana.

But I had never been more clear-headed in my life.

Clear-headed enough to see exactly what I was worth in his eyes.

Three years of taking the poisoned cups meant for him, my ruined stomach, all of it, reduced to nonsense.

It was too absurd.

The noise had carried far enough to draw a crowd to the doorway. Made men, their wives, associates, the whole glittering feast of the Corsetti operation come to watch.

Word passed from mouth to mouth, and within a breath every one of them believed the deals I'd closed for this Family had been closed on my back.

They pointed. They whispered behind ringed fingers.

"Dio, a woman like that thinks she'll stand beside the Don? How could she ever deserve him?"

Someone else added, thick with sarcasm.

"She's had plenty of men. Clearly she's got her own particular talents."

"What talents? I wouldn't mind a taste myself. Is that all it takes to close a deal with her?"

Some drunk near the bar whistled at me through his teeth.

The anger on Lorenzo's face vanished the instant that whistle landed. Not a flicker of it left.

"Francesca! Apologize to Adriana! Or the surprise I had planned for tonight is finished!"

He was using the ring, the thing he'd promised me, as a blade to my throat.

I didn't care anymore.

"Lorenzo. We're done."

His face froze, disbelief carved into it.

"You strike someone, and now you throw a fit and demand we're finished?"

"You're drunk out of your mind. Since you love your wine and your scenes so much, tonight I'll let you have your fill. Let everyone here see exactly what you turn into."

He dragged me into the private room and forced the liquor down my throat in front of a table full of young women in borrowed silk.

However I struggled, his hand wouldn't ease.

One of the girls couldn't stomach it and spoke up.

"Don Corsetti, if something happens to Francesca from being made to drink like this, it falls on you. You'll answer for it."

But Lorenzo turned on her with a look that shut her mouth.

"Don't concern yourself. She's mine. Whatever happens to her, I'll answer for it."

Venom flashed through Adriana's eyes, but she caught his arm, weeping.

"Don Corsetti, let it go! It's all my fault! Every bit of this is my fault... let me take three cups to make it up to Signorina Bellandi!"

She snatched the bottle from Lorenzo's hand and tipped it to her lips. One mouthful was all it took. She choked, her whole face flushing red.

Lorenzo panicked instantly, sweeping her up into his arms.

"Adriana, are you out of your mind? Your stomach's already bad, how could you drink like this? It'll be aching again in no time!"

He carried her off, toward whatever doctor the Family kept on its payroll for nights like this.

I'd had two cases of liquor forced down my throat, and he didn't spare a single thought for whether my stomach would ache, whether it would perforate again. Adriana had taken one sip, and he'd fallen apart like this.

Watching his hurried back disappear into the crowd of made men, I understood it completely now. To Lorenzo, I was nothing but the woman who took the poisoned cups meant for him.

My stomach burned like it was on fire, yet I walked to the back room to change as if I felt nothing.

I'd only gotten halfway out of my clothes when the locked door swung open.

I whipped around and saw several of the Family's associates slink in, their faces oily with lust.

"Well, well. Signorina Bellandi really is generous. She caught our little hint and can't even wait to give us what we want."

"Then it would be rude of us to refuse."

Several fat, greasy hands reached for me. I grabbed the chair beside me and hurled it at them.

"Get out!"

But they caught it and yanked hard, dragging it toward themselves. I stumbled and crashed to the floor. Pain stabbed through my stomach, and that familiar metallic taste spread across my tongue.

The pain had stars bursting in my eyes. I pulled out my phone and hit the call for Lorenzo.

No one answered.

A sleazy jeer landed in my ear.

"Oh? Still trying to call Don Corsetti for help? But your Don's busy looking after his little courier. He's got no time for you. And besides, he told us to make sure you drank until you'd had your fill."

One of them played an audio clip. It really was Lorenzo's voice.

"Vito Marchetti, Sal Renzi, haven't you always wanted to put Francesca Bellandi under the table? Tonight you can have your fun. Just get a video of her drunk, making a fool of herself in front of the whole Family."

My heart clenched with a pain I couldn't control, and every drop of blood in me froze at those words.

The next second, someone gripped my chin. I heard the crack of knuckles against a palm, the sound Vito made right before he did something ugly. The mellow scent of liquor right under my nose sickened me for the first time in my life.

My stomach heaved, and I lost consciousness completely.

When I woke, I was in a private room, clean sheets, an armed man standing at the door who answered to a name that wasn't Corsetti.

Dominic Falcone was keeping watch over me, his eyes rimmed red.

"You're awake? Does anything hurt?"

I shook my head and rasped out,

"Is the transfer ready?"

He said nothing more. He removed his reading glasses, folded them with slow precision, and took out the papers and a pen. The blood oath that would cut my stake in the Corsetti operation loose and place it, and me, under Falcone protection.

I signed my name carefully. Dominic immediately sent word to have it witnessed and notarized, the underworld's version of a thing made permanent.

Once everything was settled, Lorenzo's calls came flooding in.