Ten years bound to the Falcone Family, and Lorenzo Falcone had taken nearly every woman I called friend, every wife who kissed my cheek at the Sunday table.

I pretended not to see it. I kept to my routine instead, carrying my eight-month belly to the Family physician for my checkups like a woman who still believed she had a place. Until the day I was on my way to one of those appointments, and his newest darling ran me down in the street.

I bled and couldn't stop, and I begged him to take me to Dr. Bruno.

Lorenzo looked at me with a face full of disgust.

"Serafina Costa, when did you learn to fake an accident so well?" His voice dripped with contempt, low and unhurried, the voice of a man who never had to raise it. "If you think a performance will make me care, you're wrong. Even if you died in front of me, I wouldn't spare you a glance."

Then he took his darling by the hand and drove off, leaving me on the pavement to bleed out alone.

By the time a stranger carried me into the Family's back-room clinic, the child in my womb had already suffocated and died.

My mother, unable to bear the shock, went in the same hour. A heart that simply stopped.

When I came back to myself, there was nothing left in me to feel.

The old Don sat at my bedside, Don Falcone himself, his face carved deep with sorrow.

"Let me go," I said, flat and quiet. "Whatever debt I owed the Falcone Family, I've paid it with my life."

——

My phone buzzed and buzzed against the sheets. I looked down to a screen flooded with photographs. Lorenzo and his mistress, Bianca Renna, tangled together, skin to skin.

While I fought to breathe, they had been celebrating in the penthouse of one of the Family's own hotels, their bodies marked with the evidence of it.

In one of the pictures Bianca lay against his chest, her smile sharp with provocation, her fingers resting at the diamonds on her throat as if to remind herself what she was worth.

The old man knew nothing of how far his grandson's cruelty ran. He still wanted to make one last play. He set a folder of papers before me on the blanket. Tribute rights. A cut of Falcone territory, sacred to the bloodline, the kind of thing a Don did not give a civilian daughter without meaning it.

"Serafina, the boy is not rotten at the core. You've loved him all these years. Can't you give him one more chance?" He pleaded, an old man of the code begging in a room that smelled of antiseptic and cold garlic from a supper no one had touched. "As long as I draw breath, no one takes your place at that table."

I said nothing. I only played the video Bianca had just sent me.

The sound of two bodies filled the small room, and even the soldier standing guard at the door went very still.

Bianca's voice came first, laced with amusement. "Lorenzo, don't you feel anything, leaving her out there in the road like that?"

Lorenzo, his lips against her neck, let out a low laugh. "Why would I? You're the only one I love. She could give me a son and she still wouldn't touch what you are."

The naked betrayal drained the old man's face to ash. His body trembled, the veins standing up along the backs of his hands, and one of those hands closed around the heavy signet ring and began to turn it, slow, once, twice.

Then the ring went still.

He let out a long, heavy breath, and I knew the verdict was already made.

"The Family has wronged you," he said. "I'll see the union dissolved myself. Seven days, and you walk free."

The words were near unthinkable under the code, and he said them anyway. His voice gentled. "As for your mother and the child. Their arrangements."

A nurse came through the door, cradling a small, lifeless bundle against her.

Even fate would not let me suffer inside this marriage a single day longer.

My baby had never taken one breath.

I turned my head away and fought to steady my own.

"Bury the child with the Falcones. My mother's ashes, I'll carry with me."

The old Don nodded, and the movement seemed to cost him everything. "I was wrong to keep you bound to this Family. Go. Go find a life beyond all of this. You deserve a wider world than the one we built on blood."

Then he bent, gathering the child that was already gone into his arms, and left the room like a man carrying the weight of every sin the Falcone name had ever earned.

The moment the door clicked shut, the tears I had been holding back finally fell.

Years of bitterness and regret came crashing down at once.

My union with Lorenzo had been arranged by his grandfather. The old Don needed someone to leash his unruly heir, to keep the boy from burning the whole territory down. I needed someone to settle the life-debt hanging over my dying mother.

It had been a fair trade.

I walked away from my old life and became a Falcone bride.

Over time, I came to know the wounds he never spoke of at the Sunday table. How he lost his parents while he was still small enough to be forgotten in the shuffle of soldiers and made men. How he still woke in the dead of night, crying out for a mother who wasn't coming back.

In those moments, our two broken souls seemed to resonate with one another.

I want to heal his heart.

I want to build a happy family with him, something the code and the blood money could never touch.

So I gave myself to the role of being the perfect wife.

I drilled myself in the kitchen for hours, chasing the taste of his mother's cooking, the one warm thing that had ever reached him inside that cold compound.

I traveled from place to place, trying to rebuild the little wooden cabin from his childhood memories. I learned every art of the bedroom to satisfy him, hoping it would be enough to make him stay.

I thought we would have a future together.

But on the anniversary of our union, he walked into a hotel with my closest friend on his arm, unhurried, unashamed, daring the whole room to say a word.

Like a madwoman, I ran after him and demanded he explain himself.

He scoffed and threw the arrangement between his grandfather and me in my face, the terms of the debt that had bought my life.

"Serafina, what do you imagine you are? Because I entertained you for a while, you think you're truly a Falcone?"

"You're nothing but a stray my grandfather paid for. What right does a bought thing have to question me about who warms my bed? Push me, and I'll stop paying for your mother's care this very second."

I felt like I'd been struck by lightning. I couldn't force out a single word.

From that night on, Lorenzo grew even more reckless.

When he tired of the nightclub darlings who preened for his attention, he moved on to my friends.

He kept testing my limits, again and again, the way a man tests how much a rope will bear before it snaps.

On one side, my mother needed her care, and the Family held the strings of it.

On the other, my marriage had rotted through to the bone. I almost collapsed under it.

The two forces pulled me in opposite directions, tearing me apart.

One day, lost in my own thoughts, I slipped and fell down the stairs.

That was when I found out I was carrying his child.

His grandfather pleaded with me, the old Don nearly desperate, his hand turning that heavy signet ring around and around.

"Serafina, please, keep the child. Perhaps it could save this union. If Lorenzo still hasn't changed after the baby comes, I swear on my name I won't force you to stay."

With too many things weighing on my heart, I agreed.

I tried. I truly did. I hadn't let myself try so hard in a long time.

But in the end, I lost everything. My mother, my baby, my marriage, my love.

I wiped away my tears and gazed out of the window at the gray sky over Falcone territory, the city where every block below belonged to someone who answered to the Family.

Maybe the only relief was that both Lorenzo and I were finally free.

While I was lost in thought, my phone rang.

It was him.

"Serafina, did you go running to the old man again? You ruined my night with Bianca! I'm warning you. Pull something like this again and I'll cut off every dollar the Family lets you touch."

In the past, I would have begged, apologized and done everything to get back into his good graces.

But now, I just said with an indifferent face.

"Do whatever you want."

He was caught off guard by my indifference. But soon, he sneered.

"I heard you gave birth. Having a child really gives you confidence, huh? But don't forget. I'm the heir to the Falcone throne. As long as you carry this Family's name, I can make your life hell."

I closed my eyes.

I had seen what he was capable of.

The first time I caught him in bed with another woman, I naively went to the old Don for justice, believing the code meant something under that roof.

But all I got in return was his twisted revenge.

He used my mother against me, the life-debt that bound me to this house, forcing me to kneel on the freezing balcony, slapping myself over and over.

That night, I listened to him and his lover making love, their voices echoing through the compound, while I shivered until I passed out.

By the time morning came, my face was swollen, my body frostbitten and the Family's private physician was called to carry me off the record.

That was the night the last of my love for him died in the snow.

After that, no matter how cruel he was, I pretended not to see.

I endured every humiliation and every insult that Falcone dealt.

I forced myself to stay in the role of the Underboss's wife.

But now, my mother was gone.

My child, too.

This union, already a corpse, needed to be buried once and for all.

I hung up the phone without another word.

Then I stood up and quietly twisted the plain band on my finger before contacting a man I trusted at the funeral home to arrange the cremation.

When I returned to the hospital room, I saw Lorenzo standing in the doorway, one of his soldiers a silent shadow at the far end of the corridor.

He drew his eyebrows together as he looked at me, then sneered.

"Why don't you keep acting, pretending to be pitiful anymore?"

He crossed his arms and scanned me with an icy gaze. "Running around so soon after giving birth? Looks like you're in great health. I suppose you won't need any time to rest and recover."

He stepped closer, his voice dripping with malice. "I've decided to move Bianca into the compound. She's young, delicate and doesn't know how to keep a house. Go on and process your discharge papers. Come home and be our maid."

As he leaned in, his lips curled into a cruel smile.

"Your pain is the best stimulant for me in bed."

He stared at me dead on, expecting to see my pained and saddened look.

But I didn't. I met his gaze with an expression as blank as an empty canvas, drained of any emotion.

His amusement faded when he realized there was nothing left for him to destroy. Irritated, he turned to a nurse hovering near the wall. "Where's the baby? Boy or girl? Bring it to me."