The night I lost the baby and the blood wouldn't stop, my parents drove through a downpour to reach the territory the Family used for clean work. They never made it. A car came out of the rain and took them on the bridge.

I lay on the table while the man they called The Surgeon's people worked over me, and I signed the consent for my parents' surgery with hands still slick with my own blood.

I couldn't save the baby. I couldn't save my parents either.

The man I'd called seventy-six times without an answer had posted a celebration for the whole circle to see.

【Congratulations to our little Sweetie. One long night, and she's finally a mama.】

Too weak to do anything else, I tapped "like." He messaged me immediately.

Two words: "Delete that."

I sent him the location pin.

"Come to the territory. I need to tell you something in person."

"I have something important to deal with. I can't come. Ask your parents to take you to the checkup. It's not like they have anything better to do."

"Your important thing is delivering puppies for her dog?"

"Since when did carrying a child turn you into a jealous shrew? You're seriously jealous of a dog?"

I didn't have the strength to argue. If he wouldn't come, he could speak to my consigliere.

……

By the time I'd buried my parents the way the Family buries its own, it was the following evening.

I dragged myself to the door of the apartment and pushed it open.

The rooms I'd kept immaculate were torn apart. Everything pulled out, thrown down, left where it fell.

Lorenzo Falcone was hunched over a drawer, digging through it, tossing aside whatever he touched without a second look.

The carelessness of a man who had always had someone to clean up behind him.

He didn't look up when the door opened. His voice carried that note of irritation.

"It's the weekend. Where have you been all day? I had to send out for lunch."

I stared at him. So he hadn't come home last night either.

Two years of this.

When the light in Gemma Vitale's place went out, he could roll out of bed at two in the morning to go fix it for her.

But he'd leave our own door unlocked behind him, letting some drunk wander up off the street, leaving me with nightmares that ran a solid month.

When Gemma's dog went into labor, he could refuse to come to my prenatal checkup.

But he'd take a full week at her side, doing work that should have belonged to a vet.

When I said nothing, Lorenzo finally looked at me. Surprise flickered across his face.

"You're white as a sheet. Is the baby giving you trouble again?"

I stepped back, away from the hand he was reaching toward my stomach. My voice was flat.

"I called you seventy-six times yesterday. Why didn't you pick up?"

His hand hung in the air. He frowned.

"Adriana Russo, are you interrogating me right now?"

"Gemma and I came up together, you know that. And that dog isn't just some animal in her club. She raised it from a pup. They have a bond."

"The dog was whelping. Gemma was sick with worry. I had to be there. That's life or death. You think I had time to answer your pointless calls?"

"It was just a checkup. Plenty of pregnant women go alone. And you have your parents. They're hardly busy. What difference does it make whether I'm there or not?"

I looked at him standing there, so certain of himself.

I wanted to ask: And what about my parents?

The crash had been brutal. My father had no vital signs by the time they reached the table.

My mother made it into surgery, but her injuries were severe and complicated.

His own man told me that only Lorenzo himself, with his hands, might have given her a chance.

He said he'd had no time to answer my calls. But the second I touched that "like," he'd found the time to order me to take it back.

Afraid Gemma might read something into it.

"Are we really just childhood friends?"

"Because I saw you kiss her, Lorenzo."

In the same restaurant where he'd asked me to bind my life to his. At the same table.

I'd been so shaken I didn't see the motorcycle bearing down on me.

The rider braked in time. But the life inside me, barely three months along, was already gone.

Panic flickered through Lorenzo Falcone's eyes, those eyes that were always so controlled, the same eyes men in this city learned never to meet for too long.

"Gemma was beside herself over the club, so I took her out to settle her nerves. She had a few too many, and..."

His tone softened a fraction.

"Anyway, forget about that. I'll be at the next appointment with you. I promise."

Again. The same routine.

A flimsy excuse to wave me off, then something sweet to smooth it over, as if none of it ever happened.

But Lorenzo, you will never need to come to another appointment with me.

"Don't bother. Let's sever it. All of it."

He froze for a second, then his face twisted with anger.

"Adriana, is this one of your games? You spent too long collecting other people's dirt, and now you turn everything into a sit-down. I told you it was an accident. Do you have to drag the whole famiglia into it?"

"And let's be honest. You're pushing thirty, you're carrying my child, and you gave up your own standing to marry into this bloodline. You're nothing now without the name I gave you. Who else would have you besides me?"

"I bleed for this Family every single day, and I don't come home to find you picking fights over nothing."

He moved toward the door.

Passing the entryway, his gaze snagged on the corner of a document poking out of my bag.

The words were perfectly legible. Death certificate.

Lorenzo turned back, confused.

"Who died?"

He reached for the paper, about to draw it out and read it.

But his phone rang. Gemma's voice came through, small and choked with tears.

"Lorenzo, something's wrong at the club, the books, the customers, I can't handle all of it at once."

"It's all going to fall apart, isn't it? I'm so scared..."

Lorenzo's face went taut with worry.

"Don't cry. I'm on my way."

And just like that, he left. Didn't look back once.

Didn't even lock his study, the one room in the estate he never liked me setting foot in.

Something pulled me inside. Then something under the desk cut right through me.

That year, I'd been a made man's daughter with standing of my own, sent to gather what I could on the old Don who was stepping down from the head of an allied Family.

But the old man was proud and stubborn. He turned me away at his door.

Days of running between territories caught up with me, and I went lightheaded and faint. I collapsed in the garden of his social club.

It was Lorenzo who found me, who lifted me up. He told me the old Don was set in his ways and would never bend.

I'd hung my head, defeated. Then the next second, something sweet was pressed past my lips. A tangerine candy.

Lorenzo gave me a playful wink.

"But I admire anyone who takes the work seriously. So how about this. Bring your questions to me instead."

I found out later that he was the youngest man ever to head the Falcone bloodline. They called him the Surgeon, for how clean his work was.

Countless others had tried and failed to get an audience with the brilliant young Don. He'd made an exception only for me.

That was how Lorenzo and I began.

Later, we both grew busier and busier. One evening he looked at me, difficulty in his eyes.

"Adriana, I know making your own name in this thing of ours is your dream."

"But the old ones in the Family need looking after. Could you step back from the work? I swear I'll spend the rest of my life making it up to you."

And I knew just as well that becoming the most feared Don in the city was his dream.

So I gave in.

I didn't vanish entirely. I let go of my own standing and took the quiet work, the logistics, the moving of cargo through allied ports, because at least that way I stayed close to the only world I'd ever loved.

On so many sleepless nights, I'd sit under the lamp and run my thumb over the dossier I'd built in my old life, the proof that I had once been someone in my own right.

Every time Lorenzo caught me doing it, guilt would flood his face, and he'd promise me again that he'd be good to me.

Now that same dossier, the one I'd treasured more than almost anything, was shoved under the corner of his desk to keep it from wobbling.

I opened his safe with Gemma's birthday.

On top was a thick manila envelope.

Inside, photographs. All kinds.

The two of them embracing. Kissing. Walking hand in hand along a beach.

Beneath the photos, receipts. An apartment he'd bought Gemma. The cash that had opened her nightclub. The renovations.

The place bled money every single month, and still he covered the gap.

The handwriting on the dossier was Lorenzo's.

"I will always clear the path for your dreams."

I stared at that line for a long, long time.

Five years flashed through my mind. Caring for his parents. Cooking, cleaning, keeping the estate running while the soldiers came and went through the side doors at all hours.

I thought about the envy that cut through me every time I saw the men and women I'd once worked alongside, the ones still gathering proof in the dark, still building their dossiers, still burning with the work I'd given up.

I laughed out loud.

So he did know how to protect someone's dreams.

I photographed everything, put it all back exactly as I'd found it, and finally made my decision.

"Sofia. I heard there's a placement open in the foreign territories. Central Asia, where our allies run their operations. Nobody's taken it yet."

"If you'll have me, I want to go."

A beat of silence on the line. Then her voice lit up.

"Yes. I always thought it was a waste when they buried you in the back rooms. This kind of placement doesn't come twice. It could be dangerous out there, but when you come home, your standing will be a different thing entirely."

I heard two soft taps of her fingers against something hard.

"Get yourself ready. You leave in a few days."

I hung up and started packing.

There was nothing left in this house I cared about.

Except the sweater. The last one my mother ever knitted for me. I was taking that.

She'd knitted me plenty of clothes when I was little. As I grew up, she got older. Her eyes weren't what they used to be.

I didn't want her straining herself, so I told her to stop.

Then I got pregnant, and suddenly I couldn't stand the cold.

She went and knitted me one anyway, in secret. Her eyes were bloodshot from the work, but she just waved me off.

"Homemade is warmer. I picked out the best yarn myself."

"You fuss over the baby in your belly, and I fuss over mine."

It hurt and it warmed me at the same time. I never could bring myself to wear it.

But now the sweater was gone.

I remembered coming home to find it missing. I'd been about to call Lorenzo and ask.

Then I saw Gemma's new post.

"Hehe, I just mentioned the babies were cold since they were just born, and a certain someone showed up with a sweater~"

"Thanking Daddy on behalf of the babies~ And of course, this Mommy's tailoring isn't too shabby either."

So that's where Lorenzo had gone. To throw a little party for her dogs.

In the photo, their heads were pressed together, bodies close.

Each of them cradling three puppies.

And I recognized it instantly.

The little dog outfits on those puppies had been cut from my mother's sweater.

When I pushed open the glass door of the club, Lorenzo and Gemma were sharing a single spoon over a slice of cake.

Lorenzo was a severe germaphobe.

At the estate, his plates were sterilized and stored apart from everyone else's. He never shared a utensil at the table, not with me, not with the men who'd bled for him.

Once, after I'd spent an entire day cleaning the house, I was so parched I picked up his glass and took a single sip of water.

He didn't say anything at the time. That night, the glass was in the trash.

He'd explained it afterward. Said it was a habit, the same care he took with everything that carried his name. The Surgeon, they called him, for how clean he kept his work.

Turns out the habit was selective.

Gemma spotted me and arched a brow, her smile dripping with sweetness she didn't mean.

"Oh, Adriana. You're here? Lorenzo and I have been close since we were children. We never really kept boundaries between us. Don't mind it, all right?"

"Lorenzo, what did I tell you? She'd never actually go through with severing the alliance."

"I mean, a woman who gave up her own standing in the Family, who can only survive on her husband's charity. Without you, how's she going to raise a child and care for her parents? And look at her, she followed you all the way down here. Clingy, isn't she?"

She pressed a hand flat to her collarbone, and her eyes flicked once toward the men by the door to see who was watching.

"Sigh. Next to that, I suppose my skin's just too thin. Nothing left for me to do but keep standing on my own two feet~"

Lorenzo pinched her nose, indulgent and fond.

"Always the clever one, aren't you? You've been a little troublemaker since we were children."

Then he turned to me, wearing the expression of a man prepared to forgive a child who didn't know any better.