I did not wait up for him. After sending word to a Consigliere I trusted, a man who handled the quiet dissolution of blood-bound unions when leverage allowed it, I turned off the lamp and went to bed early.

The soft chime of a message dragged me out of sleep somewhere in the dead hours. I found the phone in the dark and checked the time. It was already past one in the morning.

The space beside me was cold and empty, the sheets undisturbed. Of course they were.

I opened the screen and its pale glow cut across the darkened room. Gia had sent me several messages, one after another, as if she could not contain herself. My big brother is so handsome. I want to eat him up while he's sleeping.

Beneath the words was a photograph of Lorenzo, asleep.

He lay against a pink pillow stitched with some childish cartoon, his dark hair fallen loose across his forehead, his eyes shut, his thin lips slightly parted. The Don of the Falcone Family, the man whose name made grown soldiers lower their eyes, curled and defenseless on a girl's bed like something she owned.

The chat box flickered. The other party is typing. Then, just as quickly, Gia deleted every message she had sent.

A moment later a foolish little cartoon kitten appeared, paws pressed together, begging forgiveness.

I meant to send that to my best friend and sent it to you by mistake. Lorenzo's asleep, I was only playing, I snuck the photo. Don't be angry with him, all right?

She expected me to do what I had always done. To call him at once, my voice trembling, and demand an explanation. To hand her the satisfaction of watching me unravel. But that hunger in me had gone quiet. This time I only blocked her, set the phone face down on the nightstand, and closed my eyes again.

Whether she meant it as a joke or as a knife, I no longer cared. I turned my thumb once around my bare finger, feeling the smooth absence where the ring had been for five years. Then I caught myself, and stopped.

The next morning Lorenzo and Gia arrived at the club together.

The Falcone Family kept its legitimate face in a members-only establishment near the water, all dark wood and quiet money, where associates came and went and business that could not be spoken aloud was conducted over espresso. Gia walked in with one hand cradled protectively against her stomach, mincing her steps, and then, on cue, she stumbled. Her face went white with a fright too perfectly timed to be real.

Lorenzo bent and lifted her off her feet without a word, carrying her past the front room as though she were made of glass. She flushed prettily, wound her arms around his neck, and over his shoulder she found me. Her eyes were bright with triumph.

Nearby, a pair of associates leaned close, murmuring the way men do when they think the Don is out of earshot.

"She can't tell tribute from petty cash, that one, yet she's been his favored runner half a year now. You think it's real between them? You think the boss actually feels something?"

I was half turned away, tapping out a reply to my Consigliere, and I answered without weight, the way you answer weather. "Maybe."

The word had scarcely left me when a familiar voice cut through the low hum of the room.

"Adriana. Come here."

I turned. Lorenzo stood behind me, having set Gia somewhere out of sight, and he was watching me with that cold, level regard he reserved for me alone in these rooms.

Not one soul under the Falcone banner knew that Lorenzo and I were married. Ours was a blood-marriage kept entirely off the books, unwritten, unspoken, unknown to the soldiers who would have died for him. He forbade entanglements within the ranks, so before the Family I was only an elder of the house, a woman who had been there a long time and knew where things were kept. To keep the smallest whisper from taking root, he treated me at work with a studied indifference, as though I were furniture that had learned to walk.

There was one time the fever took me to forty degrees, and I could not keep my legs beneath me. Half-blind with the heat of it, I dragged myself through the marble corridors of the estate until I found Lorenzo, and I asked him, only asked, to have one of the soldiers drive me to a doctor. But there were made men within earshot, capos he had to keep in awe of him, and a Don does not carry his sickly wife through his own halls where the ranks can see it. He shook my hand off his sleeve as though it were something soiled and told me, low and even, to send word through the household and let them handle it.

Yet let Gia press a hand to her belly and whisper that her stomach ached, and Lorenzo would rise from a council of his own capos, leave men who had waited a week for his ear, and drive her himself to be looked over by the family physician as if her breath were the last in the world.

I followed Lorenzo into the study.

Gia had been settled behind the folding screen at the far end to rest, tucked away like something precious. With the room emptied of witnesses, he crossed the obsidian floor to me and took my hand in both of his, his voice dropping into that deep register he used when he wanted to be believed. "Are you still angry?"

I drew my hand free. My tone came out flat, distant, borrowed from somewhere colder than I felt. "I told you. I'm not angry."

He set his hand on my shoulder, and his gaze pressed into me the way the grandfather clock in the corner pressed its ticking into the silence, insistent, filling every gap. "Still being stubborn? You didn't call me once last night. Not a single word carried to me, and you have the nerve to stand there and say you're not angry."

I was thrown by that, honestly thrown, and I heard myself answer, "But Gia was with you. She's your runner. Of course she'd see you were taken care of."

Something flared behind his eyes, that heat that never once warmed me, and his fingers closed hard on my shoulder. Pain shot down my arm. I twisted to break loose from him, and in the struggle he shoved me back and I went down onto the leather sofa, the cold of it biting through my dress.

Pushing myself upright, I felt something snag beneath my palm. Without thinking I pulled at it, and out of the crease of the cushion came a scrap of pink lace. A woman's bra.

The anger drained from Lorenzo's face in a single breath. "This is…"

I had no appetite for whatever explanation he was already assembling behind those still lips. I dropped the lace back into the seam of the sofa where I'd found it and said, lightly, as though I were addressing an associate and not the man I'd bound my blood to, "If there's nothing else, I'll be going now, Don Falcone."

After the day's business, I was gathering myself to meet an allied boss when Lorenzo's car rolled to a slow, deliberate stop in front of me at the curb, the marked plate everyone in the territory knew catching the light. My thumb was turning the bare place on my finger where the ring used to sit; I did not remember starting.

"Get in," he said through the lowered window. "I'll see Gia home first, and then I'll take you to the seafood house on Maple Road."

Gia leaned across from the passenger seat, her smile bright and easy, the smile of a woman who had never once been made to wait in a corridor with a fever. "Sorry, Adriana. Hitching a ride off you again."

I was already lifting a hand for a passing cab, and I answered without looking back at either of them. "You two go on. Seafood doesn't agree with me."

Lorenzo's face went dark on the instant. He knew, better than anyone alive, that no shellfish had ever disagreed with me a day in my life. That house on Maple Road, the low light and the salt and the cracked shells, had been one of the few pleasures I let myself keep.

His jaw set, and I could see him gathering something to say, some quiet correction to put me back in my place before the god-sister he paraded like a jewel. But I didn't give him my eyes again. I stopped turning the bare place on my finger, and stepped clear of his marked car, and crossed to the far side of the road, and got into a taxi that owed him nothing.

I hadn't expected Lorenzo to follow me to the restaurant with Gia trailing at his heel like a shadow he'd chosen to keep. The private room at the back of the club was set for a sit-down. Don Barone hadn't yet arrived, the head of the table still empty, and the two of them slid into the leather banquette across from me as though they'd been invited, as though this were their table and I the intruder.

For a long moment I said nothing. The candle between us threw its small light against the dark paneling, and I felt the old, familiar cold settle into my chest, the kind that came whenever Lorenzo made a decision that cost me and never noticed the price. My thumb found the bare skin where a ring should have sat, and I turned that empty finger once, slowly, before I caught myself doing it and went still.

Perplexed, and past the point of pretending otherwise, I said it plainly. "I have a sit-down arranged with Don Barone. This meeting is mine."

Lorenzo raised one dark brow. He was rolling the heavy signet ring around his finger, unhurried, the gold catching the candlelight. "Has Don Barone ever once said he didn't wish to see me?"

I fell silent. I did not push them out any further. Whatever I had become to him behind closed doors, in this world he was still the Don, and the room, the club, the very air we breathed all belonged to the Falcone name. To move against him here, before an allied boss, would have been to spit on the hierarchy that fed us all. So I swallowed it. I had grown very good at swallowing things.

When Don Barone finally arrived, the room seemed to draw itself upright around him. He was an old-blooded man, careful, the sort who measured a family's worth by the wine it poured and the silences it kept. He settled at the head of the table and, with a small gesture, instructed his own man to open a bottle he'd brought himself, something dark and expensive that breathed like smoke when the cork came free.

I frowned, and the memory rose unbidden, the way it always did when I least wanted it. The day I had gone to schedule the procedure after the accident. The physician's hands folded on the desk. His voice low and certain as he'd confirmed it with me again, and again, refusing to let me pretend I hadn't heard. After the miscarriage from the car, cara, your body was already damaged. That you carry again now is nothing short of a miracle. If you lose this one too, there may never be another chance. Do you understand me? Never.

I pressed my lips together. The glass was already being filled at my place, the wine bleeding red into crystal, and I gathered the words to decline it gently, to find some soft lie the table would accept without insult to our host.

Then Gia spoke.

She leaned forward with that bright, guileless smile she wore like borrowed silk, one hand drifting to rest against the flat of her stomach in a gesture she thought looked tender. "Oh, I've heard people say Adriana holds her wine better than any man at the table. Today I finally get to see it for myself!" Her eyes shone with a girl's admiration, wide and innocent and utterly, deliberately empty.

I looked at her without warmth. "Who told you that?"

Her smile froze on her face. The color of it drained just slightly, and her gaze cut sideways to Lorenzo, seeking the hand that always caught her when she fell. "Did I... did I say something wrong again?"

He reached over and smoothed her hair, the way a man gentles a favored animal, before he turned to me. And when he turned to me his face had gone to stone, the affection stripped clean off it. His voice dropped into that cold register I knew the shape of by heart, the one he saved for when he meant to make me small in front of company.

"Adriana. It's one glass of wine." A pause, weighted, the signet ring turning once more. "You're not a frightened girl anymore. Stop being so shy."

Something inside me went to ice.

I held his cold gaze across the candle. Around us the room had gone quiet in that particular way rooms do when men who deal in silence sense a fault line opening beneath the table. Don Barone's soldier stilled with the bottle in his hand. The old man himself watched with hooded, patient eyes, saying nothing, missing nothing.

My thumb pressed against my empty finger. I felt the ghost of the ring I no longer wore, the vow I had kept for five years in a marriage no one at this table knew existed, the years I had spent brokering the alliances that built his empire from the shadows so that he could sit here and command me to drink poison for the sake of his pride.

I stopped turning my finger. The halt of it was a small, final thing, and only I knew what it meant.

I forced my mouth into the shape of a smile. And I said it, word for word, slow and clear enough that not one man at the table could later claim he hadn't heard.

"Don Falcone. I can't drink." A breath. "Because I'm carrying a child."

The room froze.

Even the candle seemed to hold its flame still. Don Barone did not move. His soldier did not pour. For one long, ringing heartbeat the only sound was the faint tick of my own pulse in my ears, and I watched the words land on Lorenzo's face and saw something move there that he could not fully hide, some flicker fast as a struck match, gone before I could name it.

Gia recovered first. She always did. The shock behind her eyes was there and then folded neatly away, and she rose to her feet with a rush of warmth, lifting her glass toward me. "Congratulations, Adriana! Oh, congratulations, truly!"

She brought the rim toward her lips.

Lorenzo's hand shot out and caught her wrist before the wine could touch her mouth. "Gia. You're pregnant too. You can't drink." His voice had softened for her, gone protective, urgent in a way it had not been for me in years.

And for once, the girl did not obey.

She pressed her lips together, and her free hand fluttered up to her stomach again, too quick this time, cradling nothing. "No. I want to drink." Her eyes glistened, wet and wide, sweeping the table to be sure the room was watching. "Ever since I came to Duskmire, I've done nothing but make trouble for you without meaning to. I've hurt you, Adriana, and I never wanted to." She lifted the glass higher, her voice trembling on the edge of tears. "So let this one be my apology. Please. Let me drink to you."