To the rest of the Family, I was Mrs. Moretti, the Don's wife, the orphan girl who had married into the bloodline. In truth, I felt less like a wife and more like something he kept on a leash. An on-call hand. An asset that drove itself to him when summoned.

A moment later my phone buzzed against the marble counter, the pale glow of a dropped location pin lighting up the dark kitchen. I let out a slow breath, the kind that hurt going out, and reached for my keys. The bruise along my ribs from the crash still pulled with every movement, but pain had never once been an excuse he accepted. I pushed through it the way I pushed through everything in that house, and went out into the night to drive.

The address belonged to one of the Family's private lounges, a back room behind a legitimate front, the air thick with cigar smoke and the sweet rot of spilled liquor when I stepped inside. I found Dominic slumped low on the leather couch, looking utterly defeated. For a man so feared, so ambitious and ice-composed that grown soldiers lowered their eyes when he passed, it was a rare and unsettling sight.

One of the men around him pressed another glass of dark amber into his hand. "Come on, Dominic. She's just a courier. A new face in the rotation. If you want a woman, it isn't hard for a man like you to take one."

"Gianna turned you down? So what. There are a dozen women in this city who'd cut their own sisters for a night at your table."

Someone in the shadowed corner snickered and muttered beneath his breath, "Like Eva."

Laughter rolled through the room, loose and ugly with drink.

So that was it. That was the reason the Don of the Moretti Family was drowning himself in a bottle. Because Gianna had told him no.

My hand froze on the cold brass of the doorknob. For a long moment I simply stood there, jaw locked tight, feeling the laughter settle over my skin like ash. My fingers found the thin wedding band on my left hand and turned it once, slowly, the way I always did when something inside me was deciding whether to break or hold. Then I pushed the door fully open and walked in.

The room went silent in an instant. Not the silence of respect. The silence of men caught.

One of his men looked up, startled, then arranged his mouth into a smile that didn't reach his eyes. "Well. Look who's gracing us. Mrs. Moretti herself."

I didn't give him so much as a glance. I looked straight at my husband. "I'm here to take you home."

Dominic rose slowly from the couch, his face unreadable, that practiced blankness he wore like armor. He swayed once, the liquor catching him, then crossed the floor to me. Without a word he draped a heavy arm across my shoulders and leaned his weight into me, the scent of whiskey and Turkish tobacco closing over us both. I bore it. I always bore it.

Before I could turn for the door, a voice slid through the quiet.

"Don Moretti." Gianna stood just inside the doorway, small and trembling, one hand pressed to the frame as though she needed it to stay upright. "If you were only going to have your wife come and collect you, why did you send for me?"

I turned to look at her. Her face was crumpled into something wounded, lip quivering, eyes glassed with tears that fell at exactly the right moment. And for the briefest fraction of a second, before the sorrow returned, her gaze flicked over me, flat and cold and assessing. Then the grief was back, seamless as a closed door.

"You didn't have to go this far," she whispered, "just to humiliate me in front of everyone."

Dominic's expression changed in an instant. The drunken slackness burned off him, replaced by something far colder. He straightened away from me, and I felt the temperature of the whole room drop with him. He turned to his men, and his voice came out low and lethal.

"Who used my phone to send for her?"

No one answered. The silence in the room thickened until I could hear ice settling in an abandoned glass.

"I said." His hand rose to the heavy signet ring on his finger and turned it, slow and deliberate. "Who did it?"

His voice climbed, and with it the pressure in the room, that invisible weight only a man of his rank could press down on every soul present. No one dared speak. No one so much as shifted his weight. They stood there, made men and soldiers alike, frozen beneath the gaze of their Don, while his wife stood unseen at his side and the snake by the door wept her perfect, weightless tears.

He looked ready to come apart at the seams, a Don's fury straining against the silk of his control. "If any of you think this kind of stunt is amusing," Dominic said, his voice low and lethal enough to still every glass in the private dining room, "consider this your only warning. Stay the hell away from Gianna."

Gianna stood frozen near the head of the table, her cheeks burning, her eyes brimming with tears she let everyone see. Then she spun on her heel and fled toward the door, barely holding the pieces of herself together, every step a performance the room drank in.

Dominic panicked. He could hardly walk a straight line, the wine still heavy in his blood, but he didn't hesitate for a breath. He released me, his hand falling away from my arm as though it had never rested there, and stumbled after her.

"Gianna, don't. Wait. Please. Just wait for me."

I stood where he'd left me and watched the two of them disappear down the hallway, his soldiers parting to let them pass without a word. Strangely, I felt almost nothing. Maybe because somewhere deep beneath the ribs, in the place I no longer let myself examine, I had always known the truth of it. I was the one he would drop the instant another voice called his name.

Once Dominic was gone, the room came slowly back to life. The voices returned, low at first, careful, then louder as the careful faded. The clink of crystal, the scrape of a chair, the soft confidence of people who knew exactly where the power in this Family had shifted.

"Dio, I've never seen him that worked up."

"Think he's serious about her this time?"

"Anyone with eyes can see it. Women who throw themselves at a man like that always end up looking cheap."

Laughter broke out again, easy and unhurried.

They didn't bother lowering their voices. Dominic had no respect to spare for me, and so neither did they. In this world respect ran downhill from the Don like water, and mine had been cut off at the source. My shoulder throbbed where he had leaned his weight on me earlier, the fracture beneath the bandage flaring with a deep, grinding ache. I lifted my hand and pressed it flat against the pain, gathering myself to leave before the whispering turned into something I would have to wear all night.

I caught myself twisting the thin band on my finger, the wedding ring I no longer believed in, turning it round and round as if friction could summon back something that had never truly been there.

Then Lorenzo's voice came from behind me, quiet and certain. "Eva."

I turned.

The Consigliere's face was drawn tight, the look of a man holding something carefully behind his teeth. He had taken off his glasses, but he wasn't cleaning them. He simply held them in one hand, set against his palm, untouched. "Let me drive you home," he said.

He had been in the room the entire time, then. He had seen all of it. The way Dominic let go of me without a thought. The way the laughter found its target. The way I stood there and took it like a debt come due.

I didn't know what he made of any of it. I wasn't sure, anymore, that I had the strength left to care. Lorenzo had always been there, sworn brother to Dominic from the very beginning, bound to him by blood and oath long before I ever entered this house. From the moment I first fell for Dominic, foolish and grateful and ten years deep in the Family's debt, Lorenzo had stood at his right hand. He had witnessed every pathetic, hopeful, humiliating moment of mine. There was nothing left to hide from him, and I no longer had the will to pretend there was.

The drive through the dark territory was silent. Lorenzo said nothing the whole way, the city sliding past the glass in slicks of wet neon, his hands steady on the wheel, the heavy quiet of a man who chose his words the way the Family chose its enemies. Carefully. Once.

Right as I reached for the door handle, he finally spoke.

"You're truly certain you want this? The severance?"

I stopped turning the ring. My hand went still around it, and then I let it go entirely.

I nodded.

I didn't even hesitate when I gave him my answer.

Lorenzo looked right at me through the open window, and then, without a word, he killed the engine and got out. The interior light caught the sharp line of his jaw before the door swung shut behind him. He crossed the few steps of cracked pavement between us with the unhurried calm of a man who had never once needed to rush, because in our world men waited for him.

He stopped in front of me, close enough that I could smell the cold night clinging to his coat, and said in a low, serious voice, "Then maybe you should consider me instead."

I froze. That wasn't what I'd expected. Not from him, the Family's Consigliere, the man Dominic trusted above any soldier in the Moretti bloodline, the sworn brother whose loyalty had never once cracked in all the years I'd watched him from across the long dinner tables of the estate.

I wasn't trying to take revenge on Dominic. I wasn't trying to prove anything to anyone. I was just tired. Tired in a way I hadn't known at eighteen, when I'd been the orphan girl who believed the Family had saved me for love and not for debt, when I'd dreamed of a fairytale stitched out of his name. Now all I wanted was peace. Just peace, quiet enough that I could hear myself breathe.

So I turned it into a joke. "Sure," I said. "Once the severance is final, I'll come find you." Then I walked away, my heels echoing against the silent courtyard, my thumb finding the thin wedding band I no longer believed in and turning it, turning it, the way I always did when the ache pressed too close.

Not long after I got inside, my phone buzzed against the marble counter. A message from Lorenzo.

I'm done waiting.

I stepped out onto the balcony and looked down into the dark. His car was still there, idling at the edge of the gated drive where the Family's soldiers usually stood watch. Lorenzo was leaning against the hood, one ankle crossed over the other, smoking.

It was the first time I'd ever seen him smoke.

I'd always heard whispers about where he came from. An old, respected bloodline, older than the Morettis in some tellings, raised under a code so strict it made our father's house look soft. A cold man, they said, a calculating one, the kind who cleaned his glasses with slow, deliberate hands while three other men decided whether you lived. His name could stand beside the Moretti name without flinching.

Maybe he sensed me watching from the dark, because he slowly lifted his head until our eyes met across the distance. He exhaled a long, pale stream of smoke into the cold air, and the corner of his mouth curved into a faint, crooked smile that I had never seen him give anyone. Then he turned, slid into the car, and drove away into the quiet streets that belonged to us.

I stood there long after, watching his taillights bleed red into the night and then vanish. And to my surprise, something inside me stirred. Something I had buried so deep I'd nearly forgotten it could move at all.

By the time Dominic finally came home, the sky had already begun to pale at its edges, the kind of gray that came before the city's legitimate face woke up and pretended it hadn't spent the night in our hands.

He stepped through the door and immediately scowled, his nose wrinkling in distaste, the heavy signet ring catching the early light as his hand came up.

"Eva," he snapped, "can you try acting like a decent woman for once? You stink of smoke. It's disgusting. Quit that habit. It's not fitting for a Moretti."

He hated it when I smoked. He always had.

But I hadn't always been like this. I'd picked it up after the union was sealed, after I'd become the wife the Family had arranged to settle the orphan's debt and nothing more. When the silence and the cold shoulders and the long, hollow routine had swallowed whatever girl I'd been.

I'd needed some kind of release. Even if it was only the slow burn of nicotine in my chest, even if it was only something that was mine and not theirs.

I stubbed the cigarette out against the rail without a word and walked toward the bathroom, my fingers still resting on that thin band, still turning it.

He followed me in, his footsteps measured, the door of the marble bath swallowing the sound. "Did you hear me?" he demanded.

Dominic was getting irritated, and I knew exactly why. For years I had revolved around him like a moon that had no light of its own. I had never once defied him, never made him wait, never made him wonder. Now that I had stopped falling into line, it rattled him in a way no rival Family ever could. He could read a threat across a sit-down table. He could not read me anymore, and the not-knowing sat under his calm like a blade he hadn't yet found.