My appetite vanished in an instant, and I refused to keep swallowing my own hurt.

“Excuse me, could you take this dish away? I'll still pay for it.”

But Lorenzo slid the plate over in front of himself.

“So I didn't sit with you while you were laid up. When did you get so dramatic? If you'd watched where you were going, you wouldn't have ended up there in the first place.”

I'd seen what he looked like when he cared about me. So the fact that he didn't love me was just as obvious now.

Once, when I'd run a high fever, this was the man who'd carried me on his back in the dead of night, running through empty streets until he was nearly in tears. Yet when he was the one who'd put me in that hospital bed, he was nowhere to be found.

The man who knew I hated bitter melon, who'd never once set anything bitter in front of me, had suddenly gone back to the way he was five years ago when we first met, ordering it like a stranger across the table.

I tugged my lips into a faint smile and said evenly,

“I hate eating bitter melon. The smell makes me sick.”

“Then just don't eat it. Problem solved, isn't it?”

His impatience was plain. My smile didn't waver.

“Let's brea—……”

Before I could finish, a woman appeared beside the table.

“Lorenzo, after all these years, you still remember I love bitter melon!”

I lifted my eyes calmly and looked at her, her makeup flawless, staring down at me with open contempt.

She nudged Lorenzo over without a word, squeezing in to sit right beside him, directly across from me.

“Let me introduce myself. I'm Lorenzo's woman, Bianca Russo.”

I didn't respond.

So she made a point of pressing against Lorenzo's arm.

“Lorenzo, why don't you introduce her? She's……”

Lorenzo's expression wasn't pleasant. Around us the low murmur of the club's regulars carried on, ice settling in glasses, men talking business that wasn't ours to hear. But at our table the air had gone tight.

Clearly Bianca's sudden arrival had caught him off guard.

The way his eyes darted away, the way his thumb found the heavy signet ring on his right hand and began to turn it, struck me as almost funny.

“She's an associate in my crew. The place was full, so we just shared a table.”

Lorenzo's head snapped toward me, shock flashing through his eyes for a split second before he let out a long breath of relief.

“Ah, right. This is one of mine, Adriana Bellandi.”

At that, Bianca smiled, sweet and lovely. The corner of her mouth lifted a fraction too fast before she remembered to look gracious.

“Miss Bellandi must be exceptionally useful to him. This is the first time I've ever seen Lorenzo sit at a table with a woman other than me.”

With that, she set her phone down beside her, casually nudging it forward.

The provocation in it was unmistakable.

I caught a glimpse of the photo on her screen. Just as I'd thought, it was the two of them, a matched pair.

Even the clothes they wore today fell in the same palette, like something chosen together, the kind of thing tribute money buys.

Now, sitting close under the soft lamps of the club, they made a strikingly well-matched pair, the handsome man and the beautiful woman.

I set down my fork and rose to leave.

Bianca grabbed my hand, her long nails digging viciously into my flesh where Lorenzo couldn't see.

“Miss Bellandi, you're leaving the second I arrive? Did I say something wrong? I'll apologize. Isn't that enough?”

Faced with a snake like her, I had no patience for these games. I yanked my hand free.

I was just checking the welts she'd dug into my wrist when, out of nowhere, her hand came down in a slap across a little boy playing near the tables.

The boy yelped in pain and burst into loud sobs.

Bianca's eyes instantly reddened, and she rushed to apologize to him.

Lorenzo hurried to press a fold of cash into the parents' hands along with his own apology, the way these things are smoothed over.

Then, without warning, the little boy pointed straight at me and said,

“It was her! She swung this lady's hand at me and hit me! I want her to apologize!”

Bianca immediately put on the picture of wounded innocence.

“Miss Bellandi, I don't know how I offended you, but if you have a problem with me, take it out on me. Don't drag an innocent child into it.”

In an instant, the diners around us were pointing and whispering, the way whispers move through the Family, faster than truth.

Lorenzo shot me a furious glare and said coldly,

“What are you standing there for? Hurry up and apologize to him! Have you no shame?”

With the room behind him now, the boy darted forward and sank his teeth into my hand, jaw locked tight, refusing to let go.

The more Bianca cooed at him, the harder he bit.

I couldn't very well wage war on a child in front of half the Family, so I murmured an apology to the boy.

But Lorenzo still wasn't satisfied. Blind to the blood the bite had drawn on my hand, he caught my wrist as I tried to rise from the table.

"Adriana, apologize to Bianca."

Bianca pleaded with him, the picture of reluctance, her free hand pressed to her chest.

"Lorenzo, let it go. I'm fine, aren't I? The little one probably got struck and it frightened him, that's all."

He looked at the angry red mark on the back of Bianca's hand, and something in his face twisted with pity.

Then he turned and pressed my hand straight down into the bowl of broth that had just been set before me.

The soup wasn't scalding, but the salted stock, easily over a hundred and forty degrees, seeped into the bite wound, and the burning sting was enough to leave my whole body trembling. Across the club, a glass was set down too softly. No one spoke.

"Adriana, how can your heart be this vicious? Let this be a lesson to you."

"Is this really who you think I am?"

Even though I already knew the answer in my heart, I still humiliated myself by asking it.

The whole farce had the others at the sit-down murmuring among themselves.

"Wait. Which one's actually his woman?"

"Are you blind? Obviously the one he's shielding is the real one. You can't even read matching colors that plain?"

When their eyes landed on me, they were full of pity.

"That's enough, son. Keep this up and you'll cook the girl's hand clean off."

My face was ghostly pale, but I didn't rage. I looked at Lorenzo and laughed instead, and under my gaze, for once, he seemed thrown. His thumb found the heavy signet ring on his right hand and turned it, slow.

In the end he finally deigned to release my hand, then swept out of the club with Bianca on his arm.

Back at his place, he had a tube of burn salve sent up by one of his runners.

"Adriana, don't be so sensitive. Don't go looking for ways to cross Bianca. We'll be moving in the same circles from now on, and I want the two of you to get along."

Did he think one tube of salve would settle the account, so he could keep both his standing and his obsession and call it peace?

I worked the salve into the wound and said nothing. He stayed out all night again.

The next morning at the club, the associates all looked at me strangely.

When I took my place at the desk in the back office, Carla, the one I was close to, leaned in. She glanced over her shoulder once, then again, before she spoke under her breath.

"Adriana, they're all saying you tried to throw yourself at Lorenzo and his woman caught you in the act. The whole crew's passing it around like it came down from the Don himself..."

I took the phone she pressed into my hand.

That was when I understood someone else had been at that table last night too. Overnight they'd strung together a group thread, picking apart my supposed bid to climb into the capo's bed.

Before I could say a word in my own defense, Lorenzo appeared before the whole room with Bianca at his side.

"I want you all to meet someone. This is Bianca Russo. She'll be running the floor from now on, over you."

So this was what Lorenzo had meant by moving in the same circles. He'd placed Bianca above me, made her my lieutenant.

In an instant, every eye in the room turned to me.

Because ever since the last lieutenant was cut loose, I'd been the one holding the crew's books together.

Everyone had already taken it as settled that the placement was mine, locked in.

In front of them all, Lorenzo brought Bianca into the crew's chat himself.

The two of them posted a line each, one after the other.

You'd have to be blind not to see their photos were a matched set, a couple flaunting it for the Family to read.

All morning, the whole floor fed on the whispers.

I was leaving anyway, so I didn't care that the placement that should have been mine had been handed off.

After sending word to the old man who kept the crew's records that I was done, exile or not, I stole a rare moment of quiet to brew myself a cup of honey citron tea in the back room.

I'd barely had two sips when Bianca came in too.

She poured herself a coffee and settled beside me, every inch the victor. The corner of her mouth lifted a fraction too fast before she remembered to soften it.

"Adriana, I know you were Lorenzo's kept woman for five years, but I'm his real one. Now that I'm back, you, the mistress, should have the good sense to leave. As long as you keep your mouth shut like before, the way omertà means you should, I won't come after you again."

As she spoke, she played a voice recording. It was the boy from the night before, angling for what he'd been promised:

"Auntie Bianca, did I do good? You can't forget the Transformer you swore me!"

I knew it. There was no way it had been a coincidence.

Watching the malice glint in her eyes, instinct told me to walk out of that back room right then, past the bar and the men playing cards who pretended not to listen.

Instead, she snatched the teacup from my hand and dumped the whole thing over her own face, then slammed the cup down onto my foot, where it shattered into pieces against the floor of the social club.

The cold tea slid down her cheeks, and the soaked blouse and tangled hair made her look pitiful, like a wounded little thing some made man might want to avenge.

This woman was truly ruthless when it came to going after me.

She blocked my way, wouldn't let me leave, and shrieked at the top of her lungs:

"Adriana, what are you doing? Why are you doing this to me?"

Her screaming brought the others running. Associates abandoned their glasses, soldiers turned in their chairs, the whole room drawn to the noise like blood in water.

She didn't forget to splash coffee down her own chest, either, and pulled the same trick again, rubbing her neck raw and red until anyone who looked saw a victim.

I couldn't take it anymore. I slapped her hard across the face. The crack of it cut clean through the silence, and for one beat no one breathed.

Lorenzo heard the commotion and came through the door, only to see me, whole and unharmed, standing over a disheveled, miserable Bianca.

Without a second thought, he raised his hand and slapped me too:

"Adriana! If you don't want your place here anymore, then get the hell out!"

Still not satisfied, he shoved me out of the way hard, then scooped Bianca up in his arms and carried her into the back office, the door closing on her soft, practiced sobbing.

I stumbled backward, the small of my back smashing into the edge of the table, the pain dragging tears straight down my face.

The old man who handled the books, the one who'd been hesitating over whether to let me walk clean, settled it with one sweep of his hand.

And Lorenzo, busy soothing Bianca, didn't even glance at what he was signing away. He cut me loose outright.

The money men read the wind and shifted with it, eager to please Bianca, the woman they now figured Lorenzo would keep, and counted out my last tribute on the spot.

I still had a fair amount of client business to hand back, names and numbers that belonged to the crew, so I packaged it all up, ready to send it to Lorenzo.

But it turned out my line into the Family had already been cut.

The only man with the authority to erase someone walking away was Lorenzo.

I sent the parting word to his phone, only to find he had blocked my number and my messages too. Deleted. Blocked. Erased, the way you erase someone who never mattered, the way the Family warns the rest that no one simply leaves.

I walked out of the club without another word, went home and wiped away every trace that belonged to me, then headed straight for the airport.