Adriana's POV

It happened in an instant. Lorenzo's mouth curved into a smile, and I knew without question that it was not meant for me. I had learned the difference between his smiles the way a woman learns the difference between thunder that passes and thunder that brings the storm down on her roof.

He glanced at his phone, the screen lighting his face, and murmured, "I'll take you out another time. Carla just messaged that she's here. We need to be at the club office. Now."

The "club" was what the family called the front, the elegant social hall on Mulberry Street where business was conducted behind velvet and brass, where men kissed rings and ledgers were never the kind anyone wrote down. I opened my mouth to answer him, but there was no one left to answer. He was already through the door, his shoes silent against the obsidian floor, his cologne and the faint trace of Turkish tobacco fading down the hall.

I rose to my feet just as her voice reached me, carrying clean and bright across the marble. "There you are, Lorenzo."

"My Carla." The two words came soft, intimate, the kind a man saves for the woman he means to keep. Their voices drifted, growing smaller, which told me they were walking together toward the car, side by side, the way a Don and his lawful wife were meant to walk and never did.

He was the Don. Not a soul in this family would dare let his name fall from their lips without a title chained to it. Don Lorenzo. Boss. Sir. No one called him simply by name except me, his wife, and now her. And he let it slide off her tongue like it belonged there. Was their arrangement truly only business, the way he swore it was? I held the question in my chest and did not let it breathe.

"Here. I bought roses for you. I know how much you love them." I could hear the grin in it, the pleasure of a man giving a gift he wanted to give.

So it was exactly as I had thought. The roses were for her.

He had never once bought roses for me. Not on a wedding anniversary, not on a name day, not on a single morning of our marriage. I turned my bare ring finger inward and pressed it into my palm, a reach for a band that was no longer there, a wound my own hand kept finding in the dark.

I let out a slow breath.

I knew they were going to the office for family work, real work, the careful arithmetic of a syndicate that touched every dock and casino in the city. So why this sickness pooling low in my stomach, this curdled, queasy thing?

The truth was simple and it shamed me. I wanted to go to the office. I wanted to stand at my husband's side. I was the Lady of the Moretti Family, and that title was supposed to mean we ran this house together, that we sat down over the books and the alliances and the quiet dangers as one. Instead he did all of it with her.

So my days had narrowed to the small things they left me. Checking on the family's people. Visiting the sick in the family physician's care. Cooking the Sunday meal that bound the men to the table and the table to the blood. Except that Carla had taken even that. The check-ins were hers now. Some of the cooking too. There was less and less of the family that was still mine, and I was the only one who seemed to notice the borders shrinking.

"I've won the bet. Don Lorenzo gave Capo Carla flowers." It was Lucia, one of the family's women, her voice carrying as she came into the house with her friends. She dropped it to a thrilled hush and I could picture her manicured fingers rising to cover her mouth, the way they always did right before she said something cruel. "It's obvious. They'll be wed soon enough."

"From what I've heard," Marcella answered, "they already are. In every way that counts."

"How can they be wed when he already has a wife?" Elena asked. Her voice was nearer, just outside the dining room, careful and low the way a sensible woman keeps her voice when she suspects the wrong ears are in the building.

Lucia muttered it like a secret too good to keep. "Well. I've heard the Lady Adriana isn't his true match at all. That it's Carla who's his lawful match by blood and bond, and the rest was just paper."

"And you believe that?" Elena asked, disbelief thinning the words.

"Yes," Marcella and Lucia said together, in one breath, two heads nodding.

Marcella's smile was in her voice, the way she nodded twice, too quickly, when she dressed up what she'd seen. "I saw them out at the lake house Friday night. Just the two of them, alone in the dark. Tell me that isn't romantic."

A small sound left my lips, and the floor seemed to tilt beneath me. My knees gave out. I went down against the cold marble, the world narrowing to a ring of white light and the impossible loud rush of my own blood.

They rushed in. I heard the scrape of chairs, the panic in their footsteps. Elena gasped, going silent first and then finding the words, glancing back over her shoulder the instant she understood who had overheard. "Oh. Lady Adriana. We had no idea you were here."

That was the last thing I heard before the dark folded over me.

When I surfaced again, the ceiling above me was unfamiliar and then it wasn't. Lorenzo stood beside the bed where someone had laid me, his frame blotting out the lamp. The second he saw my eyes open, the worry I might have imagined drained out of his face and left only irritation. He rolled the heavy signet ring around his finger with his thumb, slow at first, then faster, the way he did when he was lying to himself about something.

"Why weren't you answering my messages?" he scowled.

"Maybe because I was unconscious," I murmured, and pushed myself up against the pillows.

The scowl melted from his face into something he meant to pass for tenderness, and he slid one hand into the pocket of his tailored slacks. He drew out a gold necklace, the chain pooling across his palm like something dredged up from a vault. "I wanted to ask you what kind of necklace you like."

My heart didn't flutter. No warmth rose in my chest, none of the foolish softness that used to flood me whenever Lorenzo placed a gift in my hands. There had been a time when a man of his standing offering me anything felt like the whole Family had turned to face me. That girl was gone, buried somewhere under the obsidian floors of this house.

"I don't like gold," I murmured, Lucia's words surfacing in my memory, sharp and unbidden. "I prefer diamonds."

He frowned and tossed the necklace onto the bed, where it landed without a sound against the silk. "Fine. Don't take it."

He turned on his heel and walked out of the bedroom, pulling the heavy door shut behind him with a force that rattled the framed photographs on the wall. The slam carried down the corridor like a gunshot in an empty church. His anger was a living thing tonight, prowling the halls of the estate. I didn't care. I let my ring finger curl inward against my palm, a small reflex, reaching for the band that no longer sat there.

The door opened again. Carla walked in as though she owned the threshold, the diamonds at her throat catching the lamplight, matching earrings winking beside her jaw. Everything about her gleamed with the certainty of a woman who knew exactly where she stood in this house, and it wasn't beneath me.

"How are you feeling, Adriana?" she asked, and the smirk arrived before the question finished leaving her mouth.

Before I could answer, her gaze slid to the gold necklace abandoned on the bed, and her grin widened, slow and pleased. "Oh, did Lorenzo give you that? He gave me one too." Her fingers rose to the diamonds at her collar and touched them lightly, reverently, the way a made man might touch the crest pinned to his lapel. "You can see it's quite expensive."

She let out a small laugh, soft and curling, the kind of laugh meant to remind me precisely how little I was worth in the arithmetic of this Family. She touched the jewels again, almost stroking them, as if their weight at her throat were the deed to everything I'd lost.

"I'm fine," I said, keeping my voice level, keeping my eyes off her so they wouldn't betray the heat building behind them. "Why haven't you gone home yet? It's nine o'clock."

"I had no idea it was this late." Her hand fell from her necklace and she gathered herself in a flurry of practiced surprise. "I'll go now. Bye!" And she was gone, slipping out of the bedroom and into the dark corridors of the Moretti house as though she belonged to them more than I did.

I rose from the bed and crossed to my closet, my footsteps silent on the cold marble. The tears came as I pulled the first garments from their hangers, blurring the rows of silk and wool I had once chosen so carefully to stand beside him at every sit-down and gala. I packed quietly, methodically, the way you do when grief has burned itself down to resolve.

Just as I closed the last of it, the door opened. Lorenzo walked in. His eyes moved across the emptied closet, lingered on the suitcase standing beside it, and I felt the room hold its breath waiting for him to speak. He said nothing about it. He simply looked, and then looked away, and that silence told me more about how little he cared than any accusation could have.

"Adriana, I'll be travelling to another Family's turf in a few weeks. With Carla. Family business." He rolled the signet ring on his finger with his thumb, slow at first. "The Falcone interests down south. What do you want me to bring you back?"

"Nothing," I said, and walked past him to sit on the edge of the bed.

He looked genuinely confused, as though my refusal violated some natural law. "Are you still sulking about the necklace? Don't be petty, Adriana. I'd have bought you a diamond one. It was sold out." The ring turned faster under his thumb.

I didn't answer. My silence struck something in him, and his composure cracked. "You should be grateful I bought you a gift at all!"

When I still said nothing, the muscle in his jaw worked and he threw the next words like a man tossing a coin to a beggar. "I'm going for a run."

I lifted my eyes only in time to watch his back disappear through the doorway.

It was an old script between us. Whenever we fought, Lorenzo would announce he was going running, and I would trail after him into the night and end up apologizing for sins that were never mine, soothing him until the storm passed and order was restored. He counted on it the way a Don counts on the loyalty of his men.

Not anymore. I stayed where I was, hands folded in my lap, the suitcase a quiet promise in the corner. I didn't follow. I didn't even care that he was angry. The thread between us had already gone slack.

He didn't come home that night.

The hours dragged through the dark house, and I lay awake in the cold expanse of the bed, wondering if Carla had run beside him, wondering if he'd spent the night in her bed instead of mine, her diamonds glittering on the nightstand while my side of this marriage rotted quietly in the dark. The estate creaked around me, all its locked rooms and watchful men, and I had never felt more alone inside its walls.

The next morning I woke to the door opening.

Lorenzo walked in, disheveled, his shirt wrinkled, the scent of someone else's perfume clinging faintly to his collar. He glanced at me, the scowl already set into his face like something carved there overnight.

"Make me two very beautiful dresses before evening."

I had spent my life with a needle in my hand, dressing the women of the Moretti Family and Lorenzo's own sister in silk that cost more than most men earned in a year. I knew the difference between a wife's commission and a lie. And I knew, the moment he set that bundle of fabric in front of me, that this dress was not for Gianna.

I answered him in a voice clipped down to the bone. "I can't have it finished before evening."

He sighed, the sound thick with irritation, his thumb already rolling slow over the gold signet on his finger. "When, then?"

"Tomorrow morning." I kept my eyes on the bolt of cloth, not on him. "I'm going out now to buy the materials."

Relief loosened something in his shoulders, and he nodded. He drew his wallet from the inside of his tailored jacket and peeled off a thick fold of cash, more than the work was worth, the way a man overpays to silence a question he doesn't want asked. "Here. For the materials."

I took it without comment, crossed to where my purse sat against the cold marble of the bedroom floor, and tucked the money inside.

His phone rang. He answered before the second ring had finished, already turning, already walking out of the room with the device pressed to his ear and his back to me.

Lorenzo did not like to answer my calls. Yet here he was, lifting the phone for someone else as though the act cost him nothing at all. In all the years I had been bound to him as his lawful wife, sworn before the Family and the priest, he had answered my call exactly five times. I had counted. A woman counts the small mercies she is denied.

Our husband doesn't want us anymore, Lucian murmured in the back of my mind, blunt as a blade laid flat against the throat.

"Don't worry," I told that buried voice, drawing in a long breath and letting it bleed out of me slow. "He won't be ours for much longer."

I rose from the edge of the bed and walked to the bathroom, and I caught my own reflection in the glass without meaning to, my left hand curled into my palm, the bare finger turned inward where the marriage band used to sit. I made myself open it.

The next day I was in the living room of the family estate, eating lunch in a silence broken only by the distant tick of the grandfather clock in the hall, when Lorenzo's message lit up the group chat. It was a small thread, the four of us only, Lorenzo and Carla and Vito and me, the kind of intimate circle that should have meant something.

[Adriana, the dresses you made are gorgeous.]

Carla answered before I could, gushing into the screen.

[Yeah, they're so beautiful! I could have bought them from a boutique, but you know how they'd cheat me. I can't tell the fine work from the cheap. Lorenzo just doesn't want me to get scammed.]

I knew the dresses were for her. I had known it from the first cut. And still he had let me believe they were for his sister, the way he let me believe so many things, gently, almost kindly, so the betrayal would have softer edges.

I typed back a single word. [Okay.]

Carla wasn't finished. [I'm wearing one of them to a friend's party. You can come too, it's four doors down from the estate, we'll be up on the balcony.]

Then Lorenzo, fast as a man slamming a door: [There's no need for you to come.]

I decided to let it lie, to swallow it the way I had swallowed everything else. But a few minutes later my phone buzzed again, this time a private message, just from her.

[I'm craving chicken wings. Pick some up on your way over.]

So designing her dress had not been enough. Now I was to run her errands as well, fetch and carry for the Don's favored woman like an associate's wife sent to the market. I scoffed at the screen, shaking my head slowly in the quiet of that big empty room.

Half an hour later I walked into the house four doors down. Music poured from the speakers, loud enough to swallow my footsteps, and bodies moved against each other in the front rooms, the kind of careless gaiety that belongs to people who have never been made to wait for anything.

I carried the box of wings out to the balcony.

Lorenzo and Carla sat alone at a table set for four. They were the only two there, the empty chairs like a statement, and they had pulled close, far closer than the space required. He was looking into her eyes. She was looking back into his, and neither of them noticed the night air or the music or the world that held them.

The sound of my heels on the tile finally turned their heads. A scowl came down over his face like a shutter, and he pressed his lips into a thin, white line, the way a man does when he is holding his temper by the throat.

Carla grinned, slow and mischievous, her fingers drifting up to the diamonds at her collar, brushing the proof of her place. "You made it."

Lorenzo's brows drew together. He spoke through his teeth, his thumb rolling fast over his signet now, faster and faster. "I told you not to come."

Her grin only widened, and she lifted both hands in mock surrender, the stones at her throat catching the light. "Guilty. I texted her to bring me some chicken wings."