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."

Lorenzo seized her hands and drew them down from her face, his voice softening into something I never heard him use for me. "You have nothing to feel guilty about, Carla tesoro."

How could he always stand on her side of every line?

The question burned and went nowhere, the way it always did. I remembered the real reason I had come into this room, the reason that had nothing to do with the woman draped on his arm, and I made myself reach into my bag and draw out the release papers. The grandfather clock in the corner of the study ticked through the silence, each stroke landing like a small judgment.

I pulled in a slow breath and let it out before I trusted my voice. "I came here for something important. A woman I know wants to be released to another Family. Her bound match belongs to them. I need your signature on her transfer." My thumb pressed the folded paper flat. My ring finger curled inward against my palm, a phantom reach for the band I had stopped wearing, and I forced my hand still before he could read it.

He glanced at me, a frown gathering between his brows as though the request needed weighing.

"Just sign it. Please." I set the words down quietly, the way Rosa would have, and he took the paper from me.

He scrawled his name across the bottom without reading a line of it, grumbling something low in his throat, then handed it back. The signet ring on his finger caught the lamplight as he passed it over, and his thumb was already rolling it, that slow restless turn I had learned to watch for.

Relief moved through me like cool water as my fingers closed around the form. Soon. Soon I would finally be free of this ache that lived under my ribs like a second heart.

"Is this why you interrupted us?" he asked, eyes flicking back to me.

"Yes." The single word was all I could spare.

His jaw set hard. His eyes narrowed, and he scoffed and turned his face away, as though the sight of me had curdled something in him. The mistress at his side watched the whole exchange with the patient amusement of a woman who has never once doubted whose name comes first.

"That mark on your wrist," Carla said, her gaze settling on my right arm where the word Mates was inked into my skin. "It looks just like the one Lorenzo wore a few months ago. The one that vanished. He told me he had it taken off." Her manicured fingers drifted up to the diamonds at her throat, a small reflexive touch, the gesture of a woman reaching for proof of where she stood.

I looked at his wrist. She was right. The matching token we had inked together five years ago, after he marked me before God and the Family as his lawful wife, was gone. Bare skin where the vow had been.

"It's only a tattoo," I told her, and the anger rose hot and bright behind my sternum even as my voice stayed level. "You can have one made for yourself if it means that much to you."

I was going to have mine removed today. It didn't mean anything to Lorenzo. There was no reason it should go on meaning everything to me.

I didn't wait for her answer. I turned my back on both of them.

My phone began to ring against my hip. I glanced at the screen and saw my brother's name. Nico.

I picked up at once, and his voice came warm down the line. "Adriana. How are you? Is Lorenzo treating you right?"

I sniffed, swallowing the thing in my throat. "I'm good. How's Mamma?"

He let the unanswered second question slide past, the way only family knows how to do. "Rosa's well. We've been missing you, all of us, but her most of all. When are you coming home? You told her it would be this week."

"I've missed you too." The truth of it nearly broke me. "Don't worry. I'm coming home in two days."

I was glad past words that he didn't ask why I was leaving Lorenzo. The Valente name carried its own weight, and Nico would not press at a wound until I was ready to show it to him. That mercy was its own kind of love.

As I ended the call, I heard footsteps cross the marble behind me, unhurried, certain. I turned to find Lorenzo walking toward me, his guards holding their places by the door, eyes lowered, the way men learn to stand when the Don moves through a room.

I couldn't tell whether he had overheard me or not. If he had, he said nothing of it.

"We'll stay here tonight," he murmured, already moving toward the staircase.

I didn't understand why he wanted us under this roof when the Family estate sat barely a mile down the road, every comfort waiting. But I followed him up the stairs the way I had followed him for five years, out of a habit my heart hadn't yet learned to break.

I woke to find his side of the bed cold and empty. The clock on the wall read one in the afternoon. The house was quiet around me, the particular hushed quiet of a place where men with guns stand somewhere out of sight and nothing happens that the Don does not permit.

The door opened and Lorenzo came in.

His gaze found me. "I had a special lunch made. Come down to the dining room and eat."

I climbed out of the bed and followed him down, his thumb turning that ring the whole way, faster now, around and around, as though there were something he was working very hard to convince himself of.