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.

Adriana's POV

There were waffles set at the two ends of the long dining table, golden and perfect on cold white china, and I crossed the obsidian floor to take the chair at the far end. The morning light came in thin through the tall windows of the safe house, catching the silver and the crystal, the kind of quiet luxury Lorenzo surrounded himself with the way other men surrounded themselves with guns. The room smelled of espresso and warm sugar and, beneath it, the leather of his coat draped over a chair near the door. A grandfather clock somewhere down the hall ticked, slow and patient, and it was the loudest thing in the house.

Lorenzo sat at the other end of the table, far enough away that we might have been seated at two separate tables in two separate lives. He watched me the way he watched men he hadn't decided whether to trust.

"Why did you change the passcode on your tablet?" he asked, his eyes fixed on me.

The tablet had been a gift, bought for my twenty-fifth birthday, and he had been the one to set the passcode for me with those careful, possessive fingers, as though programming a thing he owned. I had changed it the day I learned he'd gone driving up into the hills with Carla, the two of them alone on a road that led nowhere a man takes his wife.

He hadn't even noticed until now. That was the part that sat coldest in my chest. Weeks of silence between us, and the first thing to draw his attention back to me was a string of four digits he could no longer command.

"No reason," I said, and I chewed my waffle slowly, letting the word settle without weight, without invitation.

A frown gathered at his brow. His thumb moved to the heavy signet ring on his hand and began to turn it, a slow roll against his knuckle, the way he did when he was telling himself something he half believed. "The sit-down is tonight. The inter-family gala. You've always wanted to stand at my side at these things." His voice had gone cold and even, the tone he used in rooms full of men who answered to him. "Do you want to come as my wife?"

I almost laughed. Carla had been the woman on his arm at every Family affair since the day he made her a capo in her own right, paraded through every gala and every neutral-ground meeting like a trophy he was daring the other Dons to covet. I went with my friends, or I went alone, or I did not go at all and no one marked the empty chair. So what had changed? Why now, when the alliance of bloodlines between us was already a corpse he simply hadn't buried yet?

But if I refused him, he would grow suspicious, and a suspicious Lorenzo was a careful one. He had signed my release back to the Valente Family without ever reading what his own hand was putting its name to, and that signature was the only thing standing between me and the rest of my life. I would not give him a reason to look twice at anything. Not yet. Not while the ink was still drying somewhere in my luggage.

Under the edge of the table, where he could not see, I turned my bare ring finger inward against my palm, pressing the empty place where his band used to sit until the phantom of it ached.

I didn't look at him as I rose from the chair. "Sure," I said.

That night the sit-down took place in the grand hall of an old marble building the Families used for their fragile truces, neutral ground where four bloodlines could share the same air and pretend the air wasn't thick with old debts. Chandeliers threw warm gold over men in dark suits and women in silk, over the slow circling of capos who never quite turned their backs to one another, over the quiet shapes of bodyguards standing along the walls like furniture that breathed. I sat at our table with Lorenzo beside me, close enough that the other Dons would see it, far enough that I felt nothing of his warmth.

"Are you enjoying yourself?" Lorenzo asked, his gaze sliding sideways to the boredom I hadn't bothered to hide.

I nodded, and I did not spare him so much as a glance.

Playing the part of Don Lorenzo Moretti's wife was nothing like the gilded fantasy I had once let myself imagine. The gala unfolded around me in a haze of crystal and candlelight, a sit-down dressed up as a celebration, where the heads of three Families circled one another beneath a chandelier the size of a small car. I knew none of the other wives, none of their husbands, none of the made men who lined the walls like well-tailored statues. And Lorenzo, who had brought me here on his arm as if I were an ornament he might or might not bother to wear, had not spoken a word to me in over an hour.

The silence between us had its own weight. I felt it in the cold marble beneath my heels, in the way the Turkish tobacco smoke curled toward the high ceilings and dissolved into nothing, the way I seemed to be dissolving too.

"Are you—" he began, finally, as if remembering I existed.

He never finished. Her voice cut through the murmur of the room first.

"Lorenzo!"

We turned, and there she was, crossing the obsidian floor like the whole evening had been arranged for her arrival. Carla. She moved without hesitation, without the careful deference the rest of the room afforded the Don, because she had never needed it. The men did not stiffen for her the way they did for him, but they watched her, and she knew it, and she wore that attention like silk.

She reached him and folded herself against his chest, both arms around him, holding him tightly in front of everyone.

"You look marvelous," he murmured, and his eyes traveled the length of her body in a way that made the wine turn sour on my tongue.

Carla took his hand and laced her fingers through his, slow and certain. "Thanks."

Then she noticed me. Her gaze flicked to where I stood, half a step apart, the lawful wife and the unseen one, and her eyes widened in a performance of surprise so smooth it could only have been practiced. She slipped her fingers free of his, her hand rising at once to the diamonds at her throat, a small reflexive touch, fingertips grazing the proof of her place.

"Oh no. Lady Adriana, I'm so sorry. It's just that we're very close."

I curled my bare ring finger inward, pressing it into my palm where no one could see, a phantom reach for a band I no longer wore.

"You don't have to apologize, Carla." Lorenzo answered her before I could open my mouth, before the room could even turn to me for my reply. His voice was the most generous it had been all night, and it was not aimed at me.

It was at that moment that Don Lombardi crossed the floor toward us, the temperature of the gathering shifting subtly with his approach, and he drew Lorenzo aside into the low, measured talk of men who decide things. I was left standing beside Carla and her diamonds, two women who shared a husband, neither of us speaking.

"Outsiders!" someone shouted from the far end of the hall. "Shooters at the perimeter!"

The word moved through the gala like a blade. Glasses were set down. Men reached beneath their jackets. The wives scattered toward the walls in a rustle of silk and panic, and for one breathless instant the whole gilded room remembered what it truly was.

"Come on, Carla," Lorenzo said, and his hand closed around hers.

He pulled her toward the back door, fast, his body between her and whatever might be coming through the dark. He did not look for me. He did not reach for me. He had a wife on one side of the room and a mistress on the other, and in the one second that fear stripped away all the careful manners, his hand had chosen her.

He didn't try to protect me. Instead, he was protecting Carla.

"Everyone, calm yourselves. There are no shooters." Don Lombardi's voice rolled across the hall, unhurried, and he lifted one open palm, calm as a man stilling water. The room obeyed it the way it would never obey a shout. "A boy at the gate saw the shadow of a hedge moving in the wind and thought it was a man with a gun. There is no one here who does not belong."

The men's hands eased away from their jackets. The wives drifted back from the walls. And I watched Lorenzo walk back into the hall with Carla still at his side, her color high, her diamonds catching the chandelier light, the danger already turning into a story she would tell prettily later.

I glanced at the time on my phone.

My flight would take off in the cold dark hours before dawn, and I needed sleep before then, needed to be steady for what tomorrow would cost me. So I did the only thing left to do at a party where I had never been wanted. I made my way out of the hall, past the made men at the doors who did not so much as turn their heads, and I had a car carry me back to the Moretti estate alone.

I did not curl my finger against my palm anymore that night. There was nothing left to reach for.

The next morning I was already in the air, the city falling away beneath the wing, when Lorenzo's voice tore into my head, frantic, stripped of all his cold composure.

Adriana! Why am I feeling pain from the blood vow breaking? Why are you leaving? Where are you going?