The day I hemorrhaged from the miscarriage, my mother and father raced through the rain toward the Family's clinic on the edge of the territory. On the way, a car came out of the dark and took them both.

I lay on the table and signed the blood pacts with hands still slick with my own blood, the papers a made person signs when life hangs in the balance.

The baby couldn't be saved. Neither could my parents.

And the man whose seventy-six calls had gone unanswered posted a glowing little celebration through the network.

【Congratulations, sweetie. After a long, hard night, you're finally a mother.】

Weak as I was, I tapped a like. A text from him came through at once.

Just one word. "Delete it."

I sent him the clinic's location.

"Come to the clinic. There's something I need to say to your face."

"I've got something important. I can't come! Have your parents take you to the checkup, they've got nothing better to do anyway."

"Your so-called important thing is delivering her dog's puppies?"

"How does carrying a child turn you into a jealous shrew? You're jealous of a dog now?"

I didn't have the strength to argue with him. If he wouldn't come, then he could talk to the Consigliere.

……

By the time I'd finished arranging my parents' burial, with all the quiet rites the Family owed its own, it was already the next evening.

I dragged my exhausted body to the door of our home and opened it.

The rooms I'd cleaned so carefully were a wreck.

Lorenzo Marchetti was bent over, rummaging for something, tossing whatever he touched onto the floor without a thought. Habit and certainty both, that someone would always clean up after him. The youngest Underboss the Marchetti name had ever made never picked up after himself. Other men did that.

He heard the door and didn't even lift his head, an edge of complaint in his voice.

"Where did you run off to all day on a Saturday? I had to send out for lunch."

I went still. So he hadn't come home last night either.

For two years now, he'd always been like this.

When a light broke in Gianna Russo's apartment, he could drag himself out of bed in the dead of night to fix it for her. But he'd forget to bolt our own door, and a drunk had wandered in off the street, and I had nightmares about it for a solid month. A made man's wife, and he couldn't be bothered to turn a lock.

When Gianna's dog was about to whelp, he could refuse to take me to my checkup. But he'd cleared a whole week at her side beforehand, though that was work for some hireling, not for the Family's most trusted fixer.

Getting no answer, Lorenzo finally turned to look at me, surprise rising in his eyes.

"You're so pale. Is the baby giving you trouble again?"

I stepped back, away from the hand reaching for my belly, my voice flat.

"I called you seventy-six times yesterday. Why didn't you pick up?"

Lorenzo's hand was still hanging in the air. He frowned at the question. He cracked one knuckle of his right hand, slow, the way he did with men who weren't worth his time.

"Adriana Vitale, are you interrogating me?"

"Gianna and I grew up together. And Sweetie isn't like the other animals in her parlor. She's raised that dog at her side since it was small. They have a deep bond."

"Sweetie was whelping. Gianna was worried sick. I had to help with the delivery. In a life-and-death moment like that, who has time to answer your pointless calls?"

"It was just a checkup. Plenty of women in your condition go on their own. And if not, you had your parents, they've got nothing else to do anyway. What difference does it make if I'm not there?"

I watched him stand there so righteous. The room had gone very quiet, only the slow tick of the clock on the mantel, loud as a dripping tap.

I wanted so badly to ask, then where are my parents?

That crash was brutal. My father had no pulse by the time they carried him into the clinic. My mother made it as far as the table, but her injuries were too deep, too tangled. The Surgeon, the Family's own elite fixer, the man who unmade death for a living, said that perhaps only if Lorenzo cut for her himself would there be a sliver of a chance.

He said he had no time to answer my calls. Yet the moment I tapped a like on that post, he could appear at once to order me to take it back. Terrified Gianna might read into it.

"Really just childhood friends?"

"But Lorenzo, I saw you kiss her."

In the very restaurant where he'd asked me to take his name. In the exact same seats, under the same low light, with the same waiters who knew to keep their eyes down when a Marchetti dined.

In my daze that day, I never saw the motorcycle speeding toward me.

The rider braked in time. But that little life inside me, only three months along, was gone in the end all the same.

Lorenzo's normally still eyes flickered with something close to panic.

"Gianna was beside herself over Sweetie, so I took her out to clear her head. She had a few too many, that's all—"

His tone softened a notch.

"Enough about that. I'll come with you to the next checkup with the Surgeon. You have my word."

There it was again.

A flimsy excuse to brush me off, then a little sweetener tossed my way, as if nothing had happened.

But Lorenzo, you'll never have to come to another checkup with me again.

"Don't bother. Let's sever the union."

Lorenzo went still for a beat, then his voice came low and cutting, humiliation curdling into anger.

"Adriana, do all you press people love blowing things out of proportion? I told you it was nothing. Do you have to make a sit-down out of it?"

"And what are you now? A clerk shuffling papers for the information network. You're about to turn thirty, carrying a child. Who else in this city would want you, besides me?"

"I'm out there cleaning up the Family's problems every single day, breaking my back for this name, not so I can come home and watch you throw a fit over nothing."

He turned for the door.

As he passed the entryway, his eye caught the corner of a document sticking out of my bag.

Death certificate. The two words were stark and unmistakable.

Lorenzo turned back, puzzled.

"Who died?"

He reached to pull it free for a better look.

Then his phone rang. Gianna's voice came through, choking helplessly on tears.

"Lorenzo, one of the puppies looks like it choked on its milk, and I've still got customers in the parlor. I can't handle it all."

"It won't die, will it? I'm so scared—"

His whole face tightened with worry.

"Don't cry. I'll be right there."

And with that, he was gone, no backward glance.

He even forgot to lock the study, the one room in the house he'd never liked me setting foot in.

Something pulled me inside, and then something under the desk stabbed at my eyes.

That year I was the most promising young reporter the network had, and I'd landed the assignment to draw out the old man who'd run the Family's clinic for thirty years. But the old man was proud and aloof, and he shut the door in my face.

After days of back-to-back nights, my blood sugar crashed and I fainted in the courtyard garden of the estate.

It was Lorenzo who picked me up. He told me the old fixer was stubborn, that once he'd made up his mind, nothing on God's earth would change it.

I dropped my head, dejected. The next second, an orange candy was tucked into my mouth.

Lorenzo gave me a playful wink.

"But I admire people who take their work seriously. So why don't you sit down with me instead?"

It was only later that I learned he was the youngest man ever made Underboss in the Marchetti Family. The Family's most trusted hand for the delicate problems no outsider could ever know about.

So many people had wanted an hour with this brilliant, dangerous star of the underworld and been turned away. He made an exception for me alone.

That was how Lorenzo and I came together.

Later, we both grew busier and busier, and Lorenzo looked at me, troubled.

"Adriana, I know earning your own name in the network is your dream."

"But there are elders in this house who can't be left without anyone to care for them. Could you step back from the work? I swear to you I'll be good to you the rest of my life."

And I knew just as well that becoming the finest fixer the Family had ever seen was his dream.

So I gave in.

I didn't walk away entirely. I moved to the quiet end of the network instead, shuffling logistics and paper. At least that way I could stay a little closer to the work I loved.

On so many sleepless nights, I'd run my fingers over my old press credentials in the lamplight.

Every time Lorenzo caught me at it, he was wracked with guilt, promising over and over that he'd be good to me.

But now, those credentials I'd treasured so dearly were being used to prop up the leg of his desk.

I opened his safe with Gianna's birthday.

On top sat a thick kraft paper envelope.

Inside were all kinds of photographs of the two of them.

Embracing. Kissing. Strolling hand in hand along a beach.

There were also receipts. The cash he'd put up to buy Gianna a house, to set up her business, to renovate the place.

Even though the kennel bled money month after month, laundered Family cash poured in to cover every shortfall, and he had to keep covering them himself.

The handwriting on the front of the envelope was Lorenzo's.

"I will clear every thorn from the path of your dreams."

I stared at that line for a long, long time.

Through my mind flashed these five years I'd spent inside the Marchetti walls, tending his parents, washing the linen, setting the Sunday table, keeping a made man's house in the order the famiglia expected.

I thought of the old colleagues I'd run into, the couriers still burning to chase a story, the ones who worked the night through over a dispatch nobody else dared to file, and the envy and the ache that had risen in me each time.

A laugh slipped out of me before I knew it.

So it turned out he knew how to protect someone's dreams too.

I photographed everything and put it all back exactly where it had been, every receipt squared to the edge of the safe. At last I made my decision.

"Hey, Carmela. I heard the network's been looking for someone to go embedded in the Old Country, into the smuggling routes, and no one's put their name down yet."

"If you'll have me, I'm willing to go."

Carmela went quiet for a moment. I heard the soft tap of her fingernail against the rim of a cup, twice, the way she always did before she said something that turned a life on its hinge. Then she said, delighted, "Of course. Back when you asked to step out of the network and marry into the Marchetti name, I thought it was such a waste. This is a rare chance. It's dangerous out there among the warlords, no question. But when you come back, no one in this business will ever speak your name the same way again."

"So get yourself ready. You'll move out in the next few days."

I set down the phone and started packing.

There was nothing left in this house I cared to hold on to.

Except for the sweater my mother knitted for me before she died. That, I was taking with me.

When I was little she'd knitted me plenty of things. Later I grew up, and she grew old, her eyes not what they used to be.

I didn't want her wearing herself out, so I told her to stop knitting.

After I got pregnant, I suddenly couldn't stand the cold.

And she secretly knitted me a sweater anyway, her eyes red and raw from staying up over it, waving it all off like it was nothing.

"Hand-knit's warmer. I picked out good yarn for it."

"You love the baby in your belly. Well, I love my baby too."

It made my heart ache and my chest swell, and I never had the heart to wear it.

But now, that sweater was gone.

I thought back to the scene when I'd gotten home, and I was about to call Lorenzo and ask.

Then I saw Gianna's new post.

"Hehe, I'd just been saying the babies were too cold now that they're newborns, and a certain someone went and brought over a sweater~"

"On the babies' behalf, thank you, Daddy~ And of course, this mama's remodeling skills are no joke either."

So Lorenzo had gone to celebrate those puppies' birthday with her.

In the photo, the two of them had their heads pressed together, their bodies tucked tight against each other.

Each of them cradled three puppies.

And I recognized it in a single glance.

The little "dog outfits" those puppies were wearing had been cut from the sweater my mother knitted for me.

When I pushed open the glass door of the kennel, the front Gianna ran with skimmed Family cash, I walked in just as Lorenzo and Gianna were eating cake off the same spoon.

Lorenzo had a severe revulsion for anything unclean.

At home his bowls and silver had to be scalded and stored apart from everyone else's, and at meals he always reached for the serving fork first.

Once, after I'd worked the house all day and was parched, my throat dry, I took a sip of water from his glass.

He hadn't said anything at the time. That night, the glass turned up in the trash.

Afterward Lorenzo explained it to me, said it was a habit the work bred in him, the same care a fixer takes with everything he touches.

So it depended on the person after all.

When she saw me, Gianna arched a brow and let out a soft, practiced laugh, tucking a strand of hair behind one ear a half-second too fast.

"Oh, big sister Adriana's here? Lorenzo and I have been close since we were kids, never one to draw lines between what's his and mine. Don't take it the wrong way, now."

"Lorenzo, what did I tell you? There's no way she's going to dissolve the union."

"After all, a woman whose standing in this life came to nothing, who can only live on the tribute her husband hands her, what would she raise the children and keep her parents on if she walked away? See, she's chased you all the way here. Clings on awfully tight, doesn't she?"

"Sigh, compared to her, I suppose I'm just too thin-skinned. All I can do is honestly stay an independent woman who makes her own way~"

Lorenzo pinched her nose, doting.

"Fine, fine, you're the cleverest one. Always were a little sprite, even as a kid."

Then he looked over at me, the way you'd forgive a child who didn't know any better.