The disgust in his eyes was unmistakable, sharpened to a blade's edge when his gaze dropped to the swell of my belly, to the stretch marks that mapped the months I had carried his blood. He looked at me the way a man looks at a debt he resents paying.

For the sake of the life I carried, I had taught myself to look past these things. I had swallowed every flinch, every cold turn of his shoulder in the dark, and told myself the same lie on a loop: everything will settle once the child is here. Everything will be fine. In a world where a made man's woman learned to keep her silence as faithfully as any soldier kept Omertà, I had made my peace with smaller and smaller pieces of myself.

But now, in this private room thick with cigar smoke and the sour-sweet reek of spilled liquor, he was using the very sacrifice I had made to grind me down. I had bled my body into shapes I no longer recognized to bring his heir into the world, and he turned that suffering into a punchline for the men lounging on the leather banquettes.

I understood, suddenly and completely, that I could not keep bartering away my dignity for a man who placed no value on his own child.

"Lorenzo Castellano, let's dissolve the union."

His indifferent expression froze. Whatever heat the wine had put in his face drained out of it, but his arrogance never so much as flickered. He smoothed his palm down the slick of his dark hair, once, slow and deliberate, the way he always did when he meant to salvage his pride. "And where would you go, cara, swollen with my child and cast out of my house? No family would touch you. No man would have you. Behave yourself and the name Castellano stays yours."

Then he caught the grief carved into my face, and something in him recalculated. His tone gentled into the velvet he used on men he wanted to disarm before he buried them. "Be obedient. I give you my word. The Castellano bloodline will come from no womb but yours."

His word. The only currency that meant anything in our world, and he spent it like a counterfeit bill, smiling as he did it.

Beside him, Gianna twisted at the waist in a slow, theatrical curve, her crimson gown catching the low light. Her fingers drifted up to the diamonds at her throat, the necklace he had fastened there not an hour ago, and she stroked the stones like a charm against everything she did not yet possess. "Lorenzo," she purred, voice thick with false reluctance, "don't quarrel with the lady of the house over me. She's still carrying your baby, after all."

He pinched her bare waist, playful, possessive, a man marking what he believed was his. "That one?" He didn't even look at me. "Pregnant or not, she's only being dramatic. She always is."

The two of them flirting in the open, in front of me, as though I were a piece of furniture too old to throw out yet, was more than my body could hold. The room tilted. Heat surged up from my stomach in a wave I could not stop and did not want to.

"Ugh. Blergh."

Everything I had carried in me came up at once, and the two of them standing closest were caught in the splash. Gianna most of all. The pale fabric of her coat went dark with the sour mess of it, the gleam of expensive wool ruined in an instant.

She tore the coat off her shoulders, her eyes gone red and wet with rage, and spat at me, "You wretched bitch. Did you do that on purpose?"

Something that had been wound tight in me for seven months snapped clean.

I struck her across the face, hard enough that the crack of it cut through the laughter in the room. "Who are you calling a bitch?"

For one breath the men on the banquettes went still, glasses paused halfway to their mouths, the way a crew goes quiet when something has shifted and no one yet knows which way the boss will turn. Gianna staggered, her hand flying to her cheek, and then she shoved me back with everything she had, both palms slamming into my chest.

"Lorenzo, you have to stand up for me!" she shrieked, clutching at the diamonds again, knuckles white around the stones as though they alone could anchor her in a place she had never earned. "My New Year's coat, your gift to me, it's ruined!"

A waiter materialized at the edge of the room with a hot towel and the careful blank face of a man who had learned that in rooms like this you see nothing, hear nothing, remember nothing. He moved toward the mess with his eyes lowered.

And Lorenzo turned to me at last, his voice dropping into that low, level register the whole crew knew to fear, the one that came right before someone learned the cost of crossing him.

"Catherine. That's enough."

Thrown off balance, I went down hard against the cold parquet, the weight of my swollen body folding beneath me like something discarded. The fall knocked the breath from my lungs. I tried to rise, to gather what was left of my dignity, but my body had become a stranger to me. Every motion was slow, pitiful, the struggle of a creature too heavy for its own limbs. The private room of the social club closed in around me, all dark velvet and gold sconces, the air thick with cigar smoke and the sweet rot of spilled wine.

The room erupted into laughter at my expense. It rolled through the men lounging on the leather banquettes, soldiers and hangers-on, made comfortable by liquor and by their boss's permission to be cruel.

"Lorenzo, doesn't your wife look like a turtle flipped on its back?"

"A fat turtle, at that. Hahaha." Glasses clinked. Someone slapped a knee.

My eyes burned with unshed tears. Embarrassment surged through me, hot and total, a humiliation that lived in the marrow. But before I could even name the feeling, a sharp pain shot through my stomach, low and deep, a blade twisting where no blade was.

A warm, wet sensation spread beneath me and I looked down in alarm.

The carpet under me was soaked, dark and spreading.

This can't be...

Panic seized me, swallowing the shame whole. I instinctively reached out for Lorenzo, my fingers grasping at the empty air between us, at the man who had once sworn his protection over my body in front of an altar.

"Lorenzo, please take me to the hospital right now!"

"My water broke!"

The haze of liquor seemed to lift from his eyes all at once, the drunken sheen burning away under something colder, sharper. The room fell quiet by degrees, the laughter dying as the men read the shift in the air the way they'd been trained to. He stood up in a sudden, ungainly panic, and for one fragile instant a flicker of regret crossed his expression, the ghost of the man who had married me.

"Don't be afraid, tesoro. I'll take you to the hospital right away." His voice cracked at the edges, almost human.

But before he could move, before that mercy could harden into action, Gianna's mocking voice cut through the tension like a wire pulled taut across the room.

"I really envy Mrs. Castellano." She let the name drip from her painted mouth like poison. "No matter what lies she tells, Lorenzo always believes her without question."

Lorenzo shoved off the white hands she had wound around his waist, his voice gone cold and sharp as a thrown knife. "Get away from me. If anything happens to my wife, it'll be on your head."

Gianna collapsed onto the sofa with exaggerated delicacy, a wounded little performance for an audience that adored her. Despite his harsh words, she persisted, undeterred, her foot clad in red silk sliding up to brush against his calf with a slow, deliberate flirtation. Her fingers drifted to the diamonds at her throat, the necklace he had given her, and she clutched them as she spoke, a talisman for a status she clutched at and never truly owned.

"Lorenzo, don't you see?" Her voice softened into something sweetly reasonable, the most dangerous thing in the room. "Mrs. Castellano just got overexcited and wet herself. How could her water break at only seven months? Her due date isn't even close."

The words settled over the men like a verdict, and one by one they took up the song. They clicked their tongues and shook their heads with theatrical disgust, the cruelty contagious now that someone had given it permission.

"I've heard pregnant women have incontinence. So that's what it looks like."

"She can't even control her own water. No wonder Lorenzo found someone else."

Lorenzo, who had just reached for me, who had half-bent toward the woman bleeding her child onto his floor, froze. I watched it happen. I watched the calculation move behind his eyes, the way he weighed my pain against the laughter of these men, against his own pride sitting exposed in front of his crew. His initial panic gave way to a long, slow exhale of relief, as though Gianna had handed him a reason not to care, and he had seized it gratefully.

His hand drifted up and smoothed his slicked hair back from his brow, palm pressing flat against it, salvaging the dignity she had threatened in front of the room.

The pity in his eyes curdled. It turned to anger, and the anger curdled into disgust, the contempt of a man looking at something beneath him. Without a single word, he reached for a nearby pillow and hurled it at me where I lay broken on the wet floor, the soft impact somehow worse than any blow, the casual dismissal of it landing harder than a fist ever could.

"Disgusting or not, you'll crawl through any gutter just to claw your way back into favor."

"No. I'm in labor. My stomach. It hurts. Please—" The words came out broken, wet, scraped raw against the marble beneath my cheek.

Lorenzo stood over me where I writhed on the floor of the private room, the obsidian tile cold against my burning skin. He looked down the length of his pressed silk shirt at me the way a man looks at something tracked in on the sole of his shoe. His eyes were flat. His voice carried that lazy mockery he saved for people he no longer counted as people.

"You're quite the little performer," he said. He lifted a hand and smoothed his slicked hair back along his skull, slow and deliberate. "If Gianna hadn't snapped me out of it, I might have actually believed your act."

Gianna's painted face split with delight. She poured herself against his side, draping her arms over the lapel of his jacket, and let her fingers drift up to the diamonds at her throat, turning them in the low light so they caught fire. "Mmm," she purred, sweet as poisoned honey. "I'm your clever, sweet little courier, after all. I know what's real and what's theater."

Another contraction tore through me. My voice shook with the force of it, splitting down the middle.

"Help me. The baby. Save the baby. Somebody, please, call for an ambulance—"

Vincent snorted into his glass. Ice clinked as he tilted it. "Lorenzo, your wife'll do anything to drag you back in. Look at this mess she made. Tying up an ambulance crew over a wet floor. Waste of good resources." He cracked the knuckles of one hand, one finger at a time, the small popping sounds loud in the smoke-choked room, though no one but me seemed to hear the threat coiled inside the ritual.

Gianna fanned the flame with the ease of someone who'd done it a hundred times. "Mrs. Castellano," she said, savoring the title she coveted and despised in equal measure, "if word got out that Lorenzo Castellano's wife pissed herself in public, in front of the whole crew, do you think he'd have a shred of respect left? In this life, a man's standing is the only thing that keeps him breathing. You never did understand that. So inconsiderate of you."

The suffocating reek of Turkish tobacco hung in the air, thick enough to taste, curling against the ache that had hollowed out my chest. Somewhere beyond the heavy door, the muffled noise of the club's New Year's feast went on, glasses raised, soldiers laughing, a whole Family celebrating while I bled on their floor.

And it settled into me then, cold and final, sinking past the pain: there was no one in this room I could reach. Not one. They were his crew, his associates, his kept woman. Every face turned toward me was a wall.

So I stopped reaching for them. I gritted my teeth so hard I tasted iron and dragged myself across the slick tile toward my handbag, lying maybe four feet away beneath the edge of the booth. My phone was inside it. If no one in this place would save me, then I would save myself.

Their laughter trailed after me, cruel and tireless, the way a pack worries a wounded animal it isn't done playing with.

"Lorenzo, your wife should be on a stage somewhere. Look at her. The dedication."

"Yeah, boss, go on, sweet-talk her down. How're we supposed to enjoy the night with her doing the whole pissing routine on the floor?"

Sweat soaked through me, plastering damp strands of hair to my forehead, stinging my eyes. Each drag of my body forward sent a fresh wave of agony rolling up from my belly, deep and clenching, like a fist closing around something precious and squeezing the life from it.

I shut my ears to the jeering of these well-dressed animals. I reached. My fingers closed around the leather strap, then the smooth glass of the phone inside.

But the instant I drew it out, the instant my shaking thumb hovered over the screen to make the call, a polished Italian shoe came down on the back of my hand. Bone ground against tile. Lorenzo shifted his weight, casual, almost bored, and kicked the phone spinning away across the floor, out of reach, into the shadows under the far table.

"Enough," he said, and the single word dropped the temperature in the room. The laughter died at once. "Have you lost your mind completely? You really think it's all right to drag an ambulance crew down here over this circus, tonight, of all nights, on the Family's New Year's feast?"