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?"

The pain was a living thing, and it would not let me stand. It folded me down into the cold marble of the private room until I was curled on the floor of the Castellano social club like something already dying, my cheek against the obsidian tile that had been polished to mirror the chandeliers above. Somewhere beyond the door the New Year's revelry went on, the clink of crystal, the low murmur of made men and their women, but in here the only sound that mattered was my own ragged breathing.

"I'm really going to give birth. The baby's only seven months old, it's very dangerous." My voice broke against the floor. "This is your baby too. Please, let me go to the hospital..."

An intense pain surged through my stomach, white and merciless, and I was not sure if the fall had harmed the baby. I could not let myself think it. If I thought it, I would stop fighting, and I could not afford to stop fighting.

For the sake of the child in my belly, I swallowed every shred of pride I had left, every ounce of the woman who had built this man's crew from nothing while he took the bows. I reached out and grabbed the hem of his trousers, the expensive Italian wool sliding through my fingers, and I begged in desperation, the way I had sworn on my mother's grave I would never beg anyone.

"Give me your phone. I'll call an ambulance myself. Please..."

"This is your own flesh and blood," I whispered, as though reminding him of it could conjure a soul where there was none.

Lorenzo kicked me aside. The toe of his polished shoe caught my shoulder and rolled me half over, and he stepped back from the amniotic fluid soaking into the priceless carpet as though it were something filthy washed up from the harbor. He sneered down at the dark stain, his lip curling, his disgust more genuine than any tenderness he had ever shown me.

The pain drained the last of my strength, and I collapsed against the marble like a lifeless animal, like one of the strays I used to feed in the alleys before any of this, before I was foolish enough to think love could make a wolf into a husband.

Then Lorenzo crouched down beside me, slow and deliberate, the way a man crouches when he wants you to understand he is in no hurry at all. He pinched my neck between his fingers, tilting my face up to his, and his voice came out colder than I had ever heard it, colder than the floor beneath me.

"Why are you pretending?" His thumb pressed into the soft hollow beneath my jaw. "You're so addicted to acting. If I don't teach you a lesson today, you'll think you can sit on my head and piss on me forever."

The words landed harder than the kick. I had given him everything. I had whispered the strategy that made his name feared in three territories, and he spoke to me as though I were a soldier who had skimmed from the tribute.

He rose, smoothed his palm slowly down the back of his slicked hair, and turned to the room as though I were already cleaned up and forgotten.

"Put her in the toilet," he ordered. The room went still around the command, the way it always did when Lorenzo gave one. His authority filled the space like cold air pouring in from a cracked window, and not one of them met my eyes. "Get two of the boys to clean up the stains on the carpet. It's disgusting to look at."

Two low-level associates seized my arms, their grips bruising, and dragged me across the slick floor toward one of the restrooms set into the private room. My heels skidded uselessly. The chandeliers swam above me.

I screamed for help, but the scream came out thin, scraped raw, barely a voice at all. "Call an ambulance, please. Someone. Someone call an ambulance for me..."

There was a young girl among them, one of the club girls brought in to pour the wine and laugh at the men's jokes, and she looked at me with something like fear in her eyes. She spoke softly, the way a person speaks when they already know it will cost them.

"Mr. Castellano, she really doesn't look well. Maybe we should just let her go, no? She's pregnant, after all."

Vincent set down his glass. He cracked the knuckles of one hand, slowly, one finger at a time, the sound small and wet in the quiet, and the men nearest him eased back without seeming to decide to. The girl did not know to watch for it. She did not understand the ritual she was witnessing until his hand was already in her hair, twisting it back, and his palm cracked across her cheek so hard her head snapped sideways.

"What's it to you?" Vincent snarled. "Who are you to question my buddy's call?"

The girl did not dare argue. She pressed her hand to her reddening face and offered up a nervous, trembling smile, the smile of someone who has learned that in this world apology is the only safe currency.

Several of the older women, the ones who had survived years on the arms of made men, laughed at her softly behind their glasses.

"Honey, you're still too green," one of them said, swirling her wine. "These are the tricks wives use to keep their men on a leash. Believe me, if Mr. Castellano sends her home, she'll be fine by morning. They're all fine by morning."

Gianna was full of herself, and she rose from where she had been draped over the leather to come stand above me, pretending to offer kindness the way a cat pretends to ignore a wounded bird. Her fingers drifted to the diamonds at her throat, the necklace Lorenzo had clasped there himself, and she stroked the stones as she spoke.

"Mrs. Castellano, Lorenzo is doing this for your own good." Her voice was syrup and venom in equal measure. "He just wants you to stay in there and clean yourself up so you don't embarrass yourself in front of the whole Family on New Year's."

Then she turned her graceful waist and settled back down onto Lorenzo's lap, fitting herself against him like she belonged there, like she had always belonged there. She looked at me over his shoulder, and her smirk was silent and complete, every gem at her throat catching the light as she flaunted a victory she had spent two years stealing.

You lose, her eyes said. She did not need to speak it. The whole room had already agreed.

Outside the door there was music and laughter, the warmth of the Family's New Year's feast carrying on without me, and I was dragged the last few feet and left behind it, isolated and defeated, a thing put away where the guests would not have to see it.

I sat on the cold tile floor of the restroom, my back against the wall, the marble leaching the heat from my body. I gathered what strength I had left into my fist and slapped it against the door.

"Help..."

The door swung shut. The latch caught. And my small cry was abruptly silenced, swallowed whole by the lacquered wood and the fireworks beginning to crackle somewhere over the city to mark the turning of the year.

Pain coursed through my body like a thousand iron nails driven in all at once. I bit down on it. I made myself breathe. And through the red haze I reached, helpless and instinctive, for the lessons from the pregnancy classes I had taken alone, in the quiet hours, dreaming of a child who would have a mother who never, ever begged.