I was a girl from the undertaker's district, hauling the unclaimed dead for coin, and for pulling the Don of the Falcone Family out of an ambush that should have killed him, he made me his bound wife in a procession of black cars that ran a mile down the avenue.

But in ten years under that blood pact, Lorenzo Falcone filled his estate with mistresses past counting.

This month he meant to install another: the most sought-after hostess of the Family's high-end club.

Heavy with child, I saw to every arrangement all the same, calm as ever.

Yet when I went out to the markets in the district, that hostess came tearing through the crowded street and ran me down in her car.

My leg bone shattered, and the blood began to pour from between my thighs and would not stop.

Lorenzo didn't spare me so much as a glance.

"Who told you to go wandering out into the street? You just wanted to flaunt it, didn't you, that you were pregnant, that you'd finally locked down your place as the Don's wife?"

"Let me make this plain. From the day you drove Isabella Vitale out of this Family, you've been a dead woman in my eyes."

"Now that you're actually dying, all the better."

He swept the hostess into his arms and walked off laughing, and the people on that street feared the Falcone name too much to dare lift a hand.

By the time my household servant found me, I lay in a river of my own blood, and the child was already dead in my womb.

When I woke again, I had them carry me to the family estate, and I knelt prostrate before Donna Abate.

"I beg you, Donna, release me from the pact. The ten years are up. It's time for me to go."

——

The matriarch sighed. "I had thought that once you were carrying his child, Lorenzo might have a change of heart."

"I never imagined he'd hold the matter of Isabella against you so bitterly."

"Carmela Greco, do you resent me? It was Isabella who gave her heart to another man and ran off with him, and yet you were the one made to carry the blame for it."

Numbly, I bowed my head to the floor again. "I ask only that you show mercy and let me go."

As I moved, fresh streams of warmth surged out from between my legs, soaking red the litter they'd carried me in on.

The Donna started in alarm and sent for the Family's doctor.

Seeing the wretched state of me, she sent a man to summon Lorenzo as well.

The man returned quickly. "Donna, the Don is at the club's private garden, amusing himself with Gianna."

"He also bid me bring this to his wife."

I raised my eyes to look. It was a length of crimson silk, a woman's slip, embroidered with a pair of mandarin ducks.

By then the doctor had finished his examination.

"Donna, the signora is gravely injured. I fear she will never be able to conceive again in this life."

"Had she been seen to in time that day, it would never have come to this, and the child might even have..."

I pressed a hand to my hollow, emptied belly and turned to the Donna with a bitter smile.

"I beg you, grant my wish."

Perhaps the sight of me was too pitiful, for even the Donna, who never let her judgments waver, let a flicker of pity cross her face.

"Your injuries are too severe. Stay at the estate seven days to recover before we speak of this again."

"I thank you for your kindness, Donna, but I still have the Don's wedding to oversee. I won't burden the household by staying."

Lorenzo's consigliere walked in, not a trace of deference about him.

He gave the Donna only the barest nod before going on:

"The Don says Gianna is the woman he holds dear, and there must be no slight to her in the smallest thing."

"His wife's health can be tended to later. It must not delay the rites between Gianna and the Don."

The Donna was aghast. "Has he lost his mind? Full rites, the seal of a true Family wife, for a mistress?"

The consigliere nodded without hesitation.

"Naturally. I'd ask the signora to return to the estate soon and make it ready. Seven days from now is the chosen hour."

With that, he turned and left.

Just like his master, he didn't give me a single glance.

The Donna was so furious she swept a set of vases to the floor, and it was a long while before she calmed enough to look at me.

"I had thought Lorenzo would let go of Isabella sooner or later. I never dreamed it would only mean ten years of ruin for you. It's time you were free."

"Seven days from now, the release from the pact will be sent to the estate. You need only leave with an easy heart."

"Only... after all you've done, after going this far, the matter of Isabella..."

I nodded quickly, doing as she wished. "That Isabella turned her back on the Don and ran off with another man — I'll carry that secret to my grave."

Only then did Donna Abate let out a breath. She sent one of her men to fetch a thin gold chain and pressed it into my hands.

"The day you leave, your mother will be waiting for you past the edge of our territory."

Stroking the keepsake my mother had once worn against her skin, I burst into tears.

Mother, we're finally free.

Ten years ago, Donna Abate put the rightful heir in the seat of the Don after the old boss was buried.

When the rival outfit moved to take everything, it was Lorenzo Falcone, not yet sworn in himself, who led the soldiers and broke the ambush that should have ended the Family — only to catch the bullets meant for the heir and fall into a coma no one thought he'd wake from.

Yet his childhood love, Isabella, chose that very moment to run off with another man.

The Donna feared that Lorenzo, when he came to, would be so crushed by the blow he'd never come back to himself. So she found someone to play a part.

And I, out scraping for the money to buy my mother's medicine, happened to step right into the path of her car.

A dose of medicine worth three days' wages bought ten years of my life.

When Lorenzo woke and learned I meant to trade saving his life for the place of his bound wife, he showed no anger.

Nor did he look down on me for being a morgue girl who carried the dead.

Instead, he spoke to me with gentle words and treated me with respect.

He even pitied me for having no name worth speaking, and saw to the arrangements himself, the way the Family looked after its own.

Guilt gnawed at me. Day and night I studied the manners, the codes, the silences a made wife was supposed to keep, not wanting to shame him in front of the table.

Newly stitched back together from wounds that should have killed him, he needed his dressings changed and his ruined muscle worked every day, so every morning I rose before light and kept watch over the stove, just so the medicine would be the perfect warmth when he woke.

Back then Lorenzo would take my hand and smile so tenderly. "Thank God I have you."

In that moment, I believed I had found a good man.

But at the Christmas sit-down, in front of the whole Family, he ordered the made wife's ring stripped from my hand.

And had it pressed onto the finger of a club hostess he'd carelessly pulled into his lap.

Disgraced and breaking, I begged him to release me from the pact.

Lorenzo only watched me with cold eyes. "Release you? When you forced Isabella to run, did you ever once think of releasing me?"

What came crashing down alongside the endless humiliation was a letter from Isabella.

Every word of it bled with grief, all of it telling how I'd used his debt to me as a weapon to drive her out.

From that day on, Lorenzo never set foot in my part of the estate again.

Every other week, women who carried some trace of Isabella in their faces were brought through the gates.

Lorenzo made me arrange their welcomes, made me pour the wine they raised to him in respect.

He even made me stand outside their doors and listen to what happened behind them.

Ten years. My heart, shot through with wounds, had long since gone numb.

I thought I had only to outlast the last of my days under the pact, and it would be over.

But I never expected Lorenzo to be slipped something while he was away handling business,

and that the two of us would make a child together.

Lorenzo didn't force me to be rid of it. He even had medicine sent to me to keep the pregnancy safe.

"The child is innocent."

Nor did he bring any more mistresses onto the estate after that.

Now and then he would even come to see me.

I thought that after ten years of waiting, hope had finally come.

And then Isabella sent another letter.

Isabella claimed I'd sent someone to parade my pregnancy in front of her, when she had only just lost a child of her own.

It was the first time I'd ever seen Lorenzo fly into such a rage.

He very nearly forced the poison to my lips himself.

It was something he'd had a man go out and obtain on purpose — the kind they used on animals to clear a womb.

One swallow of it, and not only would the child be gone, I would bleed out and die on the floor.

In that moment of despair, the child in my belly stirred.

Lorenzo froze for a moment, then smashed the bowl against the marble and walked out, leaving me there.

I wept, my hand resting over my belly.

My child was a good child, one who would protect his mother.

He deserved to come and see this world.

But for all my struggling, in the end I still couldn't keep him safe.

Perhaps it was for the best. At least he wouldn't be born into a house with a father who didn't love him.

Lost in a thousand thoughts, I had already come back to the Falcone estate.

But the man at the gate wouldn't let me through.

"The Don says this is your punishment for going to the Donna to complain."

Even the cot had been carried out. All that was left waiting for me was a single length of wooden rod.

I bit down on the pain and dragged my broken leg back across the compound to the main house, one step at a time, stopping often. It took the better part of an hour.

Lorenzo was already there, Gianna tucked against him. "She actually had the nerve to go running to the Donna. She nearly frightened Gianna to tears."

"What are you standing there for? Apologize to Gianna. Now."

The pain swam black across my vision, but I gritted my teeth and bent my body low.

"I'm sorry, Gianna."

Lorenzo looked faintly surprised. In all these years under the pact, it was the first time I had ever backed down.

Even when he'd had me thrown into a cellar full of vipers, I had never bowed my head.

I'd always clung stubbornly to the same thought: why confess to something I never did?

But in Lorenzo's eyes, my standing before him, pleading through tears, was worth nothing.

Far less believable than the thin sheets of poisoned letter paper Isabella had been feeding him for years.

He was certain I was a woman who lied as easily as she breathed, who sowed discord through the whole famiglia wherever she went.

So fine. I wouldn't argue anymore.

Once I'd spoken, I turned to leave.

Lorenzo called after me. "Wait. Why is there blood on you? I thought it was only your leg."

A flick of his eyes, and the household servant beside him came to strip the heavy cloak from my shoulders.

My flat stomach lay exposed.

Lorenzo's pupils contracted. He rose and crossed the room to me. "Where is the child?!"

I lifted my head, numb. "Left behind. With the Donna."

The matriarch had said the child carried Falcone blood too, that he should stay under her roof, that someone would see to the rite and lay him properly to rest.

I hadn't even been granted the right to take him with me.

But Lorenzo misread it.

"I told you it was pointless to go crying to her. So why go to her at all?"

"So it turned out you went there to give birth."

"Truly laughable. Do you think anyone else is as vicious as you, that anyone could raise a hand against a newborn?"

That had been an informant Isabella planted inside the household.

She'd gotten pregnant by some secret lover, drowned the baby once it was born, and pushed the whole thing onto me.

Lorenzo had had me driven out deep into the wild hills, into forests crawling with beasts, the way the Family disposed of those it branded.

By the time the Donna sent men to bring me out, I was wounded everywhere, barely breathing.

Back then I had still wept and tried to explain.

But now, I wouldn't.

I stood like a walking corpse, giving nothing back.

Lorenzo sensed something was off and shot me a frowning glance. His thumb moved to the heavy signet ring on his right hand, turning it once, slowly.

In the end he settled on the idea that I was working some new trick. "Spare me the routines you've picked up."

"This dead-hearted act, who is it for? Get out, before you foul Gianna's eyes."

When I got back to my own courtyard, I found all my belongings flung out across the cold stone.

"The Don says Gianna has taken a liking to these rooms. You're to move out."

But Lorenzo had assigned me no new place to stay.

The steward watched me with a vicious grin. "Then the bound wife can make do in the woodshed for the night."

"The Don says you used to sleep among corpses down in the morgue district. You can surely sleep anywhere."

Every servant in the house was enjoying the spectacle of me.

But inside, nothing stirred anymore.

How can someone whose heart is already dead still have anything left to care about?

The woodshed leaked drafts from every side, and by the middle of the night I had burned into a fever.

Drifting in and out, I felt Lorenzo storm in again, seething, and throw me to the ground.

"You actually dared to put a curse on Gianna!"

A doll stuck full of silver needles rolled out across the dirt in front of me.

I couldn't even be bothered to lift my eyelids.

The ink scrawled on it wasn't dry yet, but I hadn't set foot in this courtyard since being summoned to the Donna the day before. How could it possibly be me?

It was clumsy work. Yet Lorenzo hadn't spared it so much as a careful look before coming to lay the charge on me.

Once he'd vented, he left with Gianna.

I dragged myself back into the woodshed, curled up, and tried to make myself a little less wretched.