The room erupted in cheers, every glass lifted in the warm gold light.

"Then let's raise a toast to Dario and his bride, ahead of the wedding!"

Inside, the gathering blazed with noise and heat, the sound of a family already celebrating a union that had nothing to do with me.

I felt like I'd been dropped into a block of ice.

I don't know how long I stood there in the cold outside the glass. When I came back to myself, everything in front of me had blurred.

My fingers were stiff with cold. I typed it out, one letter at a time.

【Let's call off the alliance.】

Inside, a message tone chimed.

Dario picked up his phone, glanced at it, and sent back a voice message.

"Ma, Pa, I've got business to close out here that can't wait. I really can't make it home today."

"Yeah, yeah, once I've got my return date settled I'll send word."

He set the phone down and did nothing else.

It took a moment for it to sink in.

Not only was I not pinned to the top of his messages, he'd buried me under Do Not Disturb.

A thousand miles of contested ground between us, and he'd often let a whole day pass before answering me.

I'd always told myself he was just buried in the work of building his own crew.

I never imagined the truth was simpler than that. He just couldn't be bothered to deal with me.

Tears dropped onto the screen, one after another.

I couldn't let it go. I dialed his number.

This time Dario looked at the phone.

He only silenced it, then tossed it back onto the table like something that meant nothing.

He pretended he hadn't seen a thing, pulling out a deck of cards and dealing them around the table.

"Who was that?"

"Bianca. Calls me every single day. Drives me out of my mind." He laughed a half-beat too early at his own words, his thumb turning the ring on his finger.

Someone asked, puzzled:

"Then why not just cut her off?"

Dario's hands never stopped moving over the cards, his tone careless.

"Cut her off and she'll bury my phone in messages. I'll leave her hanging, then tell her later I was too tied up with business to notice."

"Ha, that's our Dario. Got the Falcone girl wrapped around his finger, blood pact and all."

I couldn't listen to another word.

I stumbled away from the window, the laughter of the Moretti house fading behind me.

The New Year was almost here, and the streets of the old neighborhood were alive with celebration.

Twos and threes, clusters of families everywhere, warm windows on every block.

I dragged my suitcase along with no destination, like something that didn't belong to any house at all.

A young couple passed me, carrying big bags of groceries.

One long scarf wound around them both, binding them close together.

The girl looked a little worried.

"It's just the two of us tonight. Can we really pull off a proper dinner?"

The boy patted her head.

"If not, we'll send out for something. As long as we're together, it doesn't matter what we eat."

Before I drove all those hours to get here, the picture in my head had looked exactly like that.

I truly couldn't understand it.

Why Dario would treat me this way.

Not so long ago, the two of us had been so good together. So good.

I'm twenty-eight this year, and we've known each other for twenty-eight years, two bloodlines meant to be joined since before either of us could walk.

At four, our first day at school, he grabbed my hand.

"Bianca, when we play house, I only want you to be my wife."

At twelve, too young to understand love, he'd rush to my side the second the bell rang.

An age when nothing mattered more than saving face in front of the other boys, and yet he let their teasing roll right off him.

At fifteen, deep in puberty, his face broke out, his grades at the bottom of the class, his father the old boss ashamed of him, and he sank into doubt and self-loathing.

"Bianca, what do I do? Do I even have a future in this life?"

I held his hand and, pretending it was nothing, told him the thing I'd buried at the bottom of my heart.

"Back then, I really wanted to die."

"But once I got through it, I realized it wasn't the end of the world. You have to keep fighting too."

The shock and heartbreak in Dario's eyes, and the way he pulled me in and sobbed his heart out once it hit him. I remember it as clearly as if it were yesterday.

On my eighteenth birthday, the moment the clock passed midnight, he made his promise to me.

"Bianca, I'll be good to you for the rest of my life."

Later, we both went up to the Capital.

He took the South Side, I took the North Side.

A four-hour trip each way through territory that wasn't always safe, and week after week he made it, never once complaining, just to lay eyes on me.

Right up until we came of age in the life, we were still good. He stayed in the Capital to build his own crew; I went back home to the Falcone house.

This year, our two families had already sat down to talk of sealing the alliance, the wedding that would bind Moretti blood to Falcone.

I'd stepped back from my own duties before the Christmas gathering on purpose, just waiting for the new year so I could come to the Capital and earn my place, so the two of us would never have to be apart again.

Now all of it had come to nothing.

Dario had another girl he wanted to bring before his parents.

He'd even started to despise me.

The words I'd once torn open my own scars to share, to comfort him, he was now trading around as a joke, entertainment for the men in his crew.

The sky darkened, and the crowds in the street slowly thinned.

I found some random hotel near the docks.

I'd just gotten settled when my phone lit up.

It was a message from Mamma.

【Bianca, sweetie, have you two eaten yet? We've laid out such a feast over here!】

A photo of the Christmas Eve table followed right after.

The family were all gathered around it, laughing without a care, the old ones at the head, wine poured deep.

A draft slipped through the hotel window into my sleeve, and the cold made me shiver.

I pressed down the ache rising in my throat and made my voice sound easy.

"The food's all ready, we'll be eating any minute. Don't you worry."

I didn't dare tell the truth. I couldn't have Mamma and my father fretting over me during the holy days. A Falcone daughter did not bleed where the family could see it.

I found some random photo of a holiday table online and sent it to them.

Then, without thinking, I glanced at Dario's message thread.

Empty and silent, the way it always was.

In the middle of the night, firecrackers cracked outside the window, sharp enough to sound like something else.

The noise was so festive I couldn't sleep.

Like I was punishing myself, I tapped into Dario's feed, trying to hunt for any trace of when he'd first broken the pact between us.

He'd hidden it well, kept her covered so tight not a drop leaked through. Omertà, even in his sins.

I scrolled back and forth, over and over.

At last, in one screenshot passed around from his crew's private thread, I caught Vanessa's handle.

A very distinctive name.

Something clicked, and I searched that name across every platform.

Among all the accounts sharing that name, I spotted her at a glance.

The profile picture was painfully familiar. It was Dario's half of a couple's icon.

Back when Dario changed his picture, I'd happily gone and found the matching half to put up as mine.

He hadn't looked pleased at the time.

He'd said he just grabbed some random image and didn't want to be flaunting the alliance in front of family and the men who watched everything.

In the end he'd half forced me to change mine back.

Vanessa's account had only a scattered handful of followers.

Hundreds of posts, carrying the whole history of her and Dario.

It had started showing back in May last year.

【My capo is so pitiful, stuck holed up running his end of things for a whole month, eating takeout every single day. Today at lunch I brought him some brodo I made myself, and he actually cried drinking it. No idea what kind of woman he's even promised to.】

At that time, Salvatore Moretti had broken his leg.

So Dario could keep his focus on the crew without worrying, none of us told him.

I took a month away from my own duties, running around caring for his father, getting the old man home from the doctor's.

Later, my own people struck my name off the list for the end of the operation I'd been rising to run.

【My capo pushed back so many jobs and took me along on runs, all so I could travel on the family's dime. Being someone's favorite really is the best feeling.】

That day was our tenth anniversary. It was also my birthday.

I'd worked through the night to close out my end of things and scraped together three days, hoping to spend them with him.

He told me he had business he genuinely couldn't step away from, a matter for the family.

【My capo gave me a bag! But this pendant that came with it as a set is way too ugly. I'll just leave this one for him.】

I froze and looked at the pendant at my own throat.

My hand rose to it without my telling it to, closed around it. There it was, the exact match. It was the birthday gift Dario had given me later, to make up for things.

I'd treasured it for so long, even sealed it under a film to keep it whole.

It took me two hours to get through everything on Vanessa's account.

My heart went cold all the way through.

Not one of the photos in the posts had caught Dario's face straight on.

But that familiar hem, and the couple's ring on his finger that matched mine, spelled out exactly who the man was, every single second.

Dario had betrayed the pact a long time ago.

In the distance, fireworks went screaming up into the sky over the territory.

I came out of my daze, ripped the pendant off, and threw it into the trash.

Ding.

Vanessa had posted something new.

This time it was a voice recording.

In it, she asked in a coy, bratty little voice:

"Dario, me and your promised bride, which one do you love more?"

"Hmm?"

Dario's voice sounded a little hazy, tender and clinging.

"You. I love you most. How could she even compare to you?"

"Baby, let's do it one more time, okay?"

The violent rustle of fabric left nothing to the imagination.

I switched off my phone, rushed into the bathroom, and dry-heaved until my whole body shook.

I lifted my eyes to the mirror.

At some point, tears had streaked all down my face.

I booked a seat on the first train out at seven the next morning.

All I wanted was to get out of Capital City as fast as I could, to get away from Dario.

I don't remember how I got home to my father's house.

By the time I came back to myself, it was already the sixth day of the Christmas holiday.

My mother and the Don could tell something was wrong with me, but they didn't ask. My mother just kept finding little things to press into my hands, and once I caught her smoothing a stray hair back from my face without a word, the way her worry always spoke when her voice wouldn't.

That morning, she asked me carefully,

"The Morettis have asked you to come to dinner. Do you want to go?"

I glanced at my phone.

Dario had only answered me yesterday.

Two messages.

One of them pulled back before I could read it.

The most recent one was a single word:

【Fine.】

I said yes anyway.

Some things just have to be said out loud, once and for all, in front of the two houses.

There was a crowd gathered outside the Moretti estate. The block families had come, the ones who whisper and remember. When they saw me arrive, their looks turned strange.

Some pitying, some just there for the show.

My chest tightened. The moment I stepped through the door, I saw Dario kneeling in the middle of the front room.

Standing awkwardly beside him was Vanessa.

Working out the timing, he must have rushed her back here the instant he saw my message.

Inside, Rosaria Moretti's face was flushed red with rage, and she slammed her hand down on the table again and again.

"You ungrateful boy, how can you do this to Bianca! To a promised bride, to a Falcone!"

Dario looked a little disheveled, but his expression was set.

"I'll go and make things clear with her. I don't love her anymore. Vanessa is my woman now."

My heart felt like it was being crushed in someone's fist.

Hearing him say it with my own ears, the pain was more than I could bear.

Rosaria was almost laughing from fury.

"Then go on, tell us how wonderful she is, that you'd throw away ten years and a pact between families for her."

Dario opened up like a floodgate, his face glowing with happiness and sweetness.

"She cooks for me. She irons out the shirts that are always wrinkled."

"Even when the crew hit a crisis, she stayed up night after night working right beside me, got us through it."

"Bianca just hides back home and pays me no attention. She can't even bring me a hot meal."

"So why should I stay bound to her!"

He said it with such righteous conviction, so impassioned. His thumb turned the ring on his finger as he spoke.

It was as if he weren't only trying to convince his parents, but himself.

Around me came the low talk of relatives and neighbors, tongues loosened where they should have stayed still.

"Put that way, the Falcone girl really isn't up to much. Isn't the whole point of an alliance that someone looks after you, warm and caring?"

I stopped in my tracks, an unmelting bitterness rising in my throat.

How laughable.

No one knew that I had originally meant to make my own name in Capital City too.

There were more chances there, bigger territory to be won, and every operation I had dreamed of running was opening up across that contested ground.

But Dario wanted to build his own crew, and his parents were sick with worry.