I clung desperately to the marble balustrade, but he pried my fingers off, one after another. Down the length of the gallery the house staff stood in a loose, silent knot, whispering behind their hands. Not one of them dared step in. In this house you learned young that a soldier does not touch what the young Don has claimed for himself.

My nightdress tore in the struggle, baring my skin to the icy air. Humiliation rushed back like a wave, the memory of last night, stripped and punished in front of the whole household. Lorenzo didn't even flinch.

"So you're still angry about last night," he said coldly. "Fine. Be angry with me. But don't take it out on others."

"You'll kneel right here and think about what you've done. When you finally understand your mistake, you'll apologize to your sister-in-law. Don't you realize what people will begin to say? That the Marchetti name couldn't stomach a widow beneath its roof?" With that, he threw me, hard, into the snow.

My knees slammed into the ice. The cold pierced through the thin silk like knives.

"Lorenzo, I did nothing wrong." I clenched my teeth, shivering, refusing to comply.

He scoffed, then turned to the old butler who ran the estate with a sneer. "Gather everyone. Let them all see how petty she is."

Within minutes a dozen servants were lined up beneath the covered walkway, watching. I knelt alone in the snow like a woman awaiting a verdict she already knew.

"Say it again, I dare you," Lorenzo snapped. "If you're so desperate for a man, I'll put a hundred at your door to keep you company. But lay a hand on my sister-in-law again and you're finished."

His words cut deeper than if he had stripped me bare and marched me through the piazza in front of every made man in the territory.

This was the man I had loved for three years. The man I had entered a blood-bound union with and built a life beside for five.

He could stomach other men seeing me exposed. He could even stomach whispers that I ran to other beds. Yet he could not tolerate, would not even think twice, about me upsetting the woman he truly cared for.

Serena stood smugly at his side, slipping into that soft, sweet voice she had perfected. "Lorenzo, let it go, please. Adriana was probably just having a bad day."

"Oh, so a bad day gives her the right to strike people?" Lorenzo raised his voice, loud enough for the whole estate to hear. A Don who raises his voice has already lost, my father used to say. Lorenzo had never learned that. "If she doesn't apologize today, I don't care if she faints. She's not getting up until she does."

Snow began to fall. Within minutes my hair and lashes were coated in a frosty white sheen. My fingers had gone numb, my lips trembling uncontrollably from the cold.

Serena took the chance to crouch beside me, wearing her grief like a costume, one gloved hand drifting toward her lips. But her words were knives, whispered only for me. "Did you know Lorenzo says you're not worth a single strand of my hair? That every time he touches you it turns his stomach? Honestly, if I were you, I'd save everyone the trouble and just die."

I looked up sharply and caught the cruel smile behind her eyes.

Something inside me snapped. Rage boiled over. I grabbed a fistful of snow and slammed it straight into her smug, pretty face.

Serena let out a theatrical scream and dropped to the ground as though struck by lightning. Only then, a beat too late, did the black-lace handkerchief flutter up to her mouth.

That was all it took for Lorenzo to lose himself. He seized the front of my nightdress, wrenched it open, and shoved me down into the snow.

"So you still won't admit your mistake?"

Before I could react he scooped up a handful of snow and forced it down the front of my dress. The freezing cold hit me like a shot through the system. A scream tore out of me I didn't know I'd been holding.

But he didn't stop. He kept grinding snow into my face, my neck, rough, relentless, until my skin burned from the cold.

"Apologize!" he barked.

I choked on a mouthful of snow, coughing violently, tears streaming down my face. I couldn't force out a single word.

Furious, Lorenzo stood and turned to the butler. "Two hours. Start the clock. She doesn't move until it's up."

Then, as if none of it had happened, he slipped off his coat and draped it tenderly over Serena's shoulders.

"Come," he said softly. "Let's get you inside before you catch a chill."

The two of them turned and walked away as though I did not exist. Their backs burned into my vision like a slap.

Around me the servants murmured. Some giggled. Others only stared with that look, the pity you give someone already halfway to the grave.

Time dragged. The cold seeped deep into my bones. My knees had gone numb long ago. I felt myself swaying, losing the last of my control, until at last I pitched face-first into the snow.

"Madam!" Someone cried out in panic.

The door creaked open. Lorenzo stepped into the room, his cold gaze fixed on me.

"Have you figured out what you did wrong yet?"

I opened my mouth to speak, but no sound came out. Everything went dark and then—I was out.

When I came to, I was back in the bedroom, lying under a thick, heavy comforter. The heat from the radiator pressed down like a hand, suffocating, but I still couldn't stop shivering.

"You're awake?"

Lorenzo sat on the edge of the bed, holding a steaming cup of water. Behind him, a soldier stood just inside the door, hands folded, eyes on nothing.

"Take your meds," he said, as if nothing had happened. "Why didn't you say anything if you were feeling sick? Instead, you chose to throw a tantrum and cause a scene in front of the whole compound."

I turned my face away, refusing to look at him.

"Don't be so stubborn," he said sharply. "Your fever's hit 104. Are you trying to die?"

"Wouldn't that be convenient for you?"

My voice was raw and raspy, barely more than a whisper. Lorenzo's expression shifted—guilt and something like concern flickered across his face. For a moment, he didn't look like the same man who'd forced me into the snow before every associate in the house.

He took advantage of my hesitation, grabbed my chin and forced the pills into my mouth, then tipped the cup of water after them.

I choked, coughing hard, water spilling down my chin and soaking my neck. I must've looked completely pathetic.

Right then, the door swung open.

Serena walked in, her eyes glinting with triumph. "Enzo, your mother's here!"

A moment later, Donna appeared in the doorway, black rosary beads moving slow through her fingers. She took one look at me and gasped.

"What on earth—Adriana, what happened to you?"

Lorenzo let go of me, wiping the spilled water off his hand like it was nothing. "She's just being dramatic. Got sick, threw a fit and now refuses to take her medicine."

Donna immediately scolded her son for not taking better care of me. Then, smiling sweetly, she produced a beautifully wrapped box and held it out.

"Adriana, this is something I picked out just for you."

She gave me a subtle wink, her way of saying this is your reward for cooperating. Her eyes told me the rest: it was time I raised the matter of letting Lorenzo take both women under one roof, the way the old houses did when the blood demanded it.

I didn't take the gift. My throat burned too much to speak and honestly, I didn't want to say a single word. So I shut my eyes and turned away.

But she couldn't wait.

Donna clutched Lorenzo's hand, the beads gone still against her palm. "Enzo, I've been meaning to talk to you. Adriana said something yesterday. She was thinking, since Serena's stayed so loyal to this Family after your brother passed, maybe it's time she carried a child. It would give her someone to rely on. Something to secure her place, for the future of the name."

The room fell silent. Even the soldier by the door seemed to stop breathing.

Lorenzo's face shifted, shock, then rage, like he'd just been slapped. "What the hell are you talking about, Mamma?"

Completely oblivious, she kept going, excited now. "It's not just me. Adriana brought it up herself. And honestly, I think it makes sense. What do you say?"

"Adriana." He spun toward me, fury written across his face.

"All this because I haven't touched you? Did you dream up something this insane to shame me under my own roof? What happened to what we swore to each other? And what the hell does that make Serena—just a womb to be passed around the Family?"

I opened my eyes, finally meeting the gaze of the man putting on a show as if he hadn't been sneaking to her bed behind my back for God knows how long.

So I said calmly, "I brought it up. What, are you saying you're not interested?"

My question caught Lorenzo mid-breath, his angry words dying in his throat.

He didn't dare deny it, not really. But he also didn't want to look too eager, didn't want the truth in his eyes to betray the thrill he was trying to hide. His thumb found the rim of the water cup and traced it slowly, though he never drank.

Before he could answer, Serena suddenly burst into tears.

"Enzo, I don't know what I did to upset your wife so much, to make her humiliate me like this," she sobbed, voice trembling just enough to sound believable. She pressed a black-lace handkerchief to her lips, a beat too late. "I'm your brother's widow. I've buried a husband. People in this Family already whisper enough about me, and now this."

Lorenzo gently patted her shoulder, eyes full of pity. You could see the tension in him, how badly he wanted to wrap her in his arms and play the hero. But instead he turned to me, face hardening.

"Adriana, I can't believe how twisted you've become."

Finally, Donna seemed to feel the shift in the room. The rosary began to move again. Awkwardly, she tried to smooth things over.

"Enzo, come on, can't you just do this one thing, for your brother's sake?" she said, her voice hopeful, a little desperate. "I know you want to protect what you have with Adriana, but the Marchetti name can't end with you. Can't you think of it as giving your mother the grandchild this Family needs?"

Donna leaned in, the black rosary beads sliding through her fingers, her voice dropping low as though the scheme itself required reverence.

"Once Serena carries a child, we'll simply say it came from your brother's seed, frozen before he passed. A doctor's miracle. No one will ever know the truth. It won't touch your union with Adriana at all…"

Lorenzo cut her off, his voice flat as a blade laid on velvet. "Mother. It's one thing for Adriana to make a spectacle of herself. Why are you feeding her poison?"

He turned to me, and his voice climbed. "This is nothing but a woman throwing a tantrum because I haven't laid a hand on her in years!"

I let out a cold laugh, watching him perform as if there were an audience beyond these walls he needed to convince.

What a farce. This union was beyond saving. Rotten to the marrow.

Lorenzo loved Serena. That much no mask could hide. Yet for the sake of appearances, for her precious standing in the Family, he would not dissolve our union and take her openly.

He refused to be known as the Don who cast off his wife for his dead brother's widow. So instead he did everything behind locked doors. Every betrayal, every filthy thing. And used me as the front. Their shield. Their alibi before the whole Cosa Nostra.

"What in God's name are you laughing at?" he snapped.

"Nothing," I said softly.

I pushed myself up from the bed, weak but numb, my voice light. Careless.

"It was only a passing thought. Do as you please."

Something in Lorenzo's expression shifted. His eyes burned red, fury clouding them. Except beneath the anger sat something else. Glee. A quiet, hungry satisfaction.

"Since you're feeling so generous," he said coldly, his arm curling around Serena, "I'll take you at your word."

Then, with deliberate cruelty, he made his declaration.

"I'll be taking Serena to a foreign city for a honeymoon. Somewhere far from the territory. As for you, you'll stay here and see to my mother. And while you're at it, you may as well learn to tend a woman with child. And later, the child itself."

Donna lit up as though it were Christmas dinner and the whole table had risen for her. "Oh, Lorenzo, how thoughtful. It's better this way. Adriana won't have to watch the two of you together. It would only break her heart."

Serena flushed and pressed herself into him, all false modesty and fluttering lashes, a widow playing the trembling virgin. She lifted her black-lace handkerchief to her lips, the grief arriving a beat too late, the way it always did when there was someone to see it. She made a show of shrinking back, of objecting.

Lorenzo silenced her with a kiss. Right there. In front of me.

Donna cast a careful glance my way, bracing for a reaction. I didn't flinch. I only stared, my face empty as an unlit room.

That seemed enough to settle her. "Lorenzo, perhaps just… soften it a little in front of Adriana, hmm?" she murmured gently, still watching me from the corner of her eye, the beads never pausing between her fingers.

This whole Family. What a circus of them. They truly believed I saw none of it.

By the end of the day, Lorenzo had already arranged the travel for the following week. The flight out of the territory, beyond the Family's reach.

He couldn't wait.

After the fever finally broke, I went quietly to work.

I had to gather proof. Real leverage. Enough to detonate all of it before they slipped away to their little fairy tale abroad.

That night, while Lorenzo sat late over Family business in the study, I slipped into the one place I had never been permitted to enter. His bedroom.

Five years bound to him, and I had never once crossed that threshold.

Lorenzo always said that a true, sacred union demanded boundaries. Purity of spirit. Even his bedroom had been forbidden to me. His own wife.

The room was cold and clinical. Stark gray and white, not a single human trace in it. Just like him. Distant, sterile, controlled.

I searched everything. Drawers, the nightstands, beneath the bed. Nothing.

I was ready to give up when I noticed it, tucked into the far corner of the wardrobe. A small safe, nearly swallowed by the shadow.

I tried Serena's birthday. The lock gave without resistance.

Inside was a flood of photographs. Hundreds, perhaps more. All of Serena.

The earliest were plainly stolen. Grainy shots from crooked angles, a man watching through a cracked door, a window. Then the tone changed. They became her own. Deliberate, sultry, pupils blown wide, lips parted. Her gaze full of knowing.

Disgust clawed up my throat, but I forced myself to keep looking.

Beside the photographs lay a leather-bound journal. I opened it. The first entry was dated the day Lorenzo and I met.

"Met a girl at the library today. She asked whether I loved Plato too. The way she said it almost made her feel like my sister-in-law. But I can't hold thoughts like that about Serena, can I. I need a distraction. A girl on my arm. Adriana will do."

My hands began to shake, but I read on.

"Adriana is naïve. She'll never see that she's only a tool. Every time Serena is near, I have to fight myself not to stare. Not to touch."

"Today we buried my brother. I nearly did something unforgivable in the chapel, at the graveside. Lucky that Serena was too lost in grief to notice how vile I truly am."

"Adriana keeps trying to reach me. It's pathetic. Why are women always so desperate. Serena isn't like that. She's pure. She's still keeping herself for my brother."

Tears blurred the page. I bit my lip hard enough to taste blood, anything to keep from making a sound. Everything I had believed was love. Every soft word, every distant smile. All of it a lie.

I was done being their cover story.