Vittoria let out a soft laugh and leaned close to my ear, close enough that the cloying sweetness of her perfume coiled into my throat like smoke.

"Adriana, since you've already handed over the ring, don't you think it's a little inappropriate for you to still be wearing the lady of the house's jewelry?"

She reached for the necklace, her fingers already curling toward the stones a beat too soon, the way a woman reaches for something she has decided is hers before anyone has given it to her.

I stepped back.

Vittoria used the momentum to tilt the champagne flute in her hand. Pale gold liquid splashed across the front of my silk gown, soaking through to the skin in a slow cold bloom. A sharp crack followed as the crystal slipped from her fingers and shattered across the obsidian floor of the Gilberti estate, the sound ringing out beneath the high ceilings like a gunshot in a chapel.

Vittoria immediately clutched the back of her hand, her eyes flooding red, fat tears rolling down her cheeks in an instant. The performance was flawless. She had always known how to bleed without being cut.

"Adriana, I just thought the necklace was pretty and wanted a closer look. If you didn't want to show me, you could've just said so. Why did you have to push me?"

The music stopped.

The string quartet in the corner let their bows fall silent, and every pair of eyes in the hall, every made man and every soldier's wife dripping in tribute and stolen gold, turned toward us. Glasses paused at lips. Somewhere near the doors, an enforcer shifted his weight, his hand drifting by instinct toward the lapel of his jacket before he remembered this was a feast and not a reckoning. In this house, a woman's tears at a Family gathering were never just tears. They were a question put to the room. They demanded an answer in blood or in banishment.

For the past seven years, any woman who tried to get close to Salvatore or provoke me had been put out without mercy. I had once ground a starlet's face into a tiered cake in front of all of Harbor Bay's ruling families for trying to crawl into his bed, and not a single capo had dared to laugh. I had been untouchable then. The lady of this house. The one whose word carried the weight of the Don's own.

Salvatore crossed the hall in long strides and pulled Vittoria behind him, putting his own body between her and me as though I were the threat in this room, as though I were the loaded thing that needed shielding against.

He looked down at the faint red mark on the back of her hand, and his brow furrowed tight. I watched his palm press flat against his stomach for the briefest moment, the old gesture I had learned to read across seven years, the one he disguised as impatience but which I knew meant something inside him had pulled taut.

"Adriana, what the hell is wrong with you? Vittoria just got back to the country. Why are you going after her?"

His voice dripped with undisguised favoritism and reproach. It carried across the silent hall so that every soldier and every wife could hear exactly where the Don's loyalty now lay, exactly whose rispetto had just been stripped in front of the entire Family.

I stared at that face. The face I had once loved down to the marrow of my bones, the face I had watched sleep, the face that had once turned to me first in every crowded room. And I felt a dull ache deep in my chest, low and grinding, the kind that does not announce itself with a cry but simply takes up residence and refuses to leave.

I drew a slow breath and forced the sting behind my eyes back down to wherever such things go to drown. I pressed my thumb against the faded scar on my forearm, hidden beneath the wet silk, and held it there until the heat in my eyes cooled to something I could control.

I didn't explain. I didn't lose my temper. There was no use in it. A truth spoken to a man who has already chosen which woman to believe is only more breath wasted in a house that no longer wanted me to breathe.

I lifted my hands, reached behind my neck, and unclasped the Pink Diamond Necklace. The clasp was cold against my fingers, the chain warm from my own skin, and for a moment the weight of it sat in my palm like the last thing I owned in the world.

Under the stunned gazes of everyone in the room, beneath the chandeliers and the hush and the watching eyes of men who answered only to the Don, I held it out to Vittoria.

"You like it? Then it's yours. I lost my footing just now. I'm sorry."

Salvatore went rigid.

Disbelief flashed across his eyes, dark and quick, and the furrow between his brows cut deeper than before, the way a man's face changes when the script he has written in his head refuses to play out. The drawing room of the Gilberti estate held its breath around him. The soldiers stationed at the doors did not move, but I felt the shift in them, that animal stillness made men acquire who have learned to read their Don's silence the way other people read weather.

Vittoria froze too. She even forgot to keep crying. Her wet lashes hung suspended, her painted mouth half open on a sob that had nowhere to go now that the audience had stopped watching her. Her fingers had already drifted up to the Jade Ring on her hand, twisting it a beat too soon, reaching to confirm her prize before the room had even finished deciding who had won.

I pulled out a handkerchief and wiped the wine from my hands. The silk came away pink, the color of a thing freshly bled. Then I crouched down.

I picked up the shards of glass from the floor one by one, bare-handed, and dropped them into the brass bin beside the marble pillar. The crystal bit into my fingertips, small clean stings I did not let reach my face. I pressed my thumb, just once, against the faded scar on my forearm, and the feeling I refused to show went down quiet, swallowed whole the way I had swallowed seven years of them. Around me no one offered to help. In this house, a woman on her knees gathering broken glass was simply a woman who had finally found her place.

When I was done, I stood and looked at Salvatore.

"My clothes are stained. I'm going upstairs to change." My voice was even. Polished. The voice of an associate excusing herself from a sit-down she was no longer welcome at.

I turned and walked toward the grand staircase, my spine perfectly straight. The obsidian floor threw my reflection back at me, a pale figure moving through a house built on tribute and fear, and I did not let my steps hurry, did not let them drag. His gaze stayed glued to my back the entire way, I could feel it, that heavy possessive weight he had used for years to keep me in orbit. For the first time, it slid off me like water.

Back in the bedroom, I shut the door.

I leaned against it and closed my eyes. The wood was cool against my shoulder blades, and somewhere below me the party went on, the low murmur of made men and their painted women, the clink of crystal, the rules of a world I had served without ever belonging to. Seven years of devotion. Seven years of bending, of smiling, of making myself smaller so his temper would have less to catch on. Today, that chapter was finally over.

The phone on the nightstand lit up.

An encrypted message from Lorenzo Frost. The screen glowed in the dim room like a coal.

"Adriana. The route is cleared. The Castellano motorcade reaches Harbor Bay in three days. Whatever the Gilberti owe you, sister, I will collect it tenfold. A hundredfold. They will learn whose blood they spat on."

I stared at the words. My brother's voice rose off the screen, low and certain, the voice of a Don who did not threaten because he had never once needed to. My eyes burned with heat, and I let them, because there was no one here to see it.

The bedroom door swung open without warning.

Salvatore strode in on those long legs, the air changing the instant he crossed the threshold, that pressure he carried into every room narrowing down to a single point. His sharp gaze locked onto the phone in my hand before I could so much as turn the screen.

He crossed the room in three steps and snatched it away.

The screen went dark at that exact moment, the message swallowed back into the encryption like a stone dropped into deep water. He did not try to unlock it. He turned it over once in his fingers, weighing it, and then tossed it onto the soft carpet like it was nothing, like it was a thing beneath the dignity of his attention. His hand pressed briefly, flat, against his stomach, the old impatience I had watched move through him a thousand times.

Then he reached out and gripped my chin, forcing my face up toward his. His fingers were warm and unhurried, the touch of a man who had never once doubted his right to handle what he believed he owned.

"Downstairs just now." His thumb moved along my jaw, slow. "Why didn't you put up a fight?" His tone was probing, almost suspicious, the suspicion of a man who has thrown a stone into a pond and heard no splash come back.

I met his eyes. My voice was flat, without a single ripple of emotion.

"You've always said my temper is too much. That I should learn to be more generous." I let the words come without weight, each one set down clean, like the glass into the bin. "I gave her the jade ring and the necklace. Isn't that exactly what you wanted?"

Something complicated flickered through his gaze, there and gone, a shadow crossing the face of a man too proud to name what unsettled him. For a heartbeat the certainty in him faltered, and I watched it falter, and I felt nothing move in me at all.

He released my chin. Then he wrapped both arms around my waist and pulled me against his chest, the gesture possessive, familiar, the embrace of a man reclaiming a thing he had not yet realized was already gone.

He smelled of faint Turkish tobacco and Vittoria's perfume.

The two scents tangled together in the close air of the study, and my stomach turned. There was something obscene about the way they mixed, the smoke he carried like a second skin and the cloying sweetness she had pressed into him, as if she had already begun marking what she intended to own.

Salvatore lowered his head, his lips brushing the shell of my ear. The gesture would have looked tender to anyone watching from the doorway, where his soldiers stood like statues against the dark paneling, eyes forward, hands folded. They knew better than to witness too much.

"Adriana, I know today was hard on you." His voice was low, intimate, the voice of a man who had ordered men's throats cut in the same gentle register. "Vittoria's older sister took a bullet meant for me. She'll never walk again because of it. I owe a debt to that blood. Looking after Vittoria is how a man of honor pays what he owes."

I pressed my thumb against the faded scar on my forearm and said nothing.

"As long as you behave yourself and stay in line, there will always be a place for you in the Gilberti house." His thumb traced an idle circle at my hip, possessive, careless. "You'll still be the woman who's stood beside me the longest. No one takes that from you. Not even her."

He was making me a promise. Delivered from on high, the way a Don tosses a coin of mercy to a beggar kneeling outside the social club, expecting the kneeling to continue forever.

He actually expected me to be grateful. To press my lips to the back of his hand for the privilege of being kept like a piece of furniture he hadn't yet decided to discard.

A frantic knock came from outside the heavy oak door. The two soldiers in the hall shifted, one of them reaching instinctively toward the lapel where his piece sat hidden, then stilling when no threat followed.

Vittoria's delicate voice drifted through the wood, pitched to carry, pitched to wound. "Salvatore, my chest hurts all of a sudden. Can you come be with me?"

His arms dropped from my waist instantly.

Not a second of hesitation. The warmth, the whispered debts of honor, the promise of a place at his table, all of it evaporated like breath off cold marble. He turned to leave, and the soldiers parted before him without a sound, the way water parts for the hull of a ship.

At the doorway, he paused and looked back. For a moment the lamplight caught the hard planes of his face, and I saw nothing in his eyes that had ever belonged to me.

"There's a sit-down tomorrow night. A charity gala, all the families under one roof, every Don pretending his hands are clean." His tone was flat, the matter already settled in his mind before he spoke it aloud. "I'm bringing Vittoria. She's only just come back to Harbor Bay and she has nothing fit to wear in front of those people." His gaze swept over me, utterly matter-of-fact, the way a man takes inventory of stock he no longer prizes. "That Starlight piece in your closet. Have the housekeeper bring it to Vittoria tomorrow. Tell the seamstress to take it in until it fits her."

I stared at him in disbelief, the cold of the obsidian floor seeming to climb through the soles of my shoes and into my chest.

That Starlight gown.

Five years ago, when he first claimed me before the whole of his organization and called me his, he had flown in the finest couturier in Paris to create it. Tailored to every line and measure of my body, made for me and no woman else alive.

Nine hundred and ninety-nine crystals, each one set by hand along the hem, so that when I walked they caught the chandelier light and threw it back like a slow fall of stars.

I had treated that dress the way the old families treat a relic. I wouldn't even let the housekeepers lift it from its hanger. It hung in the dark of my closet like something sacred, like the one thing in that house of borrowed loyalty that had been truly mine.

Once, a new associate's daughter, a girl brought in to serve at table, had slipped it out and tried it on before the mirror when she thought no one would know. The instant I learned of it, I had her dismissed and sent out of the Capital territory entirely, her family quietly told never to seek work under the Gilberti name again.

Salvatore had praised me for it then. He had taken my chin in his hand and said that what was mine was mine, that no one in his world had the right to lay so much as a finger on what belonged to me, and that he would break the hand that tried.

I pressed my thumb harder against the scar, and felt nothing move in my face at all.