Every year, on the anniversary of the blood-alliance that bound me to him, Salvatore Gallo brought another woman into the compound under the pretext of letting me train her.

At the dinner marking our tenth year, the woman he walked in on his arm was a hostess from one of the Family's speakeasies, poured into a Playboy bunny costume.

"She's got nothing to wear, so give her your wedding dress and the jewelry I gave you last time. As for shoes, I think the pair on your feet will do."

"Oh, and she's young. She doesn't understand much. You'll have to put in the effort to teach her. Especially in bed."

Every made man at that table was waiting to watch me humiliate myself. I lived up to their expectations once more and said I wanted to sever the pact.

Salvatore chuckled, looking at me with that familiar contempt and mockery.

"Adriana Bellini, haven't you said you wanted out every single time? I'm sicker of hearing it than I am of your moaning in bed."

"If you really want out, I'll hand you a hundred million to walk."

The whole room erupted again, their laughter thick with the certainty that I was playing coy, that a fallen Bellini didn't know her place.

They didn't know this was the hundredth time I'd said it, and the only time I truly meant it.

——

Every eye in the room came to rest on me. Even the hostess who had just arrived covered her mouth and giggled behind her rings.

"Alright, place your bets. I say she folds before she reaches the door."

"A million she doesn't leave!"

"I'll match thirty."

The wager over whether I'd break the pact had become a tradition on every anniversary, the way some Families toasted a saint.

Plenty of them hated me when they lost. None of them liked me much when they won.

I chuckled and shook my head, cursing myself for being useless. Ten years since I first decided to leave Salvatore.

"I bet she walks."

A low voice came from somewhere in the crowd, and the men around it murmured for him to think twice, not to throw good money after a lost cause. I looked toward it but couldn't make out the figure through the smoke.

"Salvatore, I'll send the papers to your office. Remember to sign them when they arrive."

I had said the word hundreds of times. This was the first time I'd spoken of papers, of something on paper a man could hold and be bound by.

Salvatore straightened. The unlit cigarette he'd been rolling between two fingers stilled, then slipped from his hand to the floor.

I pretended not to see it. I crouched, slid off my heels, and set them down gently by the girl's feet.

Her name was Gina Russo. Early twenties, and very beautiful.

"These might pinch at first. You get used to them if you wear them enough."

"As for the dress and the jewelry Salvatore mentioned, I'll have Zia Rosaria bring them up to you."

"Before you, there were nine others he brought under this roof. If there's anything you don't understand, ask them. They keep the third floor. Your room's the last one on the right."

In ten years of this marriage, the women Salvatore had installed in the house could have filled a throne room of their own.

Tall, short, soft, sharp, the wide-eyed and the worldly, the cold and the bright. He'd collected them all.

Word on the street was he wanted to play the old emperor, gather twelve beauties beneath one roof like tribute.

A shame, then, that I'd never had the fortune to be counted among them.

I brushed the dust that wasn't there from the shoes, rose, and started barefoot toward the door.

I never made it. Before I could cross the threshold, a hard grip closed around me from behind and dragged me back.

"Adriana. If you're leaving, leave clean. Every single thing on your body was bought with Gallo money."

My bare feet felt as though they'd been pressed to ice, and even my breathing trembled.

"You want me to strip?"

Salvatore raised an eyebrow. His eyes seemed to cut straight through me.

"When your bloodline fell, didn't your mother strip you bare and lay you on my bed to seal the alliance? You leave the way you came."

"Or do you regret it? That's fine. Kneel and put her shoes on for her, and I'll forgive you."

Behind him, the men laughed so hard they rocked back in their chairs.

It wasn't long after Salvatore and I were bound together that the Bellini bloodline collapsed. My father, seeing the Family stripped of territory and tribute, threw himself from the roof of our compound and never woke from the coma that followed.

My mother, terrified the Gallos would let us rot now that we had nothing, slipped something into both Salvatore's wine and mine. Then she made her noise, loud enough that the whole underworld heard, forcing the Gallo Family to honor the blood-alliance pact and take responsibility.

That night was the beginning of all my humiliation.

It also completely ended whatever had lived between Salvatore and me when we were young.

He was forced into the alliance marriage, and on the wedding night he brought a woman under our roof to shame me.

He did everything right in front of me. Even the wrapper, I was the one who tore open and pressed into his hand.

I was the one who knelt on the floor afterward, cleaning up the whole mess, piece by piece.

I lived such a humble life for ten years.

Now, I couldn't live like this anymore.

"I'll take it off."

Before anyone in the room could react, I had already unfastened my shawl.

It was deep winter, but the parlor was warm, the radiators ticking against the cold pressing at the tall windows.

I stood near the entrance, though, and the icy wind clawed under the door and up my skirt, raising goosebumps along my bare arms and shoulders.

I reached back for the buckle of my dress, and the thin collar slipped free.

Most of my shoulders and the curve of my breasts were bared to the room.

"Dio!"

A few of the softer guests covered their eyes, unable to watch any longer.

The men looked on with great interest.

Only Salvatore's expression darkened. His lips pressed into a thin line, and the only sign of his anger was the unlit cigarette he'd begun to roll between two fingers, faster and faster.

The dress slipped down, and I was almost standing naked in front of them all.

The cigarette stopped spinning. He dropped it, tore off his suit jacket, and threw it over my shoulders.

"Adriana, you've got a death wish!"

"Every one of you, close your eyes. If a single word of what you saw tonight leaves this house, I'll see to it you don't watch the sun come up tomorrow."

"Get out. All of you."

Salvatore rarely raised his voice, least of all at a gathering like this, with old friends of the Family watching.

And they were all old acquaintances, men who understood exactly what a lowered voice from a Gallo meant. Conversations died. Chairs scraped. They began to file out.

Even the nine women he'd installed under his roof drifted upstairs one after another. Only Gina remained where she stood, fingers grazing the pearls at her throat.

"Salvatore, are you satisfied now? Will you let me go?"

I tilted my head back, stubbornly holding his gaze.

Tears rose in my eyes, but I didn't let them fall.

I had cried too many times for Salvatore. I didn't want to cry for him anymore.

"Adriana, don't play these little games of yours in front of me. Playing hard to get. It makes me sick to look at."

He still didn't believe a word of it, and he warned me not to shame the Gallo name.

I took a deep breath, then said, "Salvatore, this time I really want to sever the pact."

For a second he looked as if he'd heard the funniest joke in the world. Then his hand clamped around my neck, forcing me into a bow.

"You think you can walk away from me? Can you cover a single day of your father's care? Can you cover your mother's spending, her endless little indulgences?"

"Adriana, your own mother would be the first to kneel in front of me, begging me not to cast you out."

His hatred for me and for my mother was beyond hiding.

He resented her for the drugs. He resented me for letting it happen.

"Even if your mother had never touched a drop of it, I would have married you. I would have helped your Family. But the two of you had to use the one method I despise above all others."

"Adriana, you personally destroyed whatever was between us."

No matter how many times I explained, Salvatore would never believe me.

Seeing that I stayed silent, his frown deepened.

He hauled me up and pressed me down to kneel in front of the woman, his hand at my neck, forcing me to put the shoes on her feet.

"Put them on her. You've been doing this kind of thing for ten years. You should be good at it by now."

In those ten years, I hadn't only served Salvatore. I'd served the nine women too, every one of them kept under the Family roof like ornaments.

I had done too many things I despised myself for, whether I should have or not, whether I was forced or willing.

Now, I just wanted it all to end quickly.

So once again, obedient as a beaten dog, I knelt and slid the shoes onto the girl's feet.

Maybe I was too obedient. It bored him. It stole the sport out of it for Salvatore.

He dragged me into his room in a fury and stripped Gina bare in front of me.

I had witnessed scenes like this more times than I could count. Sometimes Salvatore even made me guide them, made me the silent servant to his cruelty under his own roof.

As before, I tore open a condom and held it out.

But this time, Salvatore pushed my hand away.

"We won't need that tonight."

My hand trembled and I withdrew it.

His hands didn't stop, yet he lifted his eyes to me, watching.

I didn't look at him. I no longer cared to.

That angered him again, and he locked me in the bathroom.

Outside there was a great deal of noise that night, threaded through with wind and snow beating the compound's windows. I sat on the cold tile and listened to all of it, all night.

In a daze, I was jolted awake by the frantic ringing of a phone.

"Is this Miss Bellini? Your mother has been in an accident and is currently being worked on. Come to Public Hospital immediately."

My heart lurched.

"Salvatore!"

I slammed my palms against the door, trying to drown out the sounds beyond it.

Salvatore opened it, wrapped in a bathrobe. His loose collar revealed the marks she'd left on his throat, and the woman clung to his arm like a trophy pinned to his side.

"What is it?"

"My mother. She's been in an accident. Please, take me to the hospital."

I knelt on the floor and begged him, tears welling in my eyes, terrified he'd refuse out of spite. I pressed my thumb against the bare groove on my finger where a wedding ring should have sat, the phantom weight of it the only thing holding me together.

"Adriana, you couldn't even bother to invent a decent lie. It's three in the morning in a blizzard. People stay indoors. Did a car drive into your mother's bedroom?"

Gina sneered, one hand drifting to the borrowed pearls at her throat as she gestured at the black sky and the heavy snow outside.

Salvatore chuckled along with her, not bothering to look at me. He pulled an unlit cigarette from somewhere and rolled it slowly between two fingers. "Adriana. You're stooping to lies like this now?"

"What's the matter? Can't stand the sounds we were making?"

Salvatore locked the door again.

The more I shouted, the louder the noises beyond it swelled, deliberate, cruel.

Completely desperate, I seized the stool beside me and smashed the window, climbing through.

The jagged glass tore my legs open and blood came at once.

I couldn't find a car at that hour, not in the snow.

I could only run forward like a dead thing walking, leaving shocking trails of bright red across the white.

A black Cayenne slowed beside me after two short blasts of the horn.

"Get in."

The man behind the wheel never turned to look at me in the dim, close dark of the car.

I thanked him again and again, but he said nothing more.

Only as I reached for the door to leave did I finally hear his voice.

"Adriana, you have options that aren't Salvatore."

"When you've made sense of things, remember to come find me."

A card, edged in gold, was held out to me. I took it with both hands, thanking him over and over. A marker of protection, though I didn't understand it then.

In that moment my whole heart was fixed on my mother, so I never looked closely at it, only pushed it into my pocket.

I stumbled into the hospital's emergency ward. Before I could even ask, I saw the nurses wheeling out a body draped in white from the operating room.

"Is Carmela Ziglio's family still not here?"

"Unbelievable. Her own daughter didn't show up before she died."

Two nurses murmured to one another, and their words slid into me easily as blades.

I rushed over and lifted the white cloth. My mother's face, once so delicate, was ruined with cuts, and her body was covered in wounds of every size.

For ten years I had hated her because of Salvatore.

I had even, viciously, wished the whole family dead together. But now that she truly lay dead before me, all I felt was the ache.