Since there were no relatives left under the Bellini roof, there was no need for a wake, no need for the old rituals that a Family observed for its own.

I stayed at my father's bedside a while, telling him about my mother, and about myself.

I talked in broken pieces until the early morning. Before I left, I looked at my father, who had lain motionless for ten years, and said with a crying voice.

"Papa, I'm tired."

The next morning, my mother was cremated. Then I placed the urn into a box and carried it back to the Gallo compound.

Along with it, I carried the divorce agreement I'd paid a man to draft — a document that, in this world, no one severed without a Family's blessing or a body.

The moment I stepped inside, I bumped into Salvatore and the women seated around the long dining table, talking and laughing as if the estate belonged to them.

"Sign it."

My voice was cold as ice as I slammed the papers down on the table. The laughter died. Silverware went still against porcelain.

"So. You ran off in the middle of the night just to bring back this."

"Adriana, you've really gone too far."

I held the urn tight against me, my head lowered.

"Salvatore, let's just let each other go."

"I don't love you anymore."

Once, I would have argued. Once, I would have fought him when the temperature in a room turned, would have pointed my finger at his face and asked if every vow he'd sworn me had been a joke.

For most of these ten years I'd held onto a sliver of hope, that he'd forgive me, that this alliance sealed in someone else's blood could still be made into a marriage.

So when he said he liked wild women, I learned to please him in the dark.

When he liked the innocent ones, I wore the clothes he favored to make him smile.

But then one woman after another moved in under this roof, and my heart grew colder, bit by bit.

The tricks I'd once used to please him became my shame, and then his instrument to humiliate me.

"Adriana, what's this you dropped..."

"Lorenzo Falcone?"

Gina bent and picked up the marker of protection I'd let fall to the floor, reading the name aloud, her fingers already drifting to the pearls at her throat.

So it was Lorenzo.

Salvatore's lifelong nemesis. The blood feud across the ocean, the name every Gallo was raised to hate, though Salvatore had never once stood face to face with the man.

Salvatore's expression darkened all at once, and he crossed the room and slapped me hard.

"So that's it. You don't love me anymore because you found someone else. Him."

"Do you even know what Lorenzo Falcone is?"

My ears rang. I couldn't stand steady. The urn cracked in my hands with a sound that filled the silent room.

Watching the ashes drift into the air, I froze, unable to move.

I dropped to my knees on instinct, trying to gather the ashes back into the broken urn.

No matter how I tried, it was useless.

Gina picked up the milk sitting nearby and poured it out over the floor. The others followed her, one after another.

The fine ashes turned instantly into sticky, ruined clumps.

"Ah!"

Something in me snapped. I went crazy. I seized a stool and swung it at Gina.

Salvatore didn't even have time to react before she went down, clutching her head.

"Salvatore."

"It hurts so much."

Someone called for the Family's kept physician, then an ambulance. Salvatore dragged me by the arm and forced me to stay at the hospital.

"If anything happens to her, you die with her."

That day I was made to give blood, again and again, transfusion after transfusion into Gina, until the doctor said no more could be taken.

Salvatore let me go then. He said it was my own fault.

I hid in my father's ward for those days and never went out.

"There you are. Thanks to that little stunt of yours, Salvatore treats me like a queen now."

"Is this your father? Why isn't he moving?"

Gina, basking in Salvatore's favor, carried herself with a new arrogance, the way a kept woman does once she believes the Family stands behind her.

She kept fiddling with my father's oxygen tube, asking me, all curiosity, what it was for.

"Don't touch that."

I pushed her away and she stumbled back a few steps, clutching her head.

The next second she rushed forward and yanked my father's oxygen tube loose. She laughed as she held it in her hands, playing with it.

"Do you think Salvatore will blame me for this?"

Before I could get an answer, Salvatore walked in.

He stopped short at the scene before him, his eyes sweeping back and forth over me. In the corner, the enforcer at the door went still, the way men in that house always did when the acting boss entered a room.

After a long pause, he finally said.

"Gina is still young and naïve. Your father's condition was beyond saving. Maybe ending things sooner was a mercy."

"I'll make sure to send more tribute to your mother's memory in the future."

The beeping from the monitor continued, each beep announcing my father's death.

I stood there, rooted to the spot. Besides the sadness and grief, there was also a sense of relief.

Salvatore ignored me and walked away, carrying Gina.

I collapsed on the ground, exhausted, and kept apologizing to my father. Still, I wondered who had ever been sorry to me.

I pulled out the marker of protection and made the call.

"Don Falcone, please come pick me up tonight."

The same crematorium, the same rites, the same silence that a Family bought when it wanted no questions asked.

This time, I left my father's ashes in the memorial hall.

When I returned to the Gallo compound, Salvatore wasn't back yet.

Those nine women kept whispering in my ear that Salvatore was furious and I was doomed.

I paid them no mind. They trailed me through the halls, asking again and again if I was really going to sever the pact.

I didn't answer. I simply opened the bedroom door.

"Choose. Everything in here is yours."

When I said that, they swarmed in and the room was instantly emptied.

Only a few old photographs of Salvatore and me from our younger days lay scattered across the floor, ignored by everyone.

I locked myself in my room and didn't come out all evening.

Salvatore sent Zia Rosaria up to ask after me. She wiped her hands slowly on her apron before she spoke, as if cleaning them of the order she'd been told to carry. I simply had her hand him my papers to sever the pact.

"Another one."

"It's been a hundred times already, Adriana. Aren't you tired of playing this game?"

Salvatore tore the papers to shreds.

"Let her starve. Don't give her food until she stops acting up."

Salvatore thought my talk of severing the pact, my saying I didn't love him, was also part of the game.

Still, love could truly run out.

Ten years. I really couldn't love that man anymore.

Now that I was alone, what else couldn't I let go of?

That night, I climbed out the window and slipped into Lorenzo's car.

Salvatore didn't see me moving through the dining room the next morning.

There was no toast he loved on the table, no coffee I had made by my own hand, no pressed and matched suit waiting on the hanger.

Salvatore rushed upstairs and threw open my room, but found it empty.

He picked up a few of the photographs from the floor, and the panic took him.

"Zia Rosaria. Where is Adriana?"

Zia Rosaria hurried in at the sound, the spatula still in her hand. She looked at the empty room and shook her head to say she didn't know.

"I'll call her mother."

She went still, then asked before she could stop herself.

"Sir, isn't Adriana's mother dead? She was cremated the day after."

Salvatore's mind flashed back to the sight of me holding the urn, and his breath hitched. The unlit cigarette between his fingers stopped turning.

He bent down slowly and gathered the photographs from the floor. His eyes were empty, hollow, as if all the life had drained out of him.

For ten years, he never thought that I would really leave him.