On the day the family doctor confirmed there was finally a child growing inside me, Gia posted a photograph of her own swollen belly for the whole of the Falcone world to admire.

As long as you're loved, you can still be a beautiful girl even when you're carrying!

In the picture she wore nothing but lace, the pale kind that costs more than a soldier earns in a month, leaning back into a man's chest while she angled the phone to catch the curve of her stomach. The man's hand rested there, spread wide over that smooth skin, and I knew that hand. I had felt it at my throat and at my waist and, once, five years ago, closed gently around mine as a priest bound us in a marriage no one in the Family was ever meant to know about. On his ring finger sat a signet identical to the one that had lived on my hand since that night.

I typed one word beneath it. Congratulations.

The reply came not in text but in a phone call, Gia's voice climbing over itself in a rush of apology. She had only posted it to bait Marco, she swore, some quarrel with that lover of hers from the Serafini territory, nothing more, she would never, how could I think it, she adored me like a sister.

Lorenzo took the phone from my hand before I could answer her. He did not raise his voice. Men like him never had to. The cold came off him the way it comes off marble in an empty church.

"You can't give me a child yourself, and now you fall apart because another woman can," he said, each word set down like a coin on a table he owned. "Jealousy that black. No wonder your body won't hold anything."

Five minutes later, Gia's status changed again.

From now on I'll have two strong men to protect me. One big and one small.

Lorenzo's thumb moved across the screen. He liked the post. I watched him do it, watched the little mark of his approval bloom under her lie, and something inside me that had been holding on for five years simply let go of the rope.

I slid the wedding ring off my finger. On the walk back toward the estate I threw it into the roadside hedges without slowing my step, and I turned the bare finger with my thumb once, feeling the ghost of the weight that was no longer there. Then I went to the clinic our people used, the discreet one behind the pharmacy front, and I made the arrangement to end it.

——

Lorenzo came home before nine, which was strange. He kept the hours of a man who owned the night.

He noticed the box in the trash before he noticed me, the sealed course of fertility medicine the doctor had pressed on me months ago, untouched, tossed. His brow drew down a fraction, the only weather that ever crossed that face.

"Nothing better to occupy you?" he said. "Sulking over something this small."

"I'm not angry," I answered. My voice came out level, and the levelness surprised even me.

He gave a low sound of contempt, rolling the heavy signet slowly around his finger the way he did when he believed he held every card at the table. "You throw away the medicine and call that calm? Do as you please. You're the one desperate to breed. Not me."

I had my hand at my pocket, the folded report already warm from my grip, ready to lay it down in front of him and watch that composure finally crack. But he moved first. He held out a dark shoebox, the lid still on, offering it the way a Don offers a favor he expects to be thanked for.

"Gia sent this for you. The girl's had a soft life, she's never learned to weather anything. When she heard how upset you were she got so frightened she started saying foolish things, talking about getting rid of the child herself. She insisted on sending you something. To make peace."

He lifted the lid. Inside sat a pair of YSL heels. They had been worn, and worn hard. The soles were scuffed grey, the lacquer chipped along the outer edge of one heel where it had scraped against something.

"Take them. Shoes like this don't come cheap. She barely wore them. She's only just started earning her keep in the Family, she can't afford much yet. Handing these over is a real sacrifice for her."

I laughed. I couldn't stop it from coming.

Because half an hour before Lorenzo walked through that door, Gia had posted again, holding a box of new Chanel slippers up to the light.

The best brother in the whole world! Thank you for showing your favoritism so openly. It gives a girl the confidence to flaunt it.

When I did not reach for the shoes, the patience drained out of him.

"Adriana. What is it with you now?" His hand went still on the ring, and any man in this Family would have known the danger had passed the point of words. "You're nearly thirty. Is it truly necessary to make life hard for one young, innocent girl?"

He threw the box.

It struck me square across the forehead. I heard the dull thud of it against my own skull before I felt the sting bloom bright and hot, and a muffled sound escaped me. My hand flew up to press against the ache, and the tears gathered at the corners of my eyes without my permission, hanging there, refusing to fall in front of him.

Lorenzo's face buckled into something close to panic. "I didn't mean to. Let me look at it."

I drew back from the hand that reached for me, my voice pitched low and even. "I'm fine."

He caught my fingers where they pressed against my forehead and pried them loose one by one, the way a man opens a fist he does not trust. When he saw the swelling rising beneath the skin, his expression went black as spilled ink. "You call this fine? Sit. Don't move. I'll bring ice."

Before I could tell him not to bother, his phone came alive on the marble table between us. The screen threw its pale light up into the dim study, over the leather and the crystal decanter and the old clock ticking its patient count in the corner. A name glowed there, sweet and small and poisonous.

Little Troublemaker.

"Lorenzo!"

Gia's voice reached us thin and wet with tears, and I watched the change move through him like a current through water. His whole body drew tight, every muscle turning toward that sound as if it were the only true north in the room. "Gia. Breathe. Slow down and tell me what's wrong."

She was crying on the other end, the sobs measured, spaced just far enough apart to be heard.

"My stomach hurts. I wanted to get to the hospital, but I took the wrong train and now I don't even know where I am."

He frowned, and the frown was for her, all worry, all tenderness. "Why didn't you call me before you left? We agreed I would drive you. That was the arrangement."

A pause. Her voice wavered, faltered, found its footing again with the precision of a woman who had rehearsed the fall. "I was foolish again today. I upset Adriana. I didn't want to trouble the two of you."

Lorenzo's face turned grave, solemn as a man taking an oath. "Gia. You are the only sister I have in this world. No one's trouble comes before yours. Send me where you are. I'm coming for you."

"No. Lorenzo, I can find the hospital on my own, truly." Her protest came quick, too quick, a hand thrown up before the blow lands. "And don't forget. Tonight is Adriana's night. The right night. Stay with her. Maybe she'll finally give me a sweet little niece to spoil."

He laughed then, soft and low, the private laugh of a man indulging a child. "Silly girl. It doesn't work by wishing it once more. Your situation can't wait. Send me your location. Now."

He ended the call and turned on me with a look that laid the whole weight of his displeasure across my shoulders. "Did you hear that? She thinks of you even now, doubled over in pain in some tunnel across the city, and still you sit there suspicious of her. I'll take her to the hospital. I'll bring back your ice."

He swept the car keys from the table. Those keys belonged to the Don's own car, the one every soldier in three territories knew on sight, the one that meant something wherever it stopped. He was already moving for the door.

"Lorenzo. Wait a moment," I said to his back.

He rounded on me, and whatever he'd been holding all evening finally slipped its leash. "Adriana, when will you have had enough? This is two lives we're talking about. Don't let your jealousy carry you somewhere you can't come back from."

I said nothing in my own defense. There was nothing left in me that wanted to be defended. I crossed to the closet instead and drew from the breast pocket of the coat he'd worn days ago a small laminated card. Her insurance card. She could never manage her own affairs, that helpless girl, so even this he carried for her. I held it out to him across the cold air of the study.

"You'll want this. She can't check in without it."

He looked at the card, and then at me, and surprise moved openly across his face for the first time that night. He had not expected me to be the one thinking of her.

A moment passed, the clock filling it with its dry ticking, before he reached out and took it from my fingers. "Thank you."

He seemed to gather something behind his teeth, some further thing he wanted to say. I did not let him. "Take care of yourself."

I lifted my hand and set his collar right, smoothing the fine wool flat against his throat the way I had done a hundred times sending him out into the night, into the sit-downs and the meetings that ran to dawn, into the world that took him and gave him back to me a little colder each time. My thumb found the bare place at the base of my other finger and turned there once, the ghost of a ring I no longer wore, and then I stopped the motion cold. I knew, with a stillness that had settled into my bones somewhere between the swelling on my forehead and the sound of her name lighting up his phone, that this was the last time I would ever do it.

Something flickered behind his eyes as he watched my face, some low guttering flame of a feeling he could not name and would not honor. Then he caught my hand in his and pulled me hard against his chest, against the steady drum of a heart that beat for someone across the city. "Adriana. I'll be back soon. Wait for me."

I did not wait up for him. After sending word to a Consigliere I trusted, a man who handled the quiet dissolution of blood-bound unions when leverage allowed it, I turned off the lamp and went to bed early.

The soft chime of a message dragged me out of sleep somewhere in the dead hours. I found the phone in the dark and checked the time. It was already past one in the morning.

The space beside me was cold and empty, the sheets undisturbed. Of course they were.

I opened the screen and its pale glow cut across the darkened room. Gia had sent me several messages, one after another, as if she could not contain herself. My big brother is so handsome. I want to eat him up while he's sleeping.

Beneath the words was a photograph of Lorenzo, asleep.

He lay against a pink pillow stitched with some childish cartoon, his dark hair fallen loose across his forehead, his eyes shut, his thin lips slightly parted. The Don of the Falcone Family, the man whose name made grown soldiers lower their eyes, curled and defenseless on a girl's bed like something she owned.

The chat box flickered. The other party is typing. Then, just as quickly, Gia deleted every message she had sent.

A moment later a foolish little cartoon kitten appeared, paws pressed together, begging forgiveness.

I meant to send that to my best friend and sent it to you by mistake. Lorenzo's asleep, I was only playing, I snuck the photo. Don't be angry with him, all right?

She expected me to do what I had always done. To call him at once, my voice trembling, and demand an explanation. To hand her the satisfaction of watching me unravel. But that hunger in me had gone quiet. This time I only blocked her, set the phone face down on the nightstand, and closed my eyes again.

Whether she meant it as a joke or as a knife, I no longer cared. I turned my thumb once around my bare finger, feeling the smooth absence where the ring had been for five years. Then I caught myself, and stopped.

The next morning Lorenzo and Gia arrived at the club together.

The Falcone Family kept its legitimate face in a members-only establishment near the water, all dark wood and quiet money, where associates came and went and business that could not be spoken aloud was conducted over espresso. Gia walked in with one hand cradled protectively against her stomach, mincing her steps, and then, on cue, she stumbled. Her face went white with a fright too perfectly timed to be real.

Lorenzo bent and lifted her off her feet without a word, carrying her past the front room as though she were made of glass. She flushed prettily, wound her arms around his neck, and over his shoulder she found me. Her eyes were bright with triumph.

Nearby, a pair of associates leaned close, murmuring the way men do when they think the Don is out of earshot.

"She can't tell tribute from petty cash, that one, yet she's been his favored runner half a year now. You think it's real between them? You think the boss actually feels something?"

I was half turned away, tapping out a reply to my Consigliere, and I answered without weight, the way you answer weather. "Maybe."

The word had scarcely left me when a familiar voice cut through the low hum of the room.

"Adriana. Come here."

I turned. Lorenzo stood behind me, having set Gia somewhere out of sight, and he was watching me with that cold, level regard he reserved for me alone in these rooms.

Not one soul under the Falcone banner knew that Lorenzo and I were married. Ours was a blood-marriage kept entirely off the books, unwritten, unspoken, unknown to the soldiers who would have died for him. He forbade entanglements within the ranks, so before the Family I was only an elder of the house, a woman who had been there a long time and knew where things were kept. To keep the smallest whisper from taking root, he treated me at work with a studied indifference, as though I were furniture that had learned to walk.