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.

There was one time the fever took me to forty degrees, and I could not keep my legs beneath me. Half-blind with the heat of it, I dragged myself through the marble corridors of the estate until I found Lorenzo, and I asked him, only asked, to have one of the soldiers drive me to a doctor. But there were made men within earshot, capos he had to keep in awe of him, and a Don does not carry his sickly wife through his own halls where the ranks can see it. He shook my hand off his sleeve as though it were something soiled and told me, low and even, to send word through the household and let them handle it.

Yet let Gia press a hand to her belly and whisper that her stomach ached, and Lorenzo would rise from a council of his own capos, leave men who had waited a week for his ear, and drive her himself to be looked over by the family physician as if her breath were the last in the world.

I followed Lorenzo into the study.

Gia had been settled behind the folding screen at the far end to rest, tucked away like something precious. With the room emptied of witnesses, he crossed the obsidian floor to me and took my hand in both of his, his voice dropping into that deep register he used when he wanted to be believed. "Are you still angry?"

I drew my hand free. My tone came out flat, distant, borrowed from somewhere colder than I felt. "I told you. I'm not angry."

He set his hand on my shoulder, and his gaze pressed into me the way the grandfather clock in the corner pressed its ticking into the silence, insistent, filling every gap. "Still being stubborn? You didn't call me once last night. Not a single word carried to me, and you have the nerve to stand there and say you're not angry."

I was thrown by that, honestly thrown, and I heard myself answer, "But Gia was with you. She's your runner. Of course she'd see you were taken care of."

Something flared behind his eyes, that heat that never once warmed me, and his fingers closed hard on my shoulder. Pain shot down my arm. I twisted to break loose from him, and in the struggle he shoved me back and I went down onto the leather sofa, the cold of it biting through my dress.

Pushing myself upright, I felt something snag beneath my palm. Without thinking I pulled at it, and out of the crease of the cushion came a scrap of pink lace. A woman's bra.

The anger drained from Lorenzo's face in a single breath. "This is…"

I had no appetite for whatever explanation he was already assembling behind those still lips. I dropped the lace back into the seam of the sofa where I'd found it and said, lightly, as though I were addressing an associate and not the man I'd bound my blood to, "If there's nothing else, I'll be going now, Don Falcone."

After the day's business, I was gathering myself to meet an allied boss when Lorenzo's car rolled to a slow, deliberate stop in front of me at the curb, the marked plate everyone in the territory knew catching the light. My thumb was turning the bare place on my finger where the ring used to sit; I did not remember starting.

"Get in," he said through the lowered window. "I'll see Gia home first, and then I'll take you to the seafood house on Maple Road."

Gia leaned across from the passenger seat, her smile bright and easy, the smile of a woman who had never once been made to wait in a corridor with a fever. "Sorry, Adriana. Hitching a ride off you again."

I was already lifting a hand for a passing cab, and I answered without looking back at either of them. "You two go on. Seafood doesn't agree with me."

Lorenzo's face went dark on the instant. He knew, better than anyone alive, that no shellfish had ever disagreed with me a day in my life. That house on Maple Road, the low light and the salt and the cracked shells, had been one of the few pleasures I let myself keep.

His jaw set, and I could see him gathering something to say, some quiet correction to put me back in my place before the god-sister he paraded like a jewel. But I didn't give him my eyes again. I stopped turning the bare place on my finger, and stepped clear of his marked car, and crossed to the far side of the road, and got into a taxi that owed him nothing.