While He Protected Her, I Stopped Loving Him

Adriana's POV

Earlier that day, I lost my baby in a hit by freelance shooters, the kind of men who answered to no Family and no name, who came and went like smoke off a gun barrel. And while it happened, while my body was failing on the cold stone of the courtyard, my husband, Lorenzo, was strolling the garden path with his capo at his shoulder.

Lorenzo was the Don of our Family, the Moretti Family, and Carla was the captain he had raised up beside him.

He saw my dress soaked through with blood, the dark stain blooming across the silk like something obscene, and he turned Carla's curious eyes away with one hand, the way a man shields a child from a body in the street. Then, coldly, almost bored, he murmured, "Don't go near her. It's bad luck."

They walked on. Their footsteps faded into the dark of the estate, and they were gone.

I was devastated. How could my own husband, the man bound to me by blood vow before two bloodlines and a priest, do that to me?

After that, one of the shooters found me where I had fallen, and the world went black.

When I came home from the Family physician, still moving like a woman made of cracked glass, I found a black lace thong twisted into the sheets of our bed. So that was where they did it now. On our bed. In the room where I had once believed myself loved.

I could not endure this heartache anymore. I would not. So I took my phone from the nightstand, my hand steady in a way the rest of me was not, and I dialed the Don of the Falcone Family, Lena, and when the line connected I kept my voice smooth as poured wine. "Hello, Don Falcone. I've thought it over. I've decided to seek release back to your Family."

……

There was a pause on the line, the kind a careful man takes to be sure he has heard correctly. I imagined him on the other end, reaching out to set right some glass or lapel that had drifted a fraction out of place, the small ritual of a man who controls everything within his reach before he closes his hand on what he truly wants.

Then his voice came, warm and certain. "That is welcome news. I'll see to the arrangements myself."

Don Falcone ended the call. The moment the screen went dark, the bedroom door opened and Lorenzo walked in, thumb already moving across his phone, eyes nowhere near me.

He was always on that phone now. It had become an extension of him, a thing more present in our marriage than I was.

He had come home late again. Ever since Carla took over her father's seat three months ago, claiming her made rank in her own right, Lorenzo left before the morning fog burned off the bay and returned long after the house had gone quiet around me.

"Were you on the phone with Nico?" he asked, sparing me half a glance. My brother's name in his mouth, like it was the only person I could possibly have to call.

"No, it was—" I began, but his phone cut across me, ringing, and his attention snapped to it like iron to a magnet.

"Forget I asked. I need to take this." He lifted the phone to his ear, and his thumb found the heavy gold signet ring on his other hand and began to roll it, slow, idle, a habit I had stopped reading meaning into a long time ago. "Let's keep it to text," he said into the line. "I have company." Then he hung up.

His phone chimed almost at once, a message landing, and he grinned down at the screen. The grin was not for me. It had not been for me in months.

It hurt, the way a small thing can hurt more than a large one, that he would not even let me finish a sentence before turning away. And I wondered, the way I always wondered now, who had earned what I could not. Was it Carla?

"Where are my pajamas?" He looked up from the screen at last, frowning at the empty bed. "You always lay them out at night."

Before I could answer, he went on, his tone shifting into the flat, administrative register he used for Family business. "We've looked into the shooters. It's handled. It won't happen again." A beat, an afterthought tacked on like a courtesy he'd been reminded to extend. "How are your wounds, by the way? Dottore Greco said they'd heal soon enough."

"They're healing nicely," I answered him curtly, my eyes fixed on my phone, scrolling through nothing, seeing nothing.

After the attack, they had carried me to the Family physician. Dottore Greco had removed his glasses and folded them slowly before he spoke, the way he always did before words that would draw blood, and only then had he told me. A concussion. A fractured arm. And the child I had never even known I carried, gone.

I had not known I was pregnant. Motherhood had been my one private dream, the thing I held quietly beneath all the cold marble and colder vows of this life, and now it lay shattered on a clinic floor while my husband called it bad luck and walked away.

I felt Lorenzo's stare settle on me. I refused to lift my eyes to meet it.

"Who are you texting?" he asked, and I nearly laughed.

Did he truly think I texted only because he did? That my world was a mirror angled at his?

"No one," I said, still watching the screen.

"I—" he started, and then his phone rang again, and he picked it up.