After the line went dead, Nonna Falcone's eyes brimmed and spilled over. She held my hand tightly in both of hers, the beads of her rosary tangled between our fingers, and her voice trembled with a cry, "I'm sorry, Serafina… This is all my fault. I should never have forced you to stay bound to him, causing you to suffer so much…."
It was true. She had arranged my alliance-marriage to Dante with her own hands.
After I came of age, she brought us together under the old codes and told him plainly that I was the only bride worthy of the Falcone name.
He protested, he fought it, but no man in that house could stand against her will. We were blood-bound before the altar.
At first, I thought I'd found my safe harbor, someone I could rely on. I was filled with hope for our future.
I poured my heart into being a good wife, putting him before everything.
Whenever the other women of the Family invited me out, I declined, worried he wouldn't eat properly if left alone in that cold compound.
Eventually, they stopped asking.
I put all my thoughts on him and let the world outside the gates fall away.
I thought my sincerity would be returned in kind.
But I was wrong. Not long after our union, Dante began staying out past midnight, his soldiers driving him home only when the streets had emptied.
Naively, I assumed it was Family business. I prepared careful meals and had them carried to the social club, urging him to care for himself.
Until one night, I stood beside him at a sit-down. Midway through, a glamorous woman crossed the room with a provocative smile.
"So, you're the Don's wife?" she sneered. "I heard you were an orphan. No wonder your cooking is so good. Must've been a survival skill, huh? Were you working someone's kitchen before he took you in?"
Then I understood. The meals I had painstakingly prepared for him had been going straight into another woman's stomach.
When we returned to the compound, I confronted him for the first time.
To call it a fight is generous. It was a catharsis for me alone.
He was unmoved, calm and self-possessed as a man watching a play that bored him.
Once I had exhausted myself, he remarked coldly, "Serafina Lombardi, don't you think your self-pity is a bit pathetic?"
That single sentence shattered every defense I had.
Everything I gave him meant nothing to him. He watched me the way a stranger watches a scene on the street, then remarked without a flicker of feeling that I was only touching my own wounds to feel them hurt.
How ridiculous.
I didn't know how to face him or the years ahead, so I chose avoidance. I stopped caring what he did in the dark hours.
Soon the whispers of his women became open talk in every backroom the Family touched.
One night he was seen with a model on his arm. The next, dining across a candlelit table from some flight attendant. Then slipping into a hotel with a woman he called a business associate.
Each scandal chipped away at my resolve until I was ready to seek release from the Family bond.
But Nonna insisted, "It's all just for show, nothing serious. Serafina, he cares for you, he simply doesn't know how to say it. Please, for my sake, give him one more chance."
She had been my benefactor since I was five, when she took me in and honored a debt owed to my blood. She had carried me through the years no orphan should survive.
Because of her, I never suffered the way the other forgotten children did.
Remembering how she had sheltered me, I endured.
After that, I went slowly from pain to numbness to his betrayals.
But last year, when Nonna learned I couldn't sleep without medication, she finally relented.
Her rosary fell still in her lap. "If you give Dante a child, boy or girl, I'll grant you your release from the Family."
Desperate for freedom, I forced myself to heal, to tend my body again.
But he wouldn't touch me. He preferred the cot at the social club to coming home to me.
So I took matters into my own hands, and by the doctors' quiet arrangement I carried an heir of Falcone blood without him ever laying a hand on me.
Thank God, it worked.
I conceived, and I gave birth.
Now, at last, I was on the brink of freedom.
Not long after Nonna's call, Dante swept into the hospital room, his face cold as ice, two of his enforcers falling silent at the door behind him.
