The lead enforcer regarded me without expression, his face carved from the same cold stone as the compound walls.
"Miss Marchetti, please don't make this difficult for us." His voice was level, almost conversational, the way men in this world spoke when the violence hadn't started yet but was already decided. "Your friends come from respectable families, I'll grant that. But respectable isn't powerful. Not in front of Don Ashford. One word from him, and every business their families have ever touched collapses. Their shipping contracts disappear. Their restaurant licenses get pulled. Their fathers find themselves answering questions from people who don't wear badges." He adjusted the cuff of his jacket. "I need to bring something back to the Don. An accounting."
My entire body felt as if it had plunged through ice into black water.
The fury and the helplessness crashed over me simultaneously, a drowning wave with no surface to break toward.
For the first time in five years, I hated myself with a clarity that burned.
I was the one who had agreed to the blood-bound union.
I was the one who had walked into the Ashford dynasty with my eyes open and my wrists offered for the shackles.
And I was the one who had dragged this humiliation, this danger, into the lives of the only people who still cared whether I lived or died.
I drew a single breath. Held it. Forced the storm inside me down below the waterline where it couldn't show.
"Fine."
"I'll give you your accounting."
My hand closed around the decorative iron rod mounted on the wall beside the booth, a heavy, cold thing meant to hold velvet rope. I wrenched it free in one motion.
Every pair of eyes in the room locked onto me.
In the silence that followed, I brought it down on my own left wrist.
The crack of bone was obscenely crisp, a sound like a branch snapping in a frozen forest. It detonated in the stillness of the room.
Agony swallowed me whole. A white-hot tide that started at the point of impact and roared up through my shoulder, my chest, my skull. My hand dropped, limp and wrong-angled, fingers dangling like a marionette with its strings cut.
"Vivi!"
They rushed toward me, hands catching my shoulders, my back, keeping me from folding to the ground.
My face had gone the color of ash. Cold sweat traced lines down my temples, my jaw, the column of my throat. But I locked my knees and forced my gaze to the enforcer's face. Held it there.
"Is that enough to report back?"
My voice came out steady. Barely.
"That blow was for them. On their behalf. From me."
Something shifted behind the enforcer's eyes. A flicker, there and gone, too fast to name. Surprise, perhaps. Or something rarer in this world: a grudging recognition of will.
He said nothing for several seconds.
Then he turned and walked out, his soldiers falling in behind him like shadows returning to the dark.
"Have you lost your mind?" My friends' voices shook, every one of them. Hands gripped my arms, my shoulders. "We would have fought them. All of them. We would have gone down swinging before we let you do that."
I shook my head.
Even speaking had become a labor, each word hauled up from somewhere deep and broken.
"You can't fight them..."
"It's all right... the bone can be set..."
They were frantic, already pulling me toward the door, someone calling for a car, someone pressing a cloth napkin against my wrist as if pressure could hold together what I had shattered.
We had barely cleared the entrance of the speakeasy when the shouting started above us.
Instinct dragged my gaze upward.
Serena Valenti stood at the edge of the second-floor terrace, her body swaying against the wrought-iron railing, teetering between the balcony and the void. The amber light from the windows behind her turned her silhouette into something theatrical, a scene staged for an audience of one.
"Don't come any closer! I haven't forgiven you! One more step and I'll jump!"
She screamed it through tears, her voice pitched to carry, to wound.
And he stood several paces back from her, framed in the open terrace doors.
Dominic Ashford.
The man whose name made rooms fall silent and grown men lower their eyes. The man who had never, in the entire span of our marriage, shown me anything beyond the flat indifference of a wall.
There was panic on his face.
Genuine, unguarded, devastating panic.
"Serena, stop this. Come back inside." His voice, that instrument of absolute command that had ordered men's fates with less emotion than ordering espresso, trembled. Actually trembled. "Come down from there. Whatever you want. Anything. Just step back from the edge and name it."
"Anything? You mean that?"
"Anything. Even my life, if that's what it costs."
I stood below them, broken wrist cradled against my chest, and listened.
The word that filled my mouth was absurd.
The feeling that filled my chest was cold. A cold so total it went beyond temperature into something existential, as if the last warm thing inside me had been snuffed out like a candle pinched between wet fingers.
How deeply did he love her.
To say those words. To mean them. To offer his life to a woman perched on a railing while his wife stood bleeding below him and he didn't even know. Didn't care to know.
The theatrics seemed to work. Serena's sobs softened. She began to inch back from the edge, careful, birdlike, her hands reaching behind her for the safety of the railing.
Then her foot slipped.
"Ah!"
The scream tore through the night air as her body pitched forward, over the rail, into nothing.
And directly below her, there was me.
The impact hit like a car. Her full weight slammed into my body with a force that drove every molecule of air from my lungs and sent us both crashing to the pavement. I was beneath her, my spine against stone, my already-shattered wrist crushed between our bodies. A cushion. A thing placed there by fate to break her fall.
The pain was no longer a wave. It was an annihilation. My vision went black at the edges, then everywhere.
He came down from above like a man possessed.
I heard his footsteps, rapid and desperate, on the stairs, through the door, across the threshold.
And the first person he reached for, the first body he gathered into his arms with shaking hands and a voice stripped of every pretense of power, was hers.
"Serena. Serena, look at me. Are you hurt? Don't be afraid. I'm taking you to the hospital. Right now. Hold on to me."
His voice cracked on her name.
He lifted her. Carried her to the waiting car as if she were made of glass, as if she were the most precious and fragile thing the world had ever produced.
The engine turned over. Tires bit asphalt. Taillights bled red into the dark and then were gone.
From the moment he had come down those stairs to the moment the car disappeared into the night, Dominic Ashford had not looked at me.
Not once.
My friends stared at the empty street where the car had been. Their bodies vibrated with a rage so acute it was almost grief. Fists clenched. Jaws locked. Eyes bright with the particular fury of people who have just witnessed something they will never forgive and can do absolutely nothing about.
But there was nothing to be done.
Not tonight.
Tonight, the only thing left was to get me to a hospital.
When I opened my eyes again, the room was white and quiet and smelled of antiseptic. The only person beside my bed was a nurse adjusting an IV line.
"Miss Marchetti, you're awake." She offered a careful smile, professional sympathy measured out in clinical doses. "It's a good thing your friends got you here when they did. The fractures were... significant." She paused, choosing her next words. "Your friends had urgent matters to attend to with their businesses. They asked that you call them the moment you woke up."
"Don't bother."
My voice was dry gravel scraping against itself.
"They're busy. There's no need to disturb them."
The nurse looked at me. The professional sympathy softened into something more personal, more painful.
"But you need someone to take care of you..."
"I can manage alone."
