When I was carrying his child, my husband gave his heart, and his hands, to the young courier who warmed his lap.
On the night of the Family's New Year's feast, he and that girl in her bloodred gown sealed themselves inside a private room at the club, raising glasses to good fortune while the rest of the city's territories burned their own candles to the saints.
When I shoved the door open, she lifted her pale throat, the one marked with crimson bruises he'd left like a signature.
"Don't misunderstand us, Mrs. Castellano." Her fingers drifted up to the necklace at her collar, the gems Lorenzo had clasped there himself. "The new year is coming. I'm only helping Lorenzo shed the old luck so the Family carries clean fortune into the season."
My husband's eyes cut to me, dark with the kind of contempt a made man saves for an associate who has overstepped. He scolded me for breaking into something that was none of my concern.
"You're carrying, Catherine. You can't see to a man's needs. I'm flesh and blood like any other." He smoothed his palm back over his slicked hair, slow, deliberate, the way he always did when the lie came easy. "Gianna's only being considerate. Lending a hand where you can't."
Seven months heavy with his daughter, I felt the rage and the shame break something loose inside me. My water came in a hot rush down my legs, there on the obsidian floor of his sins.
But the girl looked at the spreading dark on the marble and told him I'd wet myself on purpose. A cheap performance, she said. A scene staged to humiliate him in his own house.
And my husband, who valued his standing in the Family above the life in my belly, believed her. He decided I had come to shame him in front of his crew. So he dragged me into the washroom and turned the lock.
For three days and three nights he indulged with his courier while I bled and labored behind that door, and only when the celebration had run dry did he see fit to end the punishment.
When at last he opened it, the color drained from his face at the sight of my deflated belly, emptied of everything it had carried.
——
On the night of the New Year's feast, my husband, Lorenzo Castellano, and his crew of associates had their date with the holiday at the club. I stayed behind at the estate, heavy and slow, because I was carrying his child. The Family kept its own calendar of nights like this one, and the men marked them with cigars and tribute and women, while the wives waited in lamplit rooms and pretended not to count the hours.
As the night deepened and the grandfather clock in the front hall ticked its way toward the turning of the year, my phone lit with a message from Lorenzo. An address followed it, the location of a private club tucked into one of the streets no outsider walked alone. The message read: Tesoro, I have a surprise for you.
I went. God help me, I went gladly. I cradled the round weight of my belly with one hand and had a soldier bring the car around, and the whole drive my foolish heart kept time with the clock I'd left behind, certain that after everything I had built for him, he meant to give me one tender hour. The joy in my chest was a small, careful flame.
It went out the moment I opened the door, drowned like a match dropped in cold water.
The room was thick with blue smoke and the sour reek of liquor gone warm. Crystal glasses stood abandoned, sweating rings into expensive wood. The air itself felt obscene, heavy with the perfume of a celebration I had never been invited to.
Gianna Rossi, my husband's courier, the girl he had brought into his inner circle and never explained, sat draped across his lap with her eyes glassed over and her ears flushed scarlet. She wore the look of a thing both ruined and untouched, that practiced innocence climbers learn to perform. Her hand rose to the jewels at her throat, clutching them, as though even drunk she knew exactly what she stood to lose.
Lorenzo's hand, the veins of it standing under the skin, gripped her waist as if she belonged to him by right. The gown had been hiked up around her hips, her shoulders bared without a trace of shame, her body half-spilled from the silk.
And that gown. That deep crimson masterpiece, hand-embroidered by an old master whose work cost more than some men earned in a year, commissioned for the day Lorenzo and I were bound, two bloodlines sealed before the Family.
He had taken it. Quietly, the way he took everything that mattered to me, and handed it over to feed his twisted appetite.
The sight of her thin pale waist, her half-draped body wrapped in the silk that was meant to crown my Union, burned my eyes until I could not blink it away.
