"Lorenzo, please. Be gentle. Slow down."
"You little devil. You beg for it five times a day, and still you play the blushing innocent."
They were tangled together in the low gold light of the club's private room, kissing hungrily, deaf and blind to every soul around them. And not one of those souls so much as flinched. The crew lounged in the leather booths as if this were nothing, as if a made man pawing a woman who wasn't his wife on New Year's Eve was as ordinary as ice melting in a glass of good scotch.
I stood frozen in the corridor outside the half-open door, and I finally understood who had sent me that message.
Lorenzo's men were sprawled across the room like kings of a small, filthy kingdom, each with a girl draped over his lap, watching the spectacle unfold with lazy amusement. Cigar smoke hung in blue ribbons under the chandelier. The air reeked of expensive cologne, spilled champagne, and something rotten underneath it all that no amount of money could scrub clean.
One of them, Vincent, low in the pecking order and already half-drowned in liquor, cracked the knuckles of one hand and smirked.
"You're a vision tonight, Miss Rossi. A real vision. No wonder Lorenzo left the wife at home to ring in the new year with us."
Lorenzo had Gianna's waist locked beneath his palm. He exhaled slow, the smoke curling from his lips, and smiled the smile I had once been stupid enough to call charm.
"Marrying a virtuous woman has its perks," he said. "But there are limitations. Catherine's too reserved for certain things. A man needs an outlet. I know how to keep my priorities straight."
He took another pull of his cigar and let the next words fall like he was discussing the weather.
"Besides. Ever since she got pregnant, Catherine's gone fat as a sow, never fixes herself up. It turns my stomach. She doesn't have the spark Gianna's got."
Gianna pouted and dragged one delicate finger in slow circles across his chest, the diamonds at her throat catching the light. "Lorenzo, you're terrible! What do you take me for? I'm a good girl from a good family."
"Yes, yes. Happy New Year, my good girl."
He reached into his jacket and drew out a necklace that threw fire across the room, a river of cold stones, and let it slide into the loose front of her gown. She giggled and pressed herself closer to him, her hand rising at once to clutch the gems against her throat as though they might be taken from her.
Someone in the booths laughed through a mouthful of smoke. "You're bold, Lorenzo. Aren't you scared the wife finds out and walks?"
Lorenzo waved the words away like flies, not a flicker of worry in him. "Even if she knows, what of it? She's carrying my child and she loves me too much to leave. Where would she go?"
Where would she go.
I had built him. Every connection, every clean front, every man in this room who now lounged so comfortably at his expense, I had drawn the maps that made him untouchable. And he sat there and asked the room where I could possibly go, as if I were a dog tied to a post.
The obscene, wet sounds of their flirting started up again. A glass clinked. Someone murmured an approval that made my skin crawl.
"Our Lorenzo," another one slurred, lifting his drink, "is just beyond anybody."
My stomach turned over, violent and sudden, a wave of sickness climbing my throat. The smoke, the perfume, the sound of his hands on her, all of it pressed down on me at once. My face had gone bloodless and cold. I pressed my thumb against the bare strip of skin where my wedding ring used to sit and rubbed a slow circle there, the way I did now when I needed to remember how to breathe. Then I put my hand flat against the door and pushed it open.
The laughter died the instant the light from the corridor fell across the floor.
It was the kind of silence that drops over a room when a gun is set on the table. Heads turned. The girls went still in their men's laps. Even the smoke seemed to hold itself in the air, waiting.
Lorenzo moved fast, fast as a man scrambling to bury something. He snatched a coat off the back of the sofa and threw it over Gianna's bare shoulders, and his free hand went up to smooth down his slicked hair, palm dragging back over it once, twice, the gesture of a man arranging his face before he lies.
I found it almost funny. Almost. Eight years of marriage, an empire built on my sleepless nights, and this was what it came down to: my husband covering another woman's nakedness on New Year's Eve while his crew watched to see what I would do.
My fists curled tight at my sides. The thumb stopped circling. And when I finally spoke, my voice came out low and trembling with everything I had no more strength to swallow down.
