"Disgusting or not, you'll crawl through any gutter just to claw your way back into favor."
"No. I'm in labor. My stomach. It hurts. Please—" The words came out broken, wet, scraped raw against the marble beneath my cheek.
Lorenzo stood over me where I writhed on the floor of the private room, the obsidian tile cold against my burning skin. He looked down the length of his pressed silk shirt at me the way a man looks at something tracked in on the sole of his shoe. His eyes were flat. His voice carried that lazy mockery he saved for people he no longer counted as people.
"You're quite the little performer," he said. He lifted a hand and smoothed his slicked hair back along his skull, slow and deliberate. "If Gianna hadn't snapped me out of it, I might have actually believed your act."
Gianna's painted face split with delight. She poured herself against his side, draping her arms over the lapel of his jacket, and let her fingers drift up to the diamonds at her throat, turning them in the low light so they caught fire. "Mmm," she purred, sweet as poisoned honey. "I'm your clever, sweet little courier, after all. I know what's real and what's theater."
Another contraction tore through me. My voice shook with the force of it, splitting down the middle.
"Help me. The baby. Save the baby. Somebody, please, call for an ambulance—"
Vincent snorted into his glass. Ice clinked as he tilted it. "Lorenzo, your wife'll do anything to drag you back in. Look at this mess she made. Tying up an ambulance crew over a wet floor. Waste of good resources." He cracked the knuckles of one hand, one finger at a time, the small popping sounds loud in the smoke-choked room, though no one but me seemed to hear the threat coiled inside the ritual.
Gianna fanned the flame with the ease of someone who'd done it a hundred times. "Mrs. Castellano," she said, savoring the title she coveted and despised in equal measure, "if word got out that Lorenzo Castellano's wife pissed herself in public, in front of the whole crew, do you think he'd have a shred of respect left? In this life, a man's standing is the only thing that keeps him breathing. You never did understand that. So inconsiderate of you."
The suffocating reek of Turkish tobacco hung in the air, thick enough to taste, curling against the ache that had hollowed out my chest. Somewhere beyond the heavy door, the muffled noise of the club's New Year's feast went on, glasses raised, soldiers laughing, a whole Family celebrating while I bled on their floor.
And it settled into me then, cold and final, sinking past the pain: there was no one in this room I could reach. Not one. They were his crew, his associates, his kept woman. Every face turned toward me was a wall.
So I stopped reaching for them. I gritted my teeth so hard I tasted iron and dragged myself across the slick tile toward my handbag, lying maybe four feet away beneath the edge of the booth. My phone was inside it. If no one in this place would save me, then I would save myself.
Their laughter trailed after me, cruel and tireless, the way a pack worries a wounded animal it isn't done playing with.
"Lorenzo, your wife should be on a stage somewhere. Look at her. The dedication."
"Yeah, boss, go on, sweet-talk her down. How're we supposed to enjoy the night with her doing the whole pissing routine on the floor?"
Sweat soaked through me, plastering damp strands of hair to my forehead, stinging my eyes. Each drag of my body forward sent a fresh wave of agony rolling up from my belly, deep and clenching, like a fist closing around something precious and squeezing the life from it.
I shut my ears to the jeering of these well-dressed animals. I reached. My fingers closed around the leather strap, then the smooth glass of the phone inside.
But the instant I drew it out, the instant my shaking thumb hovered over the screen to make the call, a polished Italian shoe came down on the back of my hand. Bone ground against tile. Lorenzo shifted his weight, casual, almost bored, and kicked the phone spinning away across the floor, out of reach, into the shadows under the far table.
"Enough," he said, and the single word dropped the temperature in the room. The laughter died at once. "Have you lost your mind completely? You really think it's all right to drag an ambulance crew down here over this circus, tonight, of all nights, on the Family's New Year's feast?"
