I nodded quickly, doing as she wished. "That Isabella turned her back on the Don and ran off with another man — I'll carry that secret to my grave."
Only then did Donna Abate let out a breath. She sent one of her men to fetch a thin gold chain and pressed it into my hands.
"The day you leave, your mother will be waiting for you past the edge of our territory."
Stroking the keepsake my mother had once worn against her skin, I burst into tears.
Mother, we're finally free.
Ten years ago, Donna Abate put the rightful heir in the seat of the Don after the old boss was buried.
When the rival outfit moved to take everything, it was Lorenzo Falcone, not yet sworn in himself, who led the soldiers and broke the ambush that should have ended the Family — only to catch the bullets meant for the heir and fall into a coma no one thought he'd wake from.
Yet his childhood love, Isabella, chose that very moment to run off with another man.
The Donna feared that Lorenzo, when he came to, would be so crushed by the blow he'd never come back to himself. So she found someone to play a part.
And I, out scraping for the money to buy my mother's medicine, happened to step right into the path of her car.
A dose of medicine worth three days' wages bought ten years of my life.
When Lorenzo woke and learned I meant to trade saving his life for the place of his bound wife, he showed no anger.
Nor did he look down on me for being a morgue girl who carried the dead.
Instead, he spoke to me with gentle words and treated me with respect.
He even pitied me for having no name worth speaking, and saw to the arrangements himself, the way the Family looked after its own.
Guilt gnawed at me. Day and night I studied the manners, the codes, the silences a made wife was supposed to keep, not wanting to shame him in front of the table.
Newly stitched back together from wounds that should have killed him, he needed his dressings changed and his ruined muscle worked every day, so every morning I rose before light and kept watch over the stove, just so the medicine would be the perfect warmth when he woke.
Back then Lorenzo would take my hand and smile so tenderly. "Thank God I have you."
In that moment, I believed I had found a good man.
But at the Christmas sit-down, in front of the whole Family, he ordered the made wife's ring stripped from my hand.
And had it pressed onto the finger of a club hostess he'd carelessly pulled into his lap.
Disgraced and breaking, I begged him to release me from the pact.
Lorenzo only watched me with cold eyes. "Release you? When you forced Isabella to run, did you ever once think of releasing me?"
What came crashing down alongside the endless humiliation was a letter from Isabella.
Every word of it bled with grief, all of it telling how I'd used his debt to me as a weapon to drive her out.
From that day on, Lorenzo never set foot in my part of the estate again.
Every other week, women who carried some trace of Isabella in their faces were brought through the gates.
Lorenzo made me arrange their welcomes, made me pour the wine they raised to him in respect.
He even made me stand outside their doors and listen to what happened behind them.
Ten years. My heart, shot through with wounds, had long since gone numb.
I thought I had only to outlast the last of my days under the pact, and it would be over.
But I never expected Lorenzo to be slipped something while he was away handling business,
and that the two of us would make a child together.
Lorenzo didn't force me to be rid of it. He even had medicine sent to me to keep the pregnancy safe.
"The child is innocent."
Nor did he bring any more mistresses onto the estate after that.
Now and then he would even come to see me.
I thought that after ten years of waiting, hope had finally come.
And then Isabella sent another letter.
Isabella claimed I'd sent someone to parade my pregnancy in front of her, when she had only just lost a child of her own.
It was the first time I'd ever seen Lorenzo fly into such a rage.
He very nearly forced the poison to my lips himself.
It was something he'd had a man go out and obtain on purpose — the kind they used on animals to clear a womb.
One swallow of it, and not only would the child be gone, I would bleed out and die on the floor.
In that moment of despair, the child in my belly stirred.
Lorenzo froze for a moment, then smashed the bowl against the marble and walked out, leaving me there.
I wept, my hand resting over my belly.
My child was a good child, one who would protect his mother.
He deserved to come and see this world.
But for all my struggling, in the end I still couldn't keep him safe.
Perhaps it was for the best. At least he wouldn't be born into a house with a father who didn't love him.
Lost in a thousand thoughts, I had already come back to the Falcone estate.
But the man at the gate wouldn't let me through.
"The Don says this is your punishment for going to the Donna to complain."
Even the cot had been carried out. All that was left waiting for me was a single length of wooden rod.
