After performing in Viviana Caruso's place for the ninety-ninth time and bringing the house down, I was thrown from a high balcony.
Both my hands were ruined, and I lost the child I'd been carrying. Mine and Matteo Rinaldi's first.
It all started because Lorenzo Moretti, the heir apparent, had launched a search across every Family-controlled territory for skilled harp players, declaring that whoever won the private gala audition at the Feast of San Gennaro would be welcomed into the Moretti inner circle.
Viviana had only heard me play once, by accident, before she begged Matteo to let me compete in her place.
I owed Matteo my life. I agreed without hesitation.
But every time I defeated an opponent, it fed Viviana's jealousy.
She severed the tendons in both my feet. She clawed my face until it scarred. She even forced a silencing draught down my throat so I could no longer speak.
I begged Matteo to stand up for me. All I got was that weightless voice of his.
"Viviana grew up out in the sticks, away from all of this. She's a little rough around the edges, but she doesn't mean any real harm. She's just worried someone will find out you've been performing in her place, and there'll be trouble..."
"Bear with it a little longer. Once she gets what she wants and earns her seat with the Morettis, you and I will marry. I'll find the best doctor money can buy to treat you, and you'll be exactly as you were before."
What he didn't know was that my memories were almost back.
And he would never live to see our wedding day.
——
Consciousness returned slowly, and the pain racking my body pinned me where I lay.
I dimly remembered: my harp had made Lorenzo turn and look.
As if drawn by something he couldn't name, he'd walked toward me, reaching for the curtain. Viviana, terrified she'd be exposed, had shoved me from the upper floor without a second thought.
A strange, unfamiliar pain pulsed low in my abdomen.
I was still trying to understand it when Matteo's and Viviana's voices drifted closer.
Viviana was crying, that delicate, pitiful whimper she did so well: "Matteo... I really didn't mean to. I was trying to pull her back, but she lost her footing and fell from the window on her own. I didn't even know she was pregnant... I'm so scared..."
Pregnant.
My hand moved to my belly without thinking.
So there had been a child here. Just now, I'd lost it.
"Don't cry, Viviana. It's not your fault. She's the one in the wrong, keeping a pregnancy hidden like that..."
"Besides, she's always been frail. Even without what happened yesterday, she probably couldn't have carried a child to term."
Matteo's voice was gentle, patient, soothing the red-eyed woman in his arms. His thumb was already smoothing the leather band of his watch, the way it always did when he had already decided to fail someone.
And every word drove through my chest like a needle, one after another, until I couldn't breathe.
I clenched the bedsheets beneath me so hard my knuckles ached, and I forced every tear back down.
Five years ago, Matteo had pulled me from a pile of the dead. I had no memory, no more sense than a frightened child, terrified of everything.
He was gentle and patient. He taught me, piece by piece, how to live in the world, until I could pass for someone whole.
In the year our feelings ran deepest, he'd whispered a vow against my ear: he would help me recover my past, find my family, and stay by my side until our hair turned white.
Then Viviana's mother died, and Viviana came to Matteo for shelter under his protection, and everything changed.
There was a time when I'd prick my finger sewing a sachet for him and he'd fuss over it for half the day.
Now we had lost our child, and I couldn't find a trace of grief on him.
He'd stood by and watched as Viviana whittled me down into something with broken hands, severed feet, a ruined face, and no voice left to cry out with.
Footsteps stopped in front of me. Matteo sat on the edge of my bed.
"Why didn't you tell me sooner you were pregnant?"
I moved my hand, tried to gesture something, but in the end I let it fall.
These past weeks Viviana had driven me to practice day and night, not even leaving time for sleep. How was I supposed to notice a child growing inside me?
And a month ago she'd poured an entire pot of that silencing draught into me. I couldn't speak a single word. How exactly was I supposed to tell him?
When he saw me close my eyes and refuse to look at him, he took my hand gently, his thumb stroking the back of it, slow and steady.
