He was rowing her across a still mountain lake, playing with her in the snow, tucking a single red maple leaf behind her ear. Spring, summer, autumn, winter. Every season of the year had been gathered up like tribute and laid at the feet of another woman, each one a frame in a love story that was never meant for me to see.
Taking a slow breath that did nothing to steady the trembling in my hands, I opened one of the videos. In it, Lorenzo stood at the edge of the ocean, the wind off the water tugging at his collar, and he called her My Carina in a voice I had not heard him use since before our alliance was sealed before the elders.
She asked him softly, the way a woman asks when she already knows the answer, "Do you love me?"
This was my husband of seven years. The made man bound to the Romano bloodline by blood-pact and oath. The father of the child I was carrying low and heavy beneath my ribs. And he answered her with a warmth that had gone cold in our own house years ago.
I'll always love you, Adriana.
I played it again. And again. The tears came without my permission, sliding down my face while the light bled out of the room and dusk pooled in the corners of our marital territory like something spilled and left to dry. I did not turn on a single lamp. I sat in the dark with the small glowing screen and let it show me, over and over, exactly where I stood.
Lorenzo came home long after the windows had gone black. I heard the soft mechanism of the front locks, the particular weight of his step on the marble, the door closing with the unhurried confidence of a man who believed he owed no one an account of his hours. His voice, when it reached me, was gentle. Indulgent. A man performing tenderness for an audience he assumed was grateful.
"Francesca. Why are you sitting in the dark like this? Dio, you'll trip and break your neck. Think of the baby."
He found the switch and the room flared to light. I turned my face quickly, dragging the back of my wrist across my cheeks before he could read what was written there. He crossed to me and went down on one knee in front of my chair, taking my hand in both of his, and for one obscene moment he looked exactly like the man who had once promised the matriarch of my bloodline that he would guard me with his life.
"Why are you crying?" he murmured, lifting my hand, pressing his mouth to my belly with a reverence that turned my stomach. "Who made my wife sad? Who upset our little one? Tell me his name."
As if a name had ever frightened him into faithfulness.
He leaned close, and that was when it reached me. Jasmine. The same sweet, expensive jasmine that clung to him like evidence he was too arrogant to wash off. I held my voice flat and level, the way my mother taught me a Romano woman holds a glass when her hand wants to throw it.
"Where were you tonight?"
"At the social club. The books take longer than they used to." He said it without a flicker, settling back on his heel, perfectly at ease. "What's troubling you, cara?"
You're lying to me, Lorenzo. You were with Adriana. She had a craving for those dumplings from the east side of the territory, the ones with no runner willing to carry them across the line after dark, so you drove the better part of an hour from the west to fetch them yourself. With your own hands. And she let half the social clubs in the district watch her do it, laughing into her little camera while she filmed her capo running errands like a soldier in love.
I let none of that touch my face. I smiled instead, and I curled my fingers gently around his, and I rested my free hand over the swell of our child the way a contented woman would. "Tesoro," I said sweetly, "I have the strangest craving tonight. Those dumplings from the east side. I can't stop thinking about them."
The baby kicked, hard, as though she felt the lie I was building and wanted no part of stillness. "Would you go and get them for me?"
Something flickered behind his eyes. Annoyance, quick and ugly, gone almost before it surfaced. He slid his hand out from under mine and wiped both palms down his thighs, brushing away something only he could see, the gesture coming a beat too fast.
"Those dumplings aren't anything worth the drive," he said, the warmth draining out of his voice now that it had stopped serving him. "And you're too far along to be eating heavy. You need to watch what you put in your body." He rose to his full height, looking down at me from the comfortable distance of a man who had already decided the conversation was finished. "For the sake of our son, just hold on a little longer. Capisci?"
He did not wait to learn whether I understood.
"I'm going to wash up. I'm dead on my feet," he muttered, already turning away. "Call your mother. Have Vittoria make you something from the kitchen if you're hungry."
The bathroom door clicked shut behind him. Soft. Final. A small, careless sound, and yet I felt it close in my chest like the lid of something.
I swallowed the sob crawling up my throat. I would not give it to him. I would not give it to this house. I spread my hand flat and slow over the curve of my belly, my child, my bloodline, the one honest thing left to me in all this beautiful, poisoned territory, and I whispered into the quiet he had left behind.
"Listen to me, piccola. You and I are about to fight a very hard war together."
