"It means I don't want him anymore," I said, and pulled my arm free of her grip. The back room of the social club smelled of stale cigar smoke and spilled grappa, the kind of place where men settled debts and women were not supposed to bleed. "If you want him, Adriana, he's all yours. Take the disgrace with him."
Her eyes thinned to slits. For a heartbeat her hand drifted to the side of her belly, that practiced, fragile tenderness she wore like borrowed silk. But the other hand, the one she kept low against her hip, curled into a fist she thought I couldn't see. It was the only honest thing about her. She flung my arm away as though it had burned her.
"What game are you playing now?" she hissed. "Don't think I'm buying a word of it. Not for a second."
The shove came from her whole shoulder, vicious and unguarded, and the floor rose up to meet me before I understood I was falling. My back struck the cold tile. And then the pain came, not pain like a blow, but a knife dragged slow through the center of me, opening something that was never meant to open. My body folded around it. I felt myself convulse, my heels scraping against the floor, my breath gone somewhere I could not reach.
Warmth spread beneath me. I looked down and saw blood, dark and certain, pooling between my legs, soaking through the pale fabric of my dress. The scream tore out of me before I chose it.
"Save my baby! For the love of God, somebody save my baby!"
Through the red haze I caught the blur of Adriana fleeing, heels clattering on tile, the brave taunting woman dissolving into a coward the moment the bloodline she'd been gambling on turned real. She did not look back. Of course she didn't. That kind never does.
I made myself breathe. I made myself be the daughter Vittoria Romano had raised. I caught the sleeve of the boy who tended the bar, the one frozen white at the edge of the room, and I told him to call for help, to get a car, to move. My voice came out flat and steady even as the rest of me shook apart. By the time they carried me out into the night and laid me in the back of the sedan, my dress had gone black with blood, heavy and clinging, and the cold air did nothing to slow the warmth still leaving my body.
My thoughts began to come loose at the edges, fraying like a hem pulled by a child. Somewhere above me a woman, a nurse, the Family's trusted physician must have sent her, was asking for the code to my phone. I gave it to her with fingers that no longer felt like mine. She dialed my emergency contact. My husband. The man bound to me by the blood-pact between the Castellanos and the Romanos, the man who was supposed to come when I called even from the floor of hell itself.
It rang. It rang again. Once, twice, three times. Four. Five. Each ring a small humiliation laid neatly beside the last.
On the sixth, he answered.
"Francesca, there's a situation here." Lorenzo's voice was sharp, clipped, impatient, the voice of a man whose new territory was finally within reach and would not be put down for anything as small as his wife. "I'm in the middle of something that can't wait. A sit-down. I'll call you back later, all right? Be good."
The line went dead.
But before it did, before the silence swallowed everything, I heard her. Adriana. Her voice rose somewhere behind him, breathless and bright, the laugh of a woman who had just won. He had not gone to any sit-down. He had gone to her.
I turned my face away from the nurse so I would not have to see the pity gathering in her eyes, that soft, terrible pity that strangers offer the dying and the betrayed. With the hem of my ruined dress I wiped the blood from my hands, slow, deliberate, the way my mother taught me to compose myself before I let the world see what it had done. Then I took the phone back. My fingers trembled so badly it took me three tries to dial.
I had to sound calm. For her, I had to sound calm.
"Mama," I said. "I… I'm in labor."
I swallowed against the pain that was climbing my spine like fire, against the salt at the back of my throat.
There was not a single second of hesitation on the other end. There never was, not with Vittoria Romano, the widow who had buried a husband in the old war and walked out of it with her chin level and her household intact. "Don't panic, Francesca. Listen to me now. Go to my house. Take my papers from the drawer and the bag I packed for you, and have one of the men drive you to Riverside. Whatever the doctors tell you, you do it. You hear me? Whatever they say."
"I'm fine, Mama. Truly. Don't worry yourself over me." I gave her the lie gently, the way you'd hand a frightened child a story, and I hung up before she could hear what was happening to my voice.
And then the next wave came.
It crashed over me with no mercy at all, wringing me out from the inside, and I screamed until there was nothing left in my lungs to scream with. Cold sweat sheeted down my face and pooled at my collarbones. My whole body shook in a way I could not stop, could not even slow. The world went bright, then dim, then bright again, and through it all I reached up with the last of my strength and seized the doctor's hand, gripping it like the last solid thing in a sinking world.
"Please," I gasped. "Save my baby. Please."
I couldn't lose her. Not this child. Not again.
