The men on the crew broke into a low round of applause, the kind that carried more calculation than joy, and Bianca settled deeper into Lorenzo's arms as though she belonged there, as though the whole mountainside had been arranged to prove it.
"No, no, everyone, you have it wrong. There's really nothing between Lorenzo and me," she said, her lashes lowering in that practiced, delicate way of hers. But down at her side, where the applause couldn't reach and the men couldn't see, her fingers curled into a small, hard fist. Lorenzo said nothing. He offered no denial, no reassurance, nothing at all. He simply tightened his hold on her, and the silence he gave the crowd was louder than any confession.
I used every ounce of strength left in me to shove away the splintered wooden frame crushing my calf, and I dug the shard of wood out of my own flesh with two fingers, biting down so I wouldn't make a sound. No one would have turned to look anyway. Limping, dragging the ruined leg behind me, I found a quiet stretch of dark where the lanterns didn't reach and cleaned the wound alone. When I finally made my way back to the site, everyone had gone. The tents, the trucks, the men who answered to Lorenzo Falcone as though his word were scripture. All of it, vanished into the night as if it had never been there.
The darkness of the mountain stretched out around me without end, and somewhere beyond the treeline I could hear the low calls of animals moving through the brush. I folded my broken body into itself, gripping a fallen branch like a weapon in one hand, and pressed my back against a boulder beneath a great black-limbed tree. I did not sleep. I sat there through the long cold hours, listening, watching, keeping the kind of vigil a soldier keeps when the Family has left them behind on hostile ground.
It wasn't until the grey light of dawn crept over the ridge that I forced myself upright and began the shaking descent. Halfway down the slope my phone finally caught a bar of signal, and it rang almost at once. Lorenzo. His voice came through hard and furious, without a single beat of concern.
"Adriana, you think you're clever, huh? Ignoring my calls, sitting on your hands somewhere. Bianca got eaten alive by mosquitoes on set last night. Get yourself to a pharmacy and bring her something for it. Now."
As the most admired daughter of an allied bloodline, Bianca Rizzo had built her whole name on the story that she needed no one. She kept no shadow-hand, hired no aides, handled every affair herself. That was the face she showed the Commission, and the men adored her for it.
What none of them knew was that Lorenzo handled every private matter she had, and that he handled it by handing it down to me. So when I stayed silent on the line, he ran out of patience in seconds and his voice cracked like a whip.
"Adriana, are you deaf? You've got half an hour. Get back to the set immediately."
"I'm on the mountain," I said.
There was a pause on the other end. A long one. When he spoke again the tempo of it had changed, gone careful. "You spent the night up there? Alone?"
I looked around me. Even in daylight I still felt it, that pair of crimson eyes I'd imagined all night, watching from behind the trunks, waiting for me to close mine. Something in me that had been pulled taut for five years finally frayed loose, and the tears came before I could stop them, the delayed terror of a body that had been afraid too long with no one to be afraid to.
Lorenzo's voice softened then, the way it always softened when he heard he'd cut too close to the bone. "Stay where you are. I'm coming for you. Give me an hour." The sun climbed high and hard over the ridge, and hour bled into hour. Still, Lorenzo never came.
I dragged my broken body down the last of the mountain and back to the set on my own, the way I had done everything on my own for five years. When Lorenzo finally stepped into the tent, I had just set down my phone after finishing a call with a new candidate. A young soldier, someone I meant to interview to take the day-to-day burden off my hands.
His eyes went straight to the phone in my grip, cold and suspicious, and his voice dropped low. "Adriana. Who were you talking to?"
"Someone I don't know," I said, flat as still water.
Lorenzo, of course, assumed it was a stranger's call, some hustle, some nothing. He didn't press further, and I offered no explanation. I had learned long ago that the truth I kept was the only thing in that tent that still belonged to me.
"Figured you'd be hungry," he said. He tossed a takeout box down onto the camp table, heavy, careless. It landed with a dull thud.
The lid had come loose at the corner, and inside I could see the scraps of a meal already picked over, the leavings of another man's plate. A sour smell rose off it into the close air of the tent.
Lorenzo snatched the box back up quickly, cleared his throat, and laughed a half-beat too loud as he clapped a hand against the table's edge. "There were a lot of men ordering food back there. Somebody must've grabbed the wrong one."
Among the kind of men who sat at the same table as a made boss like Lorenzo Falcone, no one grabbed the wrong box. No one dared. I knew exactly whose scraps those were, and I knew exactly what it meant that he'd carried them all the way up here and called it a gift.
I lay back on the cot and turned my body toward the canvas wall, away from him, my ring finger drifting on its own to the plain band I still wore. I turned it once, slowly, weighing whether to say what was true. Then I let my hand fall still.
"It's fine," I said, my voice cold and even. "My own delivery should be here any minute now."
