He'd had no time for our place, the little trattoria where the owner knew to seat us in the back. Yet he'd taken someone else there.
"I'm not hungry. You eat."
Marco's voice dropped, light and offhand, the way a made man talks down a debt he has no intention of paying. "Adriana, what exactly are you throwing a fit about? Because I helped Gianna shoot a video and didn't go seal the pact with you?"
I lifted my eyes to him in disbelief, the words I wanted to say lodged in my throat, tears sliding from the corners of my eyes.
His accusations and reproaches poured out without stopping.
"I met Gianna because you introduced us. You were the one who didn't want to see your man and your closest confidante constantly at each other's throats, so you told us to get along."
"Now you've gotten what you wanted, and suddenly you're jealous?"
"Have I spoiled you too much, that you've turned this petty?"
"You know perfectly well the bridal photos were for the network, that the kiss was just an angle."
"Adriana Valente, what more do you want from me?"
Right. What more did I want?
Wasn't it all because of you?
Why was I always making such an unreasonable scene?
I kept my head down, tears dripping, dripping onto the floor.
Breathing had become difficult.
It felt like a piece of candy had lodged in my throat, something I couldn't swallow and couldn't spit out, something that would finally choke me to death.
The paper bag hit the floor with a slap. In a house where men measured every sound, that one landed like a verdict.
Marco and I stayed silent for what felt like a century.
In the end, he grabbed his coat and left.
He didn't come home all night,
and I didn't sleep all night.
When the sky was just turning pale, I found myself opening Gianna's page again, the one every social club in the territory whispered over.
She'd posted a new clip: her and Marco sitting side by side on the balcony, talking.
The footage was sped up. The two of them had talked from dark of night nearly all the way to dawn.
Over these past few years, Marco and I had spoken less and less, our silent standoffs growing more and more frequent.
I'd assumed it was the work, the endless grind of tribute and territory that had turned us into this.
But a long time ago we'd had so much to say to each other, too, enough that it seemed it could never run out in a lifetime.
I stared blankly at the screen, my heart as if a great hole had been hollowed out of it.
All those things he hadn't said to me, in the end he'd said to someone else.
It took me a long while to calm down before I called my mother.
"Mamma… I miss you so much."
She sensed something was wrong. The Donna always did. "Adriana, what is it? Did you and Marco have a fight?"
My nose stung, and I forced myself to speak. "I want to come home."
She sighed, and I heard the slow turn of my father's ring against her finger, the way she'd worn it since the day she buried the man and took his empire. "I never agreed to you being with him in the first place."
"Back then you said you'd follow him no matter what. You gave up your blood, your name, your place at my right hand, just to go and play his courier. You, the heir to everything I built, who couldn't so much as boil water, for his sake…"
I'd loved him too fiercely back then. I hadn't listened to my mother, certain our love would stay the way it was forever.
"Adriana," she stopped bringing up the past, "if you're tired, then come home. Your mother will always be behind you."
I choked up. "Okay."
I packed a few things and set out for the crew's office to withdraw my protection, to file the kind of leaving that, in our world, no one simply does.
Marco had never leaned on a Family. He'd built everything from nothing, or so the soldiers under him believed.
Back then, to be with him, I'd even cut ties with my own mother, with the Valente name and all the weight it carried.
Thinking about it now, I had been so utterly, absurdly wrong.
Gianna had only been a minor face in the social scene at the time, a girl who traded on rumor with no real standing.
When she and Marco first met, the two of them couldn't exchange more than a few words without it turning into a fight.
Gianna blamed Marco for stealing me away from her;
Marco, in turn, hated how she was always urging me to walk away from him.
Then one of their photos together happened to make the rounds, passed from phone to phone through every club and back room in Seaford.
A handsome man and a beautiful woman. The whole network lost their heads pairing the two of them.
Gianna's circle of gossip contacts swelled overnight, and Marco's crew rode the wave too, its reputation rising until the silent partners came knocking and the tribute flowed like it never had before.
At first I hadn't thought much of it, until Marco, for the sake of filming with Gianna, ignored me time and time again, until everyone in the territory believed the two of them were the real thing.
