At the Moretti Family's gala, the kind of night when every old bloodline in the territory came to drink and measure each other across the room, Bianca Russo shoved me, and I went down hard onto the marble.
She crossed to me in those four-inch heels, the soldiers along the wall pretending not to see, and drove a heel straight into my swollen belly.
In an instant red bloomed across the white of my dress.
Lorenzo Moretti turned his head a fraction and looked at me, brow creasing.
'Pregnant, and you can't even keep to the house like a decent woman? You have to come out and put on a show? Trying to make trouble for my Bianca again? You've bled all over the floor now, you bad-luck thing. You're an embarrassment.'
He said it and turned away without looking back, one arm around Bianca's waist as he led her off.
Not even the shriek of the ambulance siren made him glance at me one more time.
Cold instruments turned inside me.
In the end, I couldn't keep the baby.
One hand pressed to my flat, empty belly, I'd barely come out of the operating room when I saw them on the television in the hall, Lorenzo kissing Bianca like he'd forgotten the world existed.
The pain in my abdomen shot straight to my heart.
I wiped the cold sweat from my forehead and looked at my mother-in-law beside the bed.
'Mom, it's been eight years. The Family pulled through the worst of it long ago. I really want out of this union. Please, let me go...'
——
Before she could answer, a phone rang and split the quiet of the room.
Lorenzo's voice came through, cold.
'Book a hotel room for me. And have someone bring that lace set I bought the other day from the house. You won't wear it. Plenty of women out there are lining up at my bed to put it on.'
He didn't raise his voice. A Don who raises his voice has already lost, and Lorenzo never lost.
But in the silent ward it carried with terrible clarity.
Anger flickered in my mother-in-law's eyes.
She reached for the phone, ready to say something.
Before she could take it, Lorenzo had already hung up on the other end.
She stood there holding the dead phone, her hand falling slack at her side, and looked at me with a long, broken sigh.
'Adriana Falcone, in the end it's the Morettis who've wronged you. I agree. Sever the union...'
Her tears struck the palm of my hand.
'But there's one thing I have to ask of you...'
'Mom, I know. You don't want Lorenzo to find out about what happened eight years ago. Don't worry. I'll take it to my grave.'
That broke her, and she couldn't hold the sobs back anymore.
Eight years ago, the Moretti Family was bled dry.
Lorenzo's father was hounded by the Russo collectors until he threw himself from a rooftop.
Overnight, the once-untouchable Moretti bloodline hung by a thread, scattered like a house with nothing left to its name.
Everyone in the territory knew I loved Lorenzo.
So the moment it happened, his mother came straight to my home and begged me to enter the union.
The old woman stood outside my bedroom door for three full days and nights.
In the end, after I kept insisting, my father agreed to let me marry into the Moretti Family.
And my father emptied his own coffers to pull them back from the edge of extinction.
But that same night, I learned the secret behind the Morettis' ruin.
The ones who destroyed them were the Russos.
Zachery Russo and Bianca both had a hand in it.
But Mavis Moretti didn't want Lorenzo dragged back into that cruel past.
So she pressed a trembling palm flat against her chest, then knelt on the floor and begged my father and me never to tell him.
I understood too well what a mother's love for her son could do.
So even today, with Lorenzo holding Bianca in his arms and taking her to his bed, since I had promised her I'd keep the secret, I would keep it...
She drew me against her and stroked my pale face, over and over.
'Child, that boy doesn't know what he has in you. It's his loss, not yours. In seven days it's your birthday. Spend it with me, and after that I'll let you leave the Morettis...'
I looked at the old woman in front of me, gray at both temples, and nodded.
Seven days, then.
I'd survived eight years already...
Worried she'd keep me from resting, she had my dinner brought up and left.
