When he finished, he pressed a soft kiss to my forehead.
The gesture was as gentle, as full of tenderness, as it had always been.
Yet I could no longer feel any warmth from him.
So it turned out a person really could act out a lie this thoroughly, all for a vendetta.
Back when my mother married into the Falcone Family, I stood at that ceremony branded the homewrecker's daughter, unable to lift my head.
I hid in a corner of the Estate and sobbed while the made men's wives whispered.
It was Lorenzo who appeared then, the only salvation I had.
He silenced the gossip swirling around me with a single flat look that made grown soldiers find somewhere else to be.
He said he would protect me for the rest of my life, that he would be someone I could lean on.
I believed him.
I sank into the tenderness he gave me, unable to pull myself free.
I never knew it was all a vendetta he had planned from the start.
The love was nothing but a reflection on water, a flower in a mirror.
He was the very person waiting to push me into the abyss.
While Lorenzo was buried in Family business, I sent my mother a message.
"Mom, I want to leave the territory. Go across the ocean."
"Don't tell the Family about this yet."
On the drive back to the Estate, the car gliding past the dark warehouses that fed the Family's cash flow, he spoke up as though it were nothing:
"The old Don's pushing me to make an alliance marriage. I've already gotten someone to help me stage the whole thing."
"Don't worry, you're the only one I've ever loved. She's agreed to help me keep it hidden. I'll still keep you here at my side."
I looked at the scenery outside the window and nodded in silence.
Tears fell without a sound.
The moment we got home, while he was washing up, I unlocked his phone.
The pinned contact was saved as Adri.
I opened the chat, and past the cute little stickers,
it was packed, wall to wall, with surveillance footage from my bedroom.
The messages beneath cut straight through to the bone.
"I told you, all I feel for her is the need for a reckoning. These videos, I'll play them at the wedding, in front of every capo and every guest. After that day, Caterina will be struck from the Falcone name for good. From then on, the only one at my side will be you."
"Before you walk through those doors, I'll clear away every obstacle for you. All that will meet you afterward is happiness."
"Adri, I love you."
I raised my eyes to the stuffed toy he'd given me six years ago.
In the dim light,
the toy's eyes glinted with an eerie red glow.
So from the very beginning, he had been planning how to get rid of me, the obstacle in a blood feud I never knew I was part of.
And how laughable that I had drowned myself in his hollow lies.
Believing I was happy.
I opened Lorenzo's private album.
Everywhere I looked were pictures of him and Adriana.
From their days before he took the ring all the way to now.
The photos chronicled the whole history of their love.
Every important holiday, every Christmas, every Sunday sit-down he claimed had run long, he'd made excuses about the Family needing him.
In truth, he had spent every one of them at Adriana's side.
Every gift he ever gave me,
Adriana had received the same.
And what Adriana had, I did not.
The second chat in the app was a record of his conversations with a wedding planner.
He had begun preparing this alliance marriage six months ago.
From the venue itself down to the very wine and crystal at the banquet.
He had handled all of it himself.
Even the surveillance videos, he had cut together with his own hands.
All so that at the wedding, before the assembled famiglia, he could tear apart, completely, this love that was never supposed to exist.
The instant before Lorenzo came through the door,
I switched off the phone.
I booked myself a one-way passage across the ocean, three days out.
At the dinner table that Sunday, Vittorio kept circling back to his son's marriage, the old Don's voice carrying the quiet weight that made every soldier at the long table sit straighter.
Lorenzo pretended to be worn down by it.
He agreed offhand.
He set the wedding for three days from now.
The fork slipped from my fingers and rang against the china in the silence.
I ate the whole meal without tasting a thing.
After dinner, my mother called me into her room, her face full of worry. She smoothed the front of her plain dress with both hands, the servant's reflex the Family had beaten into her.
"Why the sudden decision to leave the territory? Didn't you insist on standing beside your brother in the Family? Have you told him about this?"
Looking at my mother's half-gray hair, an ache rose sharp in my nose.
