Salvatore's voice dripped with contempt. "Everything I am, I built on my own talent."
"She's a leech, riding on my name. And she's only getting older. I can't exactly show her off."
My eyes drifted back to the dais at the head of the room, where Vittoria stood at Salvatore's side, beaming as the capos raised their glasses to him.
The chandelier light washed over them both. They really did make a striking pair.
Right then my phone chimed. My passage across the water had cleared. The Greco Syndicate had opened its door to me.
I was halfway through packing at the estate when Salvatore came back.
He tossed a half-empty brown bottle onto the table beside me.
"Brought you some medicine."
I picked it up. I'd seen this bottle of iodine tincture before.
In Vittoria's posts. Salvatore had used it to dab her wound.
Except I'm allergic to iodine tincture.
At eighteen, freshly crowned the youngest Don the Falcone name had ever raised, Salvatore already carried himself like a man twice anointed. Gifted beyond compare, he'd eclipsed every made man around him overnight.
A rival boss took offense at it, and sent soldiers to ruin Salvatore's hands, the hands that had built the legend.
Back then I threw myself in front of him without a second thought for my own life.
It was only a shallow cut, but a soldier of the Family cleaned it with iodine tincture without thinking.
I went straight into shock, rushed to the doctor the Family kept on a leash, on the table for nearly a full day and night before they pulled me through.
The others told me later that for as long as my life hung in the balance, Salvatore stood outside that door and wept.
And when he came back afterward, he flew into a rage, threw out every bottle of iodine tincture in the compound, and laid down a law that it was never to appear under the Falcone roof again.
I never imagined that, in the end, he'd be the one to break his own law.
I lowered my eyes and dropped the iodine tincture into the trash.
Salvatore saw what I did and gave a flat, indifferent snort.
"Use it or don't!"
His phone pinged. Salvatore glanced at it, and his face softened again.
He said gently,
"Sweetheart, whatever you do, don't get the wound wet."
"You have to watch what you eat for a while. Once you're better, I'll take you somewhere good to eat."
Maybe it was my dead silence that threw him, because Salvatore kept cutting his eyes toward me. The room had gone very quiet, the kind of quiet that, in our world, comes before a man decides whether he has miscalculated.
In the end he couldn't help speaking first.
"What happened today was only to make an example. You know better than anyone there's no shortage of ugly business in this Family."
"Punishing you like that was a warning to the others."
"And looking after Vittoria now is so no one has anything to hold against you."
I nodded, no argument, no more explaining.
"I understand."
Salvatore froze, plainly caught off guard. His right hand flexed once at his side, then clenched, as if testing whether the old control still answered him. Something strange uncurled in his chest.
He wanted to say more, but I'd already stepped into the bathroom to gather a few toiletries.
There, in the most obvious corner of the sink, lay a pink lace thong that wasn't mine.
Beyond the door, a voice message played from Salvatore's phone:
"Salvatore, sweetie, I left my little panties in your bathroom this morning, boo-hoo..."
"Could you bring them over to me? Oh, and I love the way your soap smells. Could you grab me a bottle of that too?"
So that was why Salvatore had worn a shirt that morning in a color he never wore.
And the scent on him was one he never kept at the estate.
He really did do whatever she said.
Salvatore came hurrying over, the message still playing.
He stepped in and saw me, and the little pink scrap of fabric at my hand.
His gaze went unsteady. "Vittoria was in a bind this morning, so I let her freshen up here."
"Mm. Fine."
I didn't react much. I just stepped aside to give him room.
Salvatore bagged the thong and turned to go, then stopped short.
"If it'll make you read too much into it, I won't take it over after all."
I waved a hand to show it made no difference.
Salvatore hesitated. Then Vittoria called again, hurrying him along.
He hung up and said to me,
"I'll be back as soon as I drop this off. While I'm out, send word. We'll be bound before the Family tomorrow."
With that, he hurried off.
Once I'd finished packing, I idly scrolled through my feed.
Vittoria had posted again. The first photo: a hand with sharp, defined knuckles testing the water at the edge of a tub.
The second: a selfie of Vittoria, with the side profile of the man behind her, focused intently on washing her hair.
【Sweetie says my hands can't touch water with the cut, so he's washing my hair and bathing me~ no idea why I'm feeling shy all of a sudden...】
I flexed the hand wrapped in gauze, then turned and took one last, long look at the estate I'd shared with Salvatore for eight years.
Salvatore's text came through right on cue:
【Something came up, can't talk. Hold off on the union before the Family for now.】
It's fine, I told myself. I never sent word for it anyway.
My thumb found my bare ring finger, the place where the band of his name should have sat and never had. I closed my fist around it.
I wheeled my suitcase out the door, caught a car, and headed for the airfield.
I sent Salvatore a parting message, then switched off my phone as the plane lifted into the sky, carrying me into territory no Falcone could touch.
