Because my blood had never given the Family an heir, and the Old Donna wanted a grandchild to carry the Falcone name, she had only grown more displeased with me.
Before, Lorenzo would have spoken up for me, said a word or two in my defense. Now his eyes held nothing but Gianna, and a longing he couldn't quite hide.
Gianna bounced up to him, hooked her arm through his, and cooed,
"Uncle Lorenzo, did you bring Gianna a present?"
He pinched her cheek, indulgent.
"Of course I did."
Twenty-eight couture gowns were wheeled into the great hall of the old estate, each paired with a set of jewelry worth more than most made men saw in a lifetime.
Twenty-eight. Gianna's age, this saint's day.
She kissed him happily on the cheek.
"Wow, Uncle Lorenzo really does love me best. All this jewelry is limited edition~ You're spending way too much, Uncle Lorenzo. What if certain people get upset?"
Her fingers drifted to the pendant at her throat, toying with it, a small triumphant caress.
Only then did Lorenzo seem to remember I was standing there. Beside those gowns, my plain dress looked more out of place than ever, a poor relation in a room built on laundered tribute.
In all these years, Lorenzo had never once remembered my birthday, let alone given me anything like a couture gown or a string of stones.
He looked at me, a little awkward, and took my hand, wanting to explain.
"Serafina, don't read too much into it. I'm Gianna's uncle, I just—"
Gianna suddenly clutched her chest, over the place where the scar lay, her brows knitting.
"Uncle Lorenzo, my heart feels strange, I don't know if my heart condition is acting up again…"
Lorenzo let go of me at once, turning to pull her into his arms, his face all alarm. The Golden Blade, the only hands in the city feared for both healing and killing, and they trembled now for her.
"Why would your chest suddenly feel like that? Does it hurt? No, I have to examine you right now."
And with that, in front of every relative and made man there, he swept Gianna up into his arms and carried her up the wide staircase without looking back.
The guests watched me with mocking eyes. The room seemed to close around me, the talk dropping to that low syndicate murmur that travels faster than any shout.
"No wonder the Don would rather drape Gianna in silk and stones than spare her even one. A woman of such low birth doesn't belong as a Falcone wife, let alone to own fine things."
"If Lorenzo weren't bound by being Gianna's uncle, why would he ever have taken this one into a blood-bound union? Maybe back then she used her own mother's death to pressure him into it. Shameless creature, climbing into the Family over her own mother's corpse."
The murmuring grew louder. The Old Donna felt the whole syndicate watching her shame, and her hand went to the heavy mourning ring on her finger. She began to turn it, slow and repeated, and snapped at me,
"You disgraceful thing, what are you still standing here for? Get yourself upstairs. Haven't you brought enough shame on this house already?"
"It was that dead mother of yours' good fortune that my son ever laid a blade to her at all. She wasn't strong enough and died, and what does that have to do with my son? You don't even have the decency to be grateful, and you still have the nerve to bleed us for tribute. You'll get what's coming to you, sooner or later."
Under my sleeve my fist clenched tight. I gave a weak smile. Yes. Knowing Lorenzo was the punishment coming to me.
I thought of the renunciation papers folded inside my bag, the ones that would dissolve a blood-bound union no Don's wife had ever walked away from. I said nothing, only turned and climbed the stairs to find him.
And there, on the second-floor loggia, where the sea wind came in off the harbor, I caught him and Gianna in each other's arms.
Gianna leaned back against the iron railing, her arms looped around his neck.
"Lorenzo, listen, tell me, is Gianna's heart still racing?"
"Gianna, we can't…"
He fought to keep his voice steady, the low measured voice that ended sit-downs and ordered men into the ground, but it cracked on the edges now.
Gianna kissed him first, her voice soft and coaxing.
"Don't you want Gianna? I know there's only Gianna in your heart, and you're in mine too. Even if you took someone else for the sake of how the Family sees you, your body belongs to me. Just let us indulge ourselves this once…"
At last Lorenzo couldn't hold back. He caught the back of her head and kissed her, hungry and deep.
The sound of fabric tearing, threaded through with whimpers no one should have to hear. I pressed my flat palm hard against the center of my own chest, checking, the way you check a wound, that the heart inside was still beating at all.
