I agreed without hesitation. "I'll do it."
I still had savings from the years I had worked inside the Luciano operation, money I had set aside in accounts no one in that family ever thought to monitor. Within the week I liquidated two parcels of waterfront property on the city's west side, land that held a pair of private golf courses I had built from nothing. The sale moved fast. Cash buyers, clean paper. Nina knew the right people for that, and she never asked a question she didn't already have the answer to.
In no time, I had enough capital to open my own neutral front.
Those golf courses had been my offering to Dante. He liked the game, or I had believed he did. During the entire construction period I lived in a corrugated-metal site office at the edge of the lot, sleeping on a cot that smelled of wet cement and diesel, overseeing every pour, every sodded green, every drainage trench. I lost weight. My hands cracked. I told myself it was worth it because the finished course would make him proud, would make him look at me the way he looked at things he valued.
When I excitedly invited Dante to play the opening round, he adjusted his signet ring with his thumb and said, without looking up from his phone, "If I have time, I'll go."
He never once went.
Later I found out that his interest in golf had only ever been genuine when it meant he could spend an afternoon with Viviana Conti in the clubhouse locker room, warming up together behind a locked door while I sat in that metal shed reviewing invoices for sod he would never walk on.
Three months after I formally severed myself from the Luciano Family, thanks to the front-management and clean-books experience I had accumulated over the years and Nina's relentless encouragement, my business began to rise rapidly. I ran the numbers myself, kept the ledger transparent, filed every tax receipt. Nothing anyone could touch, nothing anyone could leverage. Nina tapped her pen twice against her knuckle the first time the quarterly figures came back clean, and the look she gave me was the closest thing to a toast either of us needed.
Sofia, my younger Blackwood, had just graduated from college and started working. She moved in with our mother and then in with me, folding the cuff of her sleeve over her knuckles when she first walked through the door, still carrying the nervous habit she had picked up during the months she spent in that hospital bed while I begged Dante for help that never came. The old apartment was too small for the three of us, so I bought a bigger place in a front-owned luxury tower on the city's north side. Clean building, doorman, security cameras in the lobby, no crew activity that I could see.
Coincidentally, Dante and Viviana's new home was just two floors above mine.
The next morning I was woken by a knock at the door. Hard, deliberate, the kind of knock that expected obedience. When I opened it, I saw the last face I wanted to see. I looked at him coldly and asked, "What is it?"
Dante stood in my doorway in a charcoal overcoat, his jaw set, his dark eyes sweeping the hallway behind me as though cataloguing the dimensions of my new life and finding them offensive. He glanced at me with open disdain, clearly irritated that I hadn't flinched, hadn't lowered my gaze, hadn't done any of the hundred small things a former alliance bride was supposed to do in the presence of the Luciano heir.
"Aren't you going to invite me in?" he asked. His thumb found the edge of his signet ring and turned it once. "Is this your way of playing hard to get?"
"My home doesn't welcome you."
The words landed in the silence of the corridor like a slap. Dante had never been turned away from my door before. He had never expected me to speak to him in a voice scraped clean of warmth. In the past, if he had taken a single step toward me, I would have been overjoyed, unable to sleep all night, replaying the moment like a prayer answered.
"Stop pretending." His voice dropped, the edge of something cruel sharpening beneath it. "Even if you stayed here for the rest of your life, I wouldn't spare you a single glance."
I frowned, genuinely confused, and asked, "You didn't actually think I moved here because of you, did you?"
"Isn't that the reason?"
He pushed past me without waiting for permission, storming into my apartment with the certainty of a man who had never been told no by anyone who mattered. His shoulder clipped the doorframe. His shoes left marks on my clean floor. And then, in three strides, he reached the windowsill where I had lined up a row of potted herbs and small flowering plants I had just arranged the day before. He swept them off the ledge with one arm. Ceramic shattered against the tile. Soil scattered in dark fans across the white stone. A single basil leaf settled on the toe of his shoe, and he didn't notice or didn't care.
Out of courtesy I stood at the door and let him finish. I watched him breathe, watched the anger roll through him in waves, watched his hand flex and close at his side. When the silence had settled over the broken pottery like dust, I walked to the kitchen counter, opened a drawer, and pulled out the property contract.
"As far as I know," I said, my voice steady, "you and Viviana only moved into this building yesterday. I bought this place two months ago."
Dante took the contract from my hand and glanced at the date. His eyes moved across the page once, quickly, the way a man reads something he doesn't want to believe. The date was exactly as I had said. Who moved in first was now crystal clear.
There wasn't the slightest hint of embarrassment on his face. If anything, his expression hardened, the ring on his finger catching light as his thumb went still against it.
"Then you move out."
"Why should I?"
I stood my ground, staring him down. My thumb brushed the inside of my left wrist where the wedding bracelet used to sit, and then my hand went still.
