Dante gave me a long, scrutinizing look. His eyes narrowed as he sized me up, the way he might measure someone across a sit-down table before deciding whether they were useful or disposable.
"Living so close," he said quietly, "are you sure you won't go mad watching me and Viv be all happy and in love in front of you every day? Over time, you might lose your mind."
I smiled. It was not a kind smile.
"Don't flatter yourself too much. I'll live just fine without you, and I'll live better." I let the pause stretch, let it fill the space between us the way silence fills a room when someone is about to say the unsayable. "The only question is, will your little lover stay loyal to you forever? Don't be surprised if one day she sells you out and you're there counting the laundered cash for her."
If the seemingly invincible heir to the Luciano name had a weakness, it was Viviana Conti.
The Conti family had fallen on hard times years ago. Their old connections had dried up, their debts had multiplied, and it was only through Viviana's attachment to Dante that they managed to cling to any semblance of standing in the neighborhoods that mattered. Everyone in the syndicate's orbit knew what Viviana was. She pretended to be devoted and faithful, the delicate creature who needed Dante's arm to lean on, but behind that performance she used his money, his skim, his name to fund a lifestyle that had nothing to do with loyalty. Whispers circulated through every social club on the east side: male models, private dinners, hotel suites billed to shell accounts Dante never audited. The tip of Viviana's tongue would touch her upper canine whenever she heard something useful, and she heard useful things constantly, because the only person kept in the dark was Dante himself, who year after year remained devoted to her with the blind ferocity of a man guarding a treasure that had already been hollowed out.
"You can talk about me," Dante said, and his voice went very low, very flat, the way it always did in the half-second before violence. "But not her."
The slap came without a moment's hesitation. His open hand cracked across my cheek with enough force to snap my head to the side. The sound bounced off the bare walls of the apartment, sharp as a gunshot in a marble corridor.
The fiery pain bloomed across my skin, hot and immediate, and through it I saw this man clearly once again. He was nothing short of a beast. Not the disciplined, calculating kind that the Luciano name demanded, but the kind that broke things because breaking was the only language left to him when the world stopped obeying.
I slammed the door shut behind him. The latch caught with a metallic click that echoed longer than it should have. I stood in the middle of the room, staring at the mess. Broken ceramic. Dark soil ground into white tile. A single green stem bent but not severed, still reaching toward the window. A reflection of our dead alliance that could never be salvaged.
From this moment on, I promised myself I would never shed another tear for him.
But Dante didn't seem to agree.
Living in the same building, with nothing more than a floor of reinforced concrete and someone else's ceiling separating us, the next morning I got into my car in the underground garage, ready to head to my front office across the river. The garage was cool and dim, the overhead lights casting long shadows between the parked sedans and SUVs that belonged to other residents. I put the key in the ignition.
Dante was already sitting in the passenger seat.
He had gotten in at some point without my noticing, the way he had always moved through spaces he considered his. He sat with his coat unbuttoned, one arm along the back of the seat, his posture carrying the same entitled ease as countless mornings before, when our alliance was still intact and I still believed proximity to him was a privilege. He looked at me as though nothing had changed, as though the red mark on my cheek had never existed, and spoke with the casual authority of a man giving instructions to a driver.
"Take me to the gym first. Then you can turn around and go to whatever it is you do now."
I found it laughable. Yesterday he had struck me across the face. Today, without so much as a word of acknowledgment, he was ordering me around like a chauffeur, like I still wore his name, like I still answered to the Luciano household.
"Get out."
I refused so firmly that something shifted behind his eyes. Surprise, faint and quickly buried, but real. He had not expected the word. He had not prepared for it.
"Do you not love me anymore?"
Once, I had loved him more than I loved myself. When I wanted to be good to someone, I would have gladly given him the world, every safe dollar, every waking hour, every piece of land I built with my own cracked hands.
But Dante had taken advantage of my love, using it as a license to hurt me without restraint. He had turned devotion into servitude and tenderness into silence, and I had let him, because I believed that if I gave enough, eventually he would see.
He never saw.
"Yeah," I said. "Just seeing you now makes me irritated."
I answered him with obvious disgust, my hand already reaching for his arm to drag him out of my car, to put my body behind the refusal my mouth had made.
Just then Dante's phone rang. The sound cut through the garage like a blade, sharp and insistent. He pulled it from his coat pocket and pressed it to his ear. A voice on the other end spoke rapidly. I caught fragments: the name of the Catholic hospital under family watch, a room number, something about an accident.
I didn't catch all the details. My only thought was that I needed him out of my car so I wouldn't be late, so I wouldn't have to sit in the driver's seat of my own vehicle and feel the old gravity pulling me back into orbit around a man who had never deserved it.
But the next second, Dante's eyes went red. His breath hitched. And without warning, he pulled me into his arms, hard, crushing, his hand gripping the back of my head as though I were something he was terrified of losing.
