Chapter 5 of My Don Husband Denied Me in Front of Everyone

He'd even fallen asleep at her bedside, the young Don of the Moretti Family, slumped in a plastic chair like a soldier standing watch over the wrong body.

Bianca leaned down and pressed a gentle kiss to his forehead. When she looked up and saw me, she froze.

The clinic corridor was cold and sterile, one of the quiet places the Family kept for its own, no records, no Feds, no questions.

Bianca stepped out, her voice dripping with pitiful sincerity as she pleaded with me.

"Adriana, I know you used to have feelings for Lorenzo too, but he's already said it himself. He doesn't love you anymore."

"You've been clinging to him for so long. If you were really his true love, he would've bound himself to you before witnesses ages ago. But clearly, that's not the case."

"Please, for old times' sake, just give us a little dignity."

"Stop clinging to him, okay?"

The way she said it, you'd think I was the one dishonoring a made man's house and refusing to walk away from it.

I stared at her, my expression ice-cold.

Everyone knew the Falcone beauty. Talented, gorgeous, delicate as a flower left on a windowsill. The kind of girl every soldier in the room instinctively wanted to shield.

Even at the sit-down of the old associates.

All she'd had to say was that she'd been clumsy back then and slipped her letter into the wrong hand, and that one silly mistake had kept them apart all these years.

Every single man at that table believed her without question.

But I just smiled coldly.

"Bianca, drop the act. Who exactly are you performing for right now?"

The color drained from her face. Her fingers rose to the base of her throat, smoothing a necklace that wasn't there.

"What's that supposed to mean?"

"Other people might not know, but did you really think I didn't?"

"I saw it with my own eyes back then. You never passed that letter to the wrong hand. That letter was always meant for Salvatore."

Bianca's composure cracked. Her eyes darted sideways. "You're lying."

"Salvatore? That soft Greco boy who couldn't pass a test and looked like a toad? Why would I ever want him?"

The cold smile on my face only deepened.

"Because his family had the cash flow."

I'd seen it all back then.

The Greco car would collect Bianca and set her down at a corner far enough from the others that no one would notice. Only after she'd stepped out would the car pull away into the dark.

I'd even stumbled across them one weekend.

Bianca on Salvatore's arm, drifting through the shops, before the two of them disappeared behind a hotel's glass doors.

And Lorenzo back then?

Handsome, yes. But quiet, aloof, and beyond his sharp mind he had nothing. Between the days he ran errands and worked the streets for whatever tribute a gutter-born nobody could scrape together.

I'd heard Bianca trash-talking him to her little circle with my own ears.

"Lorenzo Moretti, that broke nobody. So what if he's clever? The second he steps into the real world, he'll be nothing."

"If I ended up bound to him, I'd suffer for the rest of my life. I'm not that stupid."

"As for that fool Adriana, if she wants him so bad, she can have him."

So of course I knew exactly why Bianca was circling Lorenzo now.

It was obvious.

She'd seen that he'd clawed his way to the head of a table. That the tribute flowed to him now.

Days ago, her silent patron had cast her out. His wife had dragged her to a back-alley clinic and forced her through an abortion.

To survive, she needed to latch onto a new man with power and a rising name.

And Lorenzo was her next target.

Bianca eyed me warily. Her laughter came a beat too fast. "If you've got the guts, go tell Lorenzo all of this right now. Let's see who he believes. You or me."

I laughed.

"Why would I tell him?"

"I came here to tell you something. Lorenzo is all yours."

Bianca stared at me, completely bewildered.

But my gaze had already drifted downward, settling on the ring of the blood oath on my left hand.

Lorenzo had bought it the year he first built his own Family.

He'd spent every last dollar he had on it.

After paying, he'd had fifty-two dollars left to his name. Not enough to survive the week in that world.

But that was when he told me he loved me.

He said that once he made it, once he sat at the head of the table, he'd give me everything good this world had to offer.

And I'd held him close, my eyes shining like they held every star in the sky.

"Lorenzo, I know things are only going to get better for us."