The message glowed on the screen, and I read it the way a person reads a death sentence written in someone else's blood.
[Lorenzo, the amount you've bled out of Serafina this month is already past every safe line. You cut out her womb and now you're draining her month after month? She's only getting weaker.]
[I don't understand. You took her as your bound bride to atone for what you did to her. So why are you still bleeding her dry?]
A reply surfaced beneath it, and even through the cold light of the screen I could feel how little the words cost him. Lorenzo Falcone wrote the way he did everything else, with the detached precision of a man who had long since stopped feeling the weight of the knife in his hand.
[I bound Serafina to me to keep her close. Nothing more. She is a convenient living tribute, a vein to draw from so Nadia's body accepts the transplant.]
[I couldn't take the woman I actually wanted. But Serafina wears her face. In a way, I suppose I married her after all.]
I could almost hear the low, bitter chuckle behind the text, the sound of a man mocking himself in the dark of some back room where no one could see the Underboss of the Falcone Family laugh at his own cruelty.
[Enough. Nadia's time is close. She needs more. I'll send over a few more bags of Serafina's blood tomorrow.]
More messages poured in, faster now, the sender's panic bleeding through the flat little letters.
[Lorenzo, have you lost your mind? You drew from her two days ago and now again? Do you even care that your own bound wife is dying by inches under your hands?]
But Lorenzo did not bother to answer. Men like him never explained themselves. Explanation was for people who feared judgment, and the Underboss of the Falcone bloodline feared nothing that walked or breathed.
I had cried until my tears ran dry, until there was nothing left inside me but a hollow, ringing silence, like a bell struck once in an empty chapel and left to fade.
So this was the truth of it. This was the real reason he had claimed me before the Families, draped me in the name Falcone, and called it atonement.
He had cut the children out of me. He had emptied my body of everything a woman is supposed to be allowed to keep. And now, night after night, checkup after checkup, he was drawing the life out of my veins one bag at a time. All of it, every drop, spilled into the arms of my dear twin sister to keep her golden and warm and adored.
Lorenzo Falcone. He truly would do anything for Nadia, wouldn't he. He would carve up one sister and pour her into the other and never so much as flinch.
The sound of the front door unlatching cut through the dark, and my heart slammed against my ribs. My thumb moved before my mind did, pressing hard against the bare band of skin where a wedding ring should have sat, that phantom mark of everything he had taken from me under the guise of giving.
I fled to the bathroom on unsteady legs. Cold water. I splashed it against my face again and again, scrubbing at the redness, trying to rinse the truth off my skin like it was something that could be washed away, trying to drown the ruin in my eyes before he could read it there.
When I stepped back out, I had built the mask again, brick by brick. I forced my face into blankness, into the smooth, obedient stillness of a woman who had seen nothing, uncovered nothing, who did not know that her own husband had priced her life in units of blood.
But Lorenzo's gaze found me the instant I emerged, and it lingered. His eyes narrowed by a fraction, the surgeon's attention that missed nothing, and I knew he had caught the swollen red rimming my eyes.
He crossed the room in a few unhurried strides, the way a man crosses a space he already owns, and pulled me into his arms. His hand settled low against my stomach with that terrible, practiced ease, kneading gently over the ruin he had made of me, as though the wound were a garden he tended rather than a grave he had dug.
"Tesoro," he murmured against my hair, his voice velvet and warm and utterly convincing. "Have you been crying? Is the scar hurting you again? If it hurts, you tell me. Don't keep it locked away from me. It kills me to see you in pain."
Kills him. How exquisitely ironic, that word in that mouth. As if he were not the very knife that had opened me. As if the pain he grieved so tenderly had not been dealt by his own steady, surgeon's hand.
I could barely hold myself still beneath the weight of his counterfeit concern, this devotion he performed so flawlessly it could fool every eye but the one that had finally learned to see. And just then, Lorenzo lifted one hand in a small, careless gesture, and the household answered as it always did.
A quiet line of the Family's cooks filed in, soldiers of the compound in their spotless whites, each carrying baskets heaped with blood-nourishing tributes — dark iron-rich meats, bitter herbs, glistening organ meats stacked like offerings. Everything a body needed to make more blood.
More blood for them to take.
