Ever since the priest had bound our hands in that cold chapel, Lorenzo had drawn my blood every month under the pretense of a caring husband's diligence. Routine, he called it. A necessary caution. And every month, without fail, he arranged a feast fit for a coronation, tables heavy with iron-rich cuts, dark wine, marrow broth simmered by the household's own cooks. Rare delicacies flown in from across the water, plated on the Falcone silver as though I were something precious being tended.
I used to think it was love. The way a woman raised in a fortress of guns and secrets learns to mistake possession for devotion.
Now that I knew the truth, that the Underboss of the Falcone bloodline could not have cared less whether my heart kept beating for its own sake, everything curdled. He was only making certain my body could keep producing enough blood. Not for me. Never for me. For my twin. For Nadia, the Family's golden princess, the adored face that smiled from a hundred glossy pages while I bled quietly behind the walls.
I let out a bitter smile and pressed my thumb, without meaning to, against the empty band of skin where a ring used to weigh on my finger. "I don't want to eat this anymore." After a pause, I lifted my eyes to his. "Besides, all these years of checkups, and nothing's ever been wrong with me. Lorenzo. Can I stop the blood tests now?"
Lorenzo's brow tightened, the faintest displeasure surfacing before it was smoothed away like a crease pressed from silk. He reached out and cupped my face in one warm, surgeon-steady hand, his fingers lingering along my jaw as though savoring the texture of something he owned outright.
"Tesoro." His voice was low, velvet stretched over steel. "Your body has been fragile ever since your injury. These checkups aren't a request. We're going to spend the rest of our lives together. You have no idea what you are to me. I won't let anything put you at risk."
The past version of me, the girl who had knelt in that chapel and believed every word, would have wept at that. Would have pressed her face into his palm and thanked God for a man who loved her more than his own life. But now I heard the second meaning threaded beneath every syllable, the cold accounting of it, and my heart sank the way a stone sinks through black water, endless, never striking bottom.
Just as he lifted the spoon to feed me himself, his phone rang against the marble. He answered, and in an instant his eyes changed, some private light flaring behind them, a hunger the tenderness could never quite disguise. His voice carried a thread of excitement he did not bother to hide.
"Tesoro, something urgent's come up. I'm needed. Be good and finish all of it, every bite. I'll know if you didn't when I'm back." He kissed my hair, warm and unhurried, a man in no hurry because he believed the world was already arranged exactly to his liking.
I nodded, obedient as a bride ought to be, and held that soft expression on my face until the sound of his footsteps faded down the corridor and the great door of our wing sealed shut behind him. Then I swept everything from the table straight into the trash. The silver clattered against the bin. Broth and wine bled together over the marrow bones, and I watched it pool there without a flicker of feeling.
I turned toward the study, meaning to copy the video onto a drive before he returned. The proof. The thing I had found, the thing that had unmade three years of my life in the space of a single played recording.
A notification lit my phone before I reached the door.
Nadia had just posted to her feed. The Family's public face, feeding the outside world its beautiful lie.
What's it like to have a childhood love who adores you more than his own breath? Endless thanks to my Lorenzo for taking over an entire private infirmary just for me and bringing in the finest postpartum care in the country. Every moment that matters, you're always at my side. How did I ever get so blessed?
Beneath the words hung the photograph.
Lorenzo, cradling Nadia's newborn against his chest. His head was bowed over the child, and his eyes, those cold surgeon's eyes I had never once seen soften for me, shimmered wet and unguarded, brimming with a tenderness I had begged for silently across three years of monthly needles. And around the infant's tiny throat, cool against that new skin, lay the Falcone heirloom. The priceless mark of the bloodline. A symbol of name and inheritance, of succession to the throne, given to a child that was not his to a woman who was not his bride.
I pressed my thumb hard against that bare stripe of skin where the ring had been, harder, as though I could push the ache clean through the bone, and stood very still in the silence of a house that had never once been mine.
