The screen glowed between us like something obscene, and every face in that private room of the Valente compound turned toward it at once. Image after image scrolled past under the soft amber lamplight, gruesome things, bloodied infants rendered in some sick artist's hand, effigies scratched over with curses, each one stamped with my name at the top like a confession signed in my own blood. The timestamps ran the full length of her pregnancy, month after month, a patient campaign of malice. All of it seemingly sent from my account.
But I had cut the cord to this bloodline long ago. Since the day I walked out of the Valente name's shadow, I had never once reached for Nadia. Not a message. Not a word. Not even in the dark hours when loneliness might have made a weaker woman crawl back. I knew it the way I knew my own heartbeat, and yet the room was already deciding otherwise, already sharpening itself against me.
"You vile disgrace." The Don of the Valente Family moved first. My father crossed the marble in three strides and struck me open-handed across the face, the crack of it loud in the stillness. "You can't carry a child yourself, so now you'll curse your own sister's?"
The blow snapped my head sideways. Heat bloomed across my cheek, but it was the Matriarch's eyes that cut deeper, my mother watching from her chair with nothing in them but hatred and a cold, curdled disgust, as though I were something that had crawled up out of the harbor to stain her floors.
Then the room erupted, voices overlapping, the household's soldiers and their women, capos who had known me since I was small, all of them finding their courage now that the Don had drawn first blood.
"I always said it. A woman broken like that, hollowed out, she rots on the inside too."
"So poisoned she couldn't even spare her own pregnant sister. Her own blood."
"A creature like this deserved to have her womb taken. Pity the man bound to her. What sin in a past life earns you a barren, heartless wife?"
The words landed like stones, each one thrown with the easy cruelty of people who had never once feared for their own place at this table. Dazed, my ears ringing, I did the thing I had done for three years without ever choosing to. I turned toward Lorenzo.
For three years he had been the one wall between me and the world's teeth. The Underboss of the Falcone Family, a man whose stillness could empty a room faster than a raised gun, and he had spent that stillness standing at my shoulder. When the Families whispered, he silenced them. When my own bloodline spat at me, he had been the one hand that did not. I turned to him now the way a drowning thing turns to the last light on the water.
But this time he did not defend me.
His fingers closed around my wrist instead, hard, the grip of a man who fixed bodies for the Family and knew exactly how much pressure a bone would take. His voice came sharp, edged with a fury I had never once had aimed at me.
"Serafina. How could you do something so vile?"
I felt the room lean in. Somewhere behind me a glass was set down on wood with deliberate care, and the sound was enormous.
"Do you truly need to drag every soul in this house down into the mud with you before you're satisfied?" His grip tightened. "Apologize to Nadia. Now. Stop pulling innocent people into your misery."
How could I have forgotten. Between Nadia and me, he would always, always stand on her side of the blood. I had known it in my marrow for three years and let myself pretend otherwise, and the pretending had cost me everything a body could be made to give.
I lifted my head. My thumb had already found the empty band of skin on my finger, pressing hard against the ghost of a ring that was no longer there, the phantom weight of everything they had taken from me one careful cut at a time. I forced the tears back down my throat. I would not let them fall in this room, before these people, on this floor.
"Why should I apologize for something I never did?" My voice came out steadier than I felt, low and even in the ringing quiet. "You call her innocent, Lorenzo. Tell me, then. Are you? Is she?"
Something moved across his face. Just for the span of a single breath, a flinch behind the surgeon's calm, something that looked almost like guilt surfacing from a place he kept locked. His eyes caught mine and held, and for one heartbeat I saw the truth swimming just beneath the ice of him. Then he shut it away, the way a man closes a wound he does not want to look at, and steeled himself into the cold thing the Family had made him.
"Serafina, enough." His jaw set. "You're making me doubt everything I ever believed. Perhaps taking you in out of pity was the greatest mistake of my life."
I let out a small laugh. It surprised even me, quiet and broken and strangely free, and I lifted my hand to wipe away the tears that had gathered at last at the corners of my eyes before they could betray me.
Lorenzo. You don't have to wonder anymore. And you don't have to keep pretending.
