Before I could react, Nadia dropped into the pooling red as though her bones had simply given out, and the sound that tore from her throat was surgical in its precision — a scream pitched to carry through every corridor of the Falcone back-room infirmary, past the soldiers stationed at the doors, past the men who knew better than to hear anything at all.
"Lorenzo! Help me!"
He came the way he always came, filling the doorway before the echo of her voice had died, and the room seemed to shrink around him. The associates near the wall stiffened and dropped their eyes. Even the sterile air changed weight. His face bled white as his gaze swept the scene, the crimson spreading across the tile, my sister crumpled at its center. His eyes found the blood first, and I watched the color drain out of him. "Nadia! What happened?!"
She curled her hands over her lower belly, her whole body folding into the performance, and the sobs came in waves timed to the pulse of his fear.
"Lorenzo… I only wanted to talk things through with my sister. To make peace between us, the way famiglia should. But she — she said that since I was lucky enough to carry a child, she'd see to it I never carried another one again. She tried to destroy me."
His head turned toward me. Slowly. There was no warmth left in that look, nothing of the man who had once slid a ring onto my finger in front of both bloodlines and called it forever. His voice came out honed to an edge. "Serafina. How could you?"
I said nothing. There was nothing that would land in a room already decided. He didn't wait for it. He bent and gathered Nadia against his chest as if she were something breakable and holy, and swept her toward the operating room at the heart of the infirmary — the room where the Family's Knife did his quiet work, where bodies were healed or unmade and no one asked which. Then he pivoted back and his hand closed around my wrist like a manacle, all that surgeon's control turned to iron.
"Get her to the blood bank. Now."
The moment we crossed the threshold, he was already issuing orders to the medical fixers who answered only to him. "She needs an emergency transfusion. Take twice the usual draw from Serafina. Immediately."
The head nurse hesitated. Her eyes flicked to my chart, then to the pallor of my skin, and something in her wavered — the last human reflex in a room built to have none. "Underboss… her oxygen is already dangerously low. If we take more, it could be fatal."
His answer did not rise. It didn't need to. Cold, absolute, the voice of a man whose word was law inside these walls. "I know her condition better than anyone in this house. Do it."
I laughed. It came out of me bitter and thin, barely a sound at all. So he wasn't even bothering to pretend anymore. All those months of the mask, the careful theater of a husband, and it fell away here on this tile as though it had never weighed a thing. I pressed my thumb hard against the bare band of skin where his ring used to sit, the phantom groove of everything they had taken from me, and I let the truth settle into my chest like a stone dropped into deep water.
He reached for the family consent form, the pact that gave the Family the right to open my veins whenever the golden princess needed filling. He signed without reading. And while his attention was fixed on Nadia's rising and falling chest, I slid a single page in among the rest — a severed pact, the document that ended the blood-bound union between us. I did not draw a breath watching him. His pen moved across the line without pause, without a flicker of recognition, his signature landing beside mine as carelessly as if he were initialing an invoice.
There. Done. He had cut me loose and never once looked down to see what his own hand had signed.
They drained what they wanted from me. I felt it leave — the cold climbing my arm, the room tilting soft at its edges, the fluorescent lights blurring into halos. When they had taken enough, more than enough, he did not spare me so much as a glance. He turned on his heel and strode back toward the operating room, and I was left in the chair like something emptied and set aside.
I made my weak, shaking legs carry me. One step, then another, my hand braced along the cold wall, following at a distance the way a soldier trails his Don without being summoned. By the time I reached the door and looked through the narrow glass, the scene inside knocked what little breath I had left clean out of my lungs.
Nadia was draped against him, unhurt, radiant, her slim fingers tracing lazy circles over his chest. She tipped her face up at him and let her lower lip push into a pout. "Lorenzo… how did you know I wasn't really hurt?"
He laughed — low, indulgent, the sound of a man entirely at ease — and tapped the tip of her nose with one finger. "Cara. I'm a surgeon. I've spent my life with real blood on my hands. Did you think I couldn't tell it from cherry syrup poured out on a floor?"
His voice dropped further, warm in a way it had never once been for me.
"Besides. This was Serafina's doing from the start. We were going to bleed her again in a few days regardless. Since she was already here tonight, it only made sense to take it fresh. It'll bring you back faster after the birth."
I stood frozen at the glass. Something colder than the blood loss moved through me, ice threading down into my hands, my feet, the hollow behind my ribs. Living tribute. That was all I had ever been to them. A vein they kept warm and walking so that when the princess needed filling, the supply was near at hand.
I turned to go. There was nothing left in that room for me, nothing that had ever been mine.
And as I turned, I found Nadia's eyes already waiting on me. She had known I was there. She had wanted me there. She smirked, slow and certain, and without letting her gaze drop from mine for even a moment, she lifted her chin and pressed her mouth to his.
