Afterward, I returned to the small apartment I'd bought for myself, a third-floor walk-up in a brownstone on a street the Moretti family owned outright but kept off the books. It was the one piece of territory I held in my own name, modest by the standards of either family, furnished with things I had chosen without asking anyone's permission. The building's stoop was watched by a rotation of neighborhood men who reported to my father's crew, though they pretended to be playing cards and smoking.
What I didn't expect was to find Adrian there.
The lock was undisturbed. He had a key. He had always had a key, because for eight years I had never thought to take it back. The sound of the door opening caught his attention. He closed his laptop, the screen going dark over whatever business he'd been reviewing, and looked up at me from my own couch as if everything were perfectly normal. As if his face hadn't been on every screen in the city six hours ago, down on one knee before another woman.
"Busy day at work? You're home late."
His voice carried the same easy warmth it always had. He sat in the lamplight with his sleeves rolled to the forearm, his jacket draped over the arm of the couch, looking so much like the man I had loved at nineteen that my chest seized before my mind could catch up.
I slipped off my shoes at the door, my mind racing. "Why are you here?"
"I had a business dinner nearby," he said casually, standing up and walking toward me as he always did, with that unhurried confidence that came from a lifetime of being the only heir to a powerful family, a man who had never once been denied entry to any room he chose to enter. "Thought I'd stop by to check on you."
As he got closer, a familiar floral scent hit me. Serafina's perfume. It clung to the collar of his shirt, sweet and heavy and unmistakable, the same fragrance that had filled every society photograph of the two of them together for the past month. Revulsion churned in my stomach. I instinctively took a step back, dodging his outstretched arms, while a sting crept into my eyes and nose.
"What's wrong?" he asked lightly, as if unaware of what he'd done. As if the perfume of his future bride was not soaked into the fabric reaching toward me.
"Nothing," I replied stiffly. "Well, you've seen me, alive and breathing. You can go now."
His smile faltered, but he quickly recovered with a soft laugh. "Last week, you were upset because I hadn't been spending more time with you. Now I've cleared my schedule just to be with you and you won't come near me? Come on, Bianca, don't do this."
I squinted, as my memory replayed the events of yesterday.
Yesterday was my birthday. In this world, birthdays inside the families were marked with deliberation, with dinners and toasts and the quiet acknowledgment that another year of survival was itself a gift worth honoring. I waited all day, from the moment the sun rose until it set, hoping to hear from him. But not a single call or text came. By nightfall, the silence had become unbearable, filling every room of the apartment until the walls seemed to press inward with it. I decided to go look for him. Before I could, though, a message arrived on my phone from an unfamiliar number.
Curiosity turned into dread as I played it. The video showed Adrian, standing in the center of the Falcone family's main office, the room where sit-downs were held and deals were brokered beneath crystal chandeliers and the painted ceiling that depicted some Renaissance saint none of them believed in. He was on one knee before Serafina DeLuca. The room was filled with cheers and laughter, with soldiers clapping and capos raising glasses, a celebration so public and so thorough that it could only have been planned for weeks.
I couldn't believe my eyes. My mind raced, searching for some explanation, any reason that could make this make sense. Perhaps it was theater, a political performance the Falcones needed for the DeLuca alliance. Perhaps there was a private message waiting for me somewhere, a reassurance that this was strategy, not feeling. Desperation carried me to the Falcone social club, determined to hear the truth from him directly. I moved through the night streets the way any Moretti daughter moved, quickly and with purpose, past the storefronts our family protected, past the corner where the neighborhood's watchers sat in parked cars, past the boundary line where Moretti territory gave way to Falcone ground.
But instead of finding answers, I stumbled upon his conversation with his associate in that narrow, photograph-lined hallway.
Bianca's been mine for eight years. Everyone knows that. What choice does she have but to wait for me?
I had waited. For eight long years, I'd waited for a man who never truly saw me. Every word I overheard was a dagger, shattering the remnants of the trust I had so stubbornly clung to. It was in that moment I realized what I had become: a fool, holding on to a love that was never mine to begin with. Not a partner. Not even a future wife. A possession left on a shelf, gathering dust, too loyal to leave and too invisible to honor.
Thinking back to his words, to the laughter in that video, the pain in my chest was overwhelming, leaving me gasping for air. I had been a joke all along. The faithful Moretti girl, the patient one, the one who waited while the city whispered and the families watched and Adrian Falcone gave his knee and his ring to someone else.
He stood in my apartment now, smelling of another woman's perfume, and looked at me as though I should be grateful he had come.
I said nothing. The silence between us stretched like a wire pulled taut, humming with everything I could not yet bring myself to say. Somewhere outside, a car door closed on the street below, and one of the neighborhood watchers coughed. The lamp beside the couch cast Adrian's shadow long across the floor, and for the first time in eight years, I saw it for what it was: the silhouette of a man who had never intended to stand beside me in the light.
