I looked up at the man in front of me, his gentle features softening under the dim light of my apartment. My vision blurred as tears welled up in my eyes, threatening to spill over. I didn't understand why, but my chest felt tight, as though the air had been sucked out of the room. The ache was unbearable.
When Adrian saw my tears fall, he panicked. He fumbled to wipe them away, his movements clumsy and unpracticed, those same hands that could command a room full of his father's soldiers rendered useless by the sight of me crying. "Why are you crying? Did someone mess with you? Tell me the name and I'll take care of them!" he said with a mix of urgency and concern. His jaw shifted once to the side, the way it always did when he was already constructing a version of events that placed him at the center as protector, as though the very thing hurting me could never be him.
Since childhood, Adrian had been the neighborhood terror. Not just any neighborhood—we'd grown up on the same stretch of old Sicilian-blood territory in South Brooklyn, where the Falcone and Moretti families shared a block and an uneasy peace. He was undisciplined and reckless, always picking fights with older boys, running numbers he was too young to understand, and his mother often chased after him through the narrow brownstone corridors, her voice sharp enough to cut glass. In contrast, I had always been the frail one. Born prematurely, I grew up under the constant watchful eyes of my parents. My father, Rowan Moretti, a capo-level elder whose word carried weight in three boroughs, would not let me play outside with the other children. I could only sit by the window of our second-floor parlor, watching them run and laugh through the gated courtyard below, longing to join.
Every time Adrian saw me sitting by that window while he played chase with the other kids on the block, he'd sneak over, slipping me a handful of treats stolen from the corner deli his family owned as a front. He'd pinch my soft cheeks with a mischievous smile and whisper, "When can you come out and play with me?"
As I grew older, my health improved, and by middle school my parents finally relented and let me venture outside. Adrian was overjoyed—he treated me as though I were made of glass, something precious that belonged to him by proximity and persistence. "Bianca," he'd tell me solemnly, squaring his narrow shoulders as if rehearsing for the man he intended to become, "if anyone dares to mess with you, just tell them my name. They won't dare touch you." Even then, the Falcone name carried enough weight on those streets to make grown men step aside.
From then on, I was never alone. Adrian was always by my side, taking me wherever I wanted to go. If anyone so much as looked at me the wrong way, he'd show up like a storm, ready to shield me. He was my safe haven, my unshakable protector. Or so I believed. In the world we came from, protection and possession wore the same face, and I had been too young to know the difference.
When we entered college, it felt natural for us to take the next step and become a couple. He grew even more attentive, showering me with a love so sweet and devoted it made me believe in forever. He sent soldiers' sons to walk me between classes when he couldn't be there himself, brought me to every Family Sunday dinner as though my seat beside him had already been carved in stone.
Then Serafina entered the picture.
She was everything I wasn't—brilliant, beautiful, and confident. She had a way of carrying herself that drew people in, a brightness that glittered like the champagne she always seemed to be holding. She and Adrian were in the same major, sharing a connection I couldn't understand—late study sessions that bled into bar tabs at clubs under Falcone protection, a language of ambition and calculation that excluded me by design. At first, Adrian tried to include me, translating their technical jargon so I wouldn't feel left out. But eventually, he grew impatient.
"You won't get it anyway," he said one day, brushing me off without looking up from his phone. "Just go do your own thing."
From that moment, their conversations deepened, ranging from class discussions to late-night chats online. They became inseparable, their connection undeniable. Meanwhile, the bond between Adrian and me began to strain. We grew more distant and our conversations became increasingly rare, reduced to nothing more than goodnight and casual greetings—texts that read like obligations rather than love.
Friends tried to warn me, urging me to keep an eye on their growing closeness, but I waved them off. I told myself that even in a relationship, people deserved privacy. I trusted him—I trusted us.
But trust, I learned, could be a cruel teacher.
