On the day my betrothal-pact was to be sealed, the boy I'd grown up loving broke it before God and every family in the room.
In front of them all, Marco Rosso took Vittoria Volpe by the hand and said it loud enough to carry to the back of the hall: this was the woman he meant to take, pact or no pact.
My father collapsed where he stood. The old weakness in his heart seized him, and by the time the soldiers got him out of the District and to the hospital, there was nothing left for any doctor to save. Don Vincenzo Castellano, who had ruled the Harbor with his ring turned once around his finger before every judgment, died of an insult he could not avenge.
In the darkest hour of my life, only one man stayed at my side. Lorenzo Marchetti, the other boy from my childhood, heir to a Family older and harder than my own.
He comforted me. He steadied me. He walked me out of the pit I'd fallen into.
In the end, I married him. Two bloodlines bound under one oath.
Seven years of that union. Tender, respectful, devoted. The kind of match every Family in the District spoke of with envy.
When I learned I was carrying, I thought I was the happiest woman alive. Any day now, I'd be a mother. An heir to the Marchetti blood.
Then, the night before the holiday, when the whole compound went quiet for Christmas, I happened to see the messages on his phone. The ones between him and his oldest friend.
"Lorenzo, if Elena Castellano ever found out the child she carries is really yours and Vittoria's, made in a clinic and slipped into her like a counterfeit heir, can you imagine how it would break her?"
"Don't forget. Seven years ago, you and Rosso already broke her once."
Lorenzo had sent back a careless little smile. "Relax. She'll never know."
"Last time I told her it was just an appendix operation. The hospital's been taken care of. There's no way it slips. The doctors there owe the Family their lives."
"Vittoria's health is fragile. To carry a child herself would be too dangerous for her."
"Once the heir is born, I'll cut things off with Vittoria completely."
"I'll spend the rest of my life loving Elena properly. Call it her compensation."
I was shaking all over, the tears already sliding down.
So all of it. Seven years of a loving marriage. Had been a performance. An arrangement, like everything else in this world of pacts and tribute.
Lorenzo was no different from Rosso. The woman he loved was never me. It was Vittoria Volpe.
If he didn't love me.
Then I'd step aside on my own and let them have their happiness.
——
I'd barely set the phone back exactly where it had lain when Lorenzo came out of the bathroom.
I lay in bed, pretending to watch the television.
That familiar trace of his cologne drifted over me, expensive and clean, the scent I'd once breathed in like safety.
He looked at me with all the tenderness in the world, his hand settling on the soft curve of my waist.
"Elena, it's been hard holding back all this time, hasn't it?"
His voice went low and warm, and when his lips came down toward mine, I pushed him away.
Lorenzo stared at me, thrown.
"Elena, what's wrong?"
In all our years married, it was the first time I'd ever refused him. No wonder he looked so startled. A man like him was not refused anything.
I answered flatly. "I just don't want to hurt the baby."
His face eased a little. "I already asked the doctor. The pregnancy's stable now. As long as we're not too rough, it's fine."
Then he leaned in again, his eyes soft with longing.
The old me would have given in already, helpless against it.
But now my whole body felt like it had been left in cold seawater, unable to feel a single degree of warmth between two people in love.
Lorenzo was my husband. And inside me I was carrying the child he'd made in some clinic with another woman, a false heir slipped into the Castellano blood to corrupt it from within.
The thought of it cut straight through me.
I pushed him away a second time. "Forget it. I'm too tired tonight. I'm not in the mood."
He didn't press. He only nodded. "Must be the long day. Let's get some sleep, then."
He switched off the television and the lights, lay down, and wrapped an arm around my waist.
It was his favorite way to hold me. In no time at all he was asleep, the breathing of a man with nothing on his conscience.
But my mind wouldn't stop spinning, and I lay awake the whole night through. In the dark I pressed my father's signet ring into my palm until the crest bit into the skin, the only thing in this house these people had never managed to take from me.
Deep in the night, once Lorenzo was sound asleep, I slipped out of bed, went to the study, and opened his laptop.
Seven years married, and this was the first time I had ever gone looking through his things, the way an enemy Family does before it moves.
It took no effort at all to find the folder he'd hidden away.
I opened it. Photographs packed it edge to edge, a thousand at least.
Tokyo. Paris. Turkey…
Different backdrops, the same scene in each. Vittoria Volpe and Lorenzo, wrapped sweetly in each other's arms.
