Barely thirty seconds passed before his phone lit up on the corner of my desk, the screen casting a pale glow over the dark walnut grain. I didn't need to lean in to read it. Bianca's name floated there, and beneath it a message that landed like a small, deliberate blade.
[You silly! Who sends a dozen milkshakes all at once? You trying to turn me into a little piggy? I'm shivering over here!]
I let my eyes slide back to the screen in front of me, unhurried, indifferent, and went on squaring the edges of the ledgers and dossiers that crowded my desk. In a Family where every account had to balance to the last dollar of tribute, I had long ago learned to make my face balance too. Nothing showed. Nothing ever did.
We got back to the estate a little after eleven. The car rolled up the gravel drive past the soldiers stationed at the gate, men who nodded to Lorenzo and never once looked at me, and the moment my heels touched the cold marble of the foyer I went straight to the bedroom and began packing my things. Quietly. The way a person learns to move when noise has a price.
When Lorenzo came in, freshly showered, the scent of his cedar soap trailing him like cologne and authority both, he noticed the vanity looked emptier than it should. A frown crossed his face, the faint pull of a man cataloguing a detail that didn't fit. But it passed. He didn't seem to mind it.
"I'm going to Paris next month," he said, drying the back of his neck. "Business. If there's anything you want, make a list. I'll have it brought back."
I didn't even hesitate. "No. I don't want anything. Thank you anyway."
After all, I was leaving in a few days. There was no point in wanting things from a man who had only ever loaned me his name and never given it. What good was a list of trinkets to a woman about to walk out from under a Don who let no one walk out alive?
Then, without warning, he threw the towel onto the bed, and his eyes went cold. That particular Falcone cold, the kind that made grown enforcers find somewhere else to look. "So what is this," he said. "You're sulking because I brought you the wrong breakfast? That's what we're doing?"
I opened my mouth to tell him I wasn't angry, that anger had nothing to do with it anymore, but he scoffed before a single word could leave me.
"You know I have no patience for women who make a drama of nothing. Adriana, you're being out of line." He said it with a thread of disgust laced through the disappointment, the way a man might speak to a soldier who'd embarrassed him at the table in front of the other captains.
And with that he stormed into his study and pulled the heavy door shut behind him. The slam echoed down the corridor, swallowed by all that obsidian and silence, and somewhere below a guard's footsteps paused, then resumed, pretending he'd heard nothing. In this house, everyone had learned the art of hearing nothing.
In seven years, he had always been the first to wield the silence between us like a blade left on the table. And every single time, I had been the one to lower my eyes, to soften my voice, to knock on that study door and humble myself until he decided I'd earned my way back into his good graces.
But this time I only arched a brow at the closed door, reached over, and switched off the bedside lamp.
He stayed in the study all night. And for the first time in seven years, no knock ever came. No quiet apology pressed against the wood. I turned the thin silver band on my right hand once, slowly, the cheap little ring he had never bothered to replace with a real one, and then I let my hand still and I slept.
The next morning I made breakfast for both of us, the way I always had, the way the Family expected the Don's woman to. I finished my own portion and was reaching for my coat to leave for the social club when the study door opened and he came out.
He was already on the phone, half his attention given to whatever soldier or shipment waited on the other end, when he barked the order at me without so much as turning his head.
"Take the day off. By five o'clock I need you to make me a fondant cake. An exact replica."
