“There’s no need,” I said flatly. “She doesn’t need it anymore.”
The night my mother passed, I had called Salvatore countless times. Not once did he pick up.
With each ring, the same cold, automated voice repeated itself, hollow and distant. At first, I was furious. But as the hours bled into days, the anger faded, replaced by a numbness I couldn’t shake.
For a moment, I considered dragging it into the open, demanding the Vitale name answer for what it had done. For the stress. For the pain that had worsened my mother’s dying. My mother, the last thin thread of the Falcone bloodline, gone while the Don who’d married into nothing looked away.
But every time I closed my eyes, I heard her last words: Don’t hold onto hate, Adriana. Let it go. Live your life freely… gracefully… happily.
So, I did. Or at least, I tried. Beneath the table, I turned her thin gold ring twice around my finger, slow, without looking down.
Salvatore, however, still thought I was upset about Gemma’s little stunt. His brow furrowed, his voice edged with impatience.
“Adriana, you don’t need to keep holding on to these little things. The past is the past.”
To him, it was over. A closed chapter.
To me? It never would be.
I lifted my gaze, locking eyes with him, my expression stone cold.
“My mother is gone,” I said, flat and final. “You won’t find her.”
Salvatore’s face darkened. His voice turned sharp, cutting through the still air of the clinic corridor. “Adriana! Don’t go too far! No matter what, she’s still your mother. How can you even say something like that? She’s sick. Where else would she be if not in a bed?”
My fingers curled into fists, nails digging into my palms, the anger bubbling up from deep inside.
My mother had treated him like a son. She had given him everything, her warmth, her kindness, even the last of the Falcone money when he hit rock bottom and had nothing but his name. She had helped him rise when the streets had put him down.
And in return?
She never knew peace. Not even in her last moments.
That’s when Gemma spoke up, her voice dripping with false sincerity.
“Dr. Falcone, I know I was thoughtless before, and I’m really sorry. Can you forgive me? Salvatore really cares about Auntie. Please don’t be mad at him.” Her hand drifted to her belly, a half-second too late to mean anything.
The sound of my mother spoken from those lips sent a searing rage through me.
“You don’t deserve to say her name!”
The control I’d been holding on to snapped. I shot up from my chair, fury flooding my veins.
“Get out. I don’t want to see you.”
Salvatore stepped in front of Gemma instinctively, as if shielding her from me. His eyes went cold.
“Adriana, are you really going to act like this?” His voice was harsh, edged with disappointment. “Is this how you carry the name they trust you with? A house doctor who loses her head?”
Before I could respond, he pulled out his phone, dialed a number, and turned his back to me. Right in front of me.
His voice was ice.
“I want it known that the Family’s doctor forgot herself tonight. Adriana Falcone. See that word gets where it needs to go…”
A bitter laugh threatened to rise in my throat, but I swallowed it back down.
So this was who he was now.
Not the man who’d promised to keep me safe when he had nothing. Not the man who once called me his home.
The man standing in front of me now didn’t even care enough to hear my side.
He finished the call and turned, walking out without another word. Gemma trailed after him, but just before she reached the door, she looked back at me.
And smiled.
It was smug. Triumphant.
Like she was saying, See? Salvatore is on my side. You? You’re nothing but a joke.
They didn’t cast me out of the Family’s medical apparatus, but the word came down all the same. A warning. A blackened name whispered through the right ears.
Rosaria Marchetti heard what happened and didn’t waste a second stepping in.
“I’ve arranged your early passage,” she told me the next day, her voice firm. She removed her reading glasses and folded them slowly. “You’re going to the neutral mission. The ceasefire territory, where none of these families can touch you.”
I didn’t argue.
I packed up my things, signed what needed signing, and went home to the estate that had never felt like mine.
Salvatore still hadn’t come back. But his name moved through the Family’s circles all the same.
Word reached me the way everything reaches a wife who has stopped mattering. An image passed hand to hand. The grey shape of Gemma’s unborn child, and beneath it, in Salvatore’s own hand: Can’t wait to meet you, little one.
Then another. A freshly painted nursery in a wing of the house I would never enter. Hurry up and get here. Mama and Papa can’t wait to hold you.
He made no effort to keep it from me.
Maybe he thought I wouldn’t care.
Maybe he wanted me to see.
I stared at it for a long time before I let it be known, coldly and deliberately, that I had seen. That I approved. A small, dead thing offered up like a blessing.
An hour later, the door closed. Word came that the Don wanted no further contact from me. Cut off. Severed.
I wasn’t angry.
Instead, I severed him first. Quietly, completely, with one final decision of my own.
From that moment on, Salvatore Vitale no longer existed in my world.
Across the city, Salvatore sat in the back room behind his legitimate front, staring at his phone. A strange unease settled in his chest, a feeling he couldn’t quite name. He rolled the heavy signet ring against his thumb, once, twice, and could not find the shape of the thing that bothered him.
His phone buzzed with an incoming call.
Gemma.
He hesitated.
For the first time in a long time, he didn’t answer at once.
Salvatore Vitale had been carrying a heavy weight of guilt for days now.
Maybe it was because he hadn’t gone to see Adriana’s mother. Or maybe it was the way Adriana had been so distant, a million miles away even when she stood close enough to touch. Either way, something was gnawing at him, refusing to let go.
That evening, he closed out the night’s business early, sending a soldier to fetch the finest tonics money could buy before he went to the clinic himself. He barely got through the door when he caught two of the house doctors speaking low nearby.
“Dr. Falcone’s mother passed a few nights ago. We were the ones who took her to be buried, quietly, the way the Family does. You’re her son-in-law, aren’t you? You didn’t know?”
