Since there were no relatives left under the Bellini roof, there was no need for a wake, no need for the old rituals that a Family observed for its own.
I stayed at my father's bedside a while, telling him about my mother, and about myself.
I talked in broken pieces until the early morning. Before I left, I looked at my father, who had lain motionless for ten years, and said with a crying voice.
"Papa, I'm tired."
The next morning, my mother was cremated. Then I placed the urn into a box and carried it back to the Gallo compound.
Along with it, I carried the divorce agreement I'd paid a man to draft — a document that, in this world, no one severed without a Family's blessing or a body.
The moment I stepped inside, I bumped into Salvatore and the women seated around the long dining table, talking and laughing as if the estate belonged to them.
"Sign it."
My voice was cold as ice as I slammed the papers down on the table. The laughter died. Silverware went still against porcelain.
"So. You ran off in the middle of the night just to bring back this."
"Adriana, you've really gone too far."
I held the urn tight against me, my head lowered.
"Salvatore, let's just let each other go."
"I don't love you anymore."
Once, I would have argued. Once, I would have fought him when the temperature in a room turned, would have pointed my finger at his face and asked if every vow he'd sworn me had been a joke.
For most of these ten years I'd held onto a sliver of hope, that he'd forgive me, that this alliance sealed in someone else's blood could still be made into a marriage.
So when he said he liked wild women, I learned to please him in the dark.
When he liked the innocent ones, I wore the clothes he favored to make him smile.
But then one woman after another moved in under this roof, and my heart grew colder, bit by bit.
The tricks I'd once used to please him became my shame, and then his instrument to humiliate me.
"Adriana, what's this you dropped..."
"Lorenzo Falcone?"
Gina bent and picked up the marker of protection I'd let fall to the floor, reading the name aloud, her fingers already drifting to the pearls at her throat.
So it was Lorenzo.
Salvatore's lifelong nemesis. The blood feud across the ocean, the name every Gallo was raised to hate, though Salvatore had never once stood face to face with the man.
Salvatore's expression darkened all at once, and he crossed the room and slapped me hard.
"So that's it. You don't love me anymore because you found someone else. Him."
"Do you even know what Lorenzo Falcone is?"
My ears rang. I couldn't stand steady. The urn cracked in my hands with a sound that filled the silent room.
Watching the ashes drift into the air, I froze, unable to move.
I dropped to my knees on instinct, trying to gather the ashes back into the broken urn.
No matter how I tried, it was useless.
Gina picked up the milk sitting nearby and poured it out over the floor. The others followed her, one after another.
The fine ashes turned instantly into sticky, ruined clumps.
"Ah!"
Something in me snapped. I went crazy. I seized a stool and swung it at Gina.
Salvatore didn't even have time to react before she went down, clutching her head.
"Salvatore."
"It hurts so much."
Someone called for the Family's kept physician, then an ambulance. Salvatore dragged me by the arm and forced me to stay at the hospital.
"If anything happens to her, you die with her."
That day I was made to give blood, again and again, transfusion after transfusion into Gina, until the doctor said no more could be taken.
Salvatore let me go then. He said it was my own fault.
I hid in my father's ward for those days and never went out.
"There you are. Thanks to that little stunt of yours, Salvatore treats me like a queen now."
"Is this your father? Why isn't he moving?"
Gina, basking in Salvatore's favor, carried herself with a new arrogance, the way a kept woman does once she believes the Family stands behind her.
She kept fiddling with my father's oxygen tube, asking me, all curiosity, what it was for.
"Don't touch that."
I pushed her away and she stumbled back a few steps, clutching her head.
The next second she rushed forward and yanked my father's oxygen tube loose. She laughed as she held it in her hands, playing with it.
