I couldn't shake the memory of how the pact had been sealed. Six months ago, on what should have been a quiet passage through Costa-controlled hills, a rival line had sprung their ambush. In the chaos of it, throwing myself between Lorenzo and the men who'd come for Vitale blood, I'd taken the fall meant for him. He walked away without a scratch. I was carried out broken and unconscious, the kind of wound that should have buried a Romano daughter in unmarked ground.
The Family's own physician reached me in time. I lived. And on the day they cleared me to leave the safehouse, Lorenzo came through the door with a bouquet of white roses and the air of a man who had decided something irreversible. He went down on one knee, and for once the cold heir of the Vitale line looked like he meant every word he spoke.
"Addie," he said, his voice thick with something I had believed was devotion, "you took a blade that was meant for me. Let me protect you for the rest of mine."
Surprise and a stupid, blinding joy closed my hand over my mouth. The men around us, soldiers and made men who never smiled, murmured their approval. I slid the ring onto my finger and let myself believe it was the beginning of a life bound by something more than honor and debt. I let myself believe a Vitale could love a Romano for who she was, and not for what she owed.
Across all our years, Lorenzo had been steady. Composed. The kind of man whose calm made a room of dangerous people sit a little straighter. If today had not happened, I'd have sworn on my own blood that he loved me. But now he sat in the passenger seat with his eyes fixed on nothing, the distance in them colder than the night glass, and that certainty was simply gone. Bled out somewhere between the social club and this road.
I drove in silence, both hands on the wheel, already turning over the unthinkable in my mind. Ending it. Walking away from a contract sealed between two bloodlines, the kind of thing a Romano woman did not do and survive intact. Five years felt long. A lifetime chained to a man who had betrayed me in every way that mattered except the legal one felt longer. The thought of standing before the priest tomorrow, of binding my name to his while his heart lived in another woman's hands, made the bile rise in my throat.
Then his phone began to vibrate against the console, insistent, refusing to die. I hesitated, fingers tightening on the wheel. It buzzed again. And again. Reluctantly I picked it up. The screen surrendered at a touch. No code, no lock, nothing he'd ever bothered to hide, because in five years I had never once looked. Privacy was the one courtesy I had always given him, a courtesy he had clearly never thought he needed to guard.
But tonight curiosity and the raw need for an answer moved my thumb across the glass.
What I found was a message from Bianca.
Text me when you get home. When Lorenzo drinks, his head splits open by morning. Make him a bowl of broth to settle it and let it cool before you bring it to him. Wipe him down before he sleeps, or he'll be miserable all night.
She was using his phone. Sending instructions for his care as though she had every right. It was obscene. Here I sat, the woman who was meant to stand beside him before God and the families tomorrow, and instead I was receiving nursing orders from the daughter of the Costa line.
I pulled the car to the curb and breathed once, slow, before I let myself scroll. The history between them unspooled and unspooled with no bottom to it, messages stacked on messages, weeks of them, months. I couldn't reach the end. The thread was thick with Lorenzo's complaints and Bianca's scattered, careless replies, and one line surfaced like something rising out of dark water.
Honestly, I don't even want this union. But how do I look the Family in the eye when she took a blade for me?
She wears a name close to yours, but she's nothing beside you. She doesn't understand me at all.
The words went into me like a blade slipped between ribs, quiet and final.
If I knelt and asked you instead, would you say yes?
Bianca hadn't answered him right away. After a stretch of silence he'd written again, mocking himself, retreating. Forget it. I'm joking. Don't go quiet on me. I won't say it again.
The conversation had gone dark after that. Then this morning he had sent her word that the union of bloodlines was set, the formal invitation passed through the family. Her reply waited there on the screen like a trap that had already sprung.
If I asked you to come to me instead, would you?
He'd answered in seconds. Are you serious?
Just joking, she'd written back.
I could see it whole, the way you see a thing you can never unsee. If Bianca had meant it, truly meant it, Lorenzo would have left me standing at the altar before the candles were lit and never once looked back. I closed my hand around the bare place beneath my ring, around the finger itself, the way I had learned to when something inside me needed steadying. The tears came anyway, hot and useless, and behind them rose a black tide of hate and fury I had no name for. And under all of it, a single cold clarity: this hollow thing I'd called love was a debt I was better off never repaying.
While he slept it off, I booked a flight to Hudson Territory, neutral ground, the borderland away from the war where a Romano name meant nothing and could finally mean nothing. Same day as the union. Every detail arranged in the dark while he lay slack on the floor where I'd left him. Then I lay down on the bed, and I did not look at him again.
I woke to his voice. He was trying to keep it low, but the door stood open a crack, and the words came through clear and soft as smoke.
"Don't cry, Addie." Regret dripped from every syllable. "The one I love will always be you. Say the word, and there's nothing I wouldn't do."
A pause. The phone pressed to his ear, his hand curled around it the way a man holds the one thing he can't refuse.
"But the guests are already called. The families are coming. Even if I wanted to walk away from it now, there's no turning the thing back."
I don't know what she said to him. But he laughed, low and delighted, the laugh of a man who'd just been handed permission. "You clever little ghost. Fine. I'll do exactly as you say. When it's done, I'll put the pictures of us behind Francesca's. Those are the ones that belong to me."
I had already decided to end it. I had already booked the flight, already closed my fist over the ghost of a ring. And still it stunned me, the casual cruelty of it, that he would stand beside me in white before the whole world, then hang the photographs of his real life behind the lie of mine, like hiding a body behind a wall.
It landed like a second strike across an open wound, each blow deeper than the last. The fury made it hard to draw breath. Then the call ended, and he eased the door wider, peering in, and the startled guilt on his face when he found me sitting upright was almost worth the wreckage.
"Addie, why are you up?" he asked, confusion tangled with the thing he couldn't quite hide.
I took a slow breath, kept my face as cold and still as the obsidian floors of his father's house, closed my hand once more around my bare finger, and rose from the bed.
