To the rest of the Family, I was Mrs. Moretti, the Don's wife, the orphan girl who had married into the bloodline. In truth, I felt less like a wife and more like something he kept on a leash. An on-call hand. An asset that drove itself to him when summoned.
A moment later my phone buzzed against the marble counter, the pale glow of a dropped location pin lighting up the dark kitchen. I let out a slow breath, the kind that hurt going out, and reached for my keys. The bruise along my ribs from the crash still pulled with every movement, but pain had never once been an excuse he accepted. I pushed through it the way I pushed through everything in that house, and went out into the night to drive.
The address belonged to one of the Family's private lounges, a back room behind a legitimate front, the air thick with cigar smoke and the sweet rot of spilled liquor when I stepped inside. I found Dominic slumped low on the leather couch, looking utterly defeated. For a man so feared, so ambitious and ice-composed that grown soldiers lowered their eyes when he passed, it was a rare and unsettling sight.
One of the men around him pressed another glass of dark amber into his hand. "Come on, Dominic. She's just a courier. A new face in the rotation. If you want a woman, it isn't hard for a man like you to take one."
"Gianna turned you down? So what. There are a dozen women in this city who'd cut their own sisters for a night at your table."
Someone in the shadowed corner snickered and muttered beneath his breath, "Like Eva."
Laughter rolled through the room, loose and ugly with drink.
So that was it. That was the reason the Don of the Moretti Family was drowning himself in a bottle. Because Gianna had told him no.
My hand froze on the cold brass of the doorknob. For a long moment I simply stood there, jaw locked tight, feeling the laughter settle over my skin like ash. My fingers found the thin wedding band on my left hand and turned it once, slowly, the way I always did when something inside me was deciding whether to break or hold. Then I pushed the door fully open and walked in.
The room went silent in an instant. Not the silence of respect. The silence of men caught.
One of his men looked up, startled, then arranged his mouth into a smile that didn't reach his eyes. "Well. Look who's gracing us. Mrs. Moretti herself."
I didn't give him so much as a glance. I looked straight at my husband. "I'm here to take you home."
Dominic rose slowly from the couch, his face unreadable, that practiced blankness he wore like armor. He swayed once, the liquor catching him, then crossed the floor to me. Without a word he draped a heavy arm across my shoulders and leaned his weight into me, the scent of whiskey and Turkish tobacco closing over us both. I bore it. I always bore it.
Before I could turn for the door, a voice slid through the quiet.
"Don Moretti." Gianna stood just inside the doorway, small and trembling, one hand pressed to the frame as though she needed it to stay upright. "If you were only going to have your wife come and collect you, why did you send for me?"
I turned to look at her. Her face was crumpled into something wounded, lip quivering, eyes glassed with tears that fell at exactly the right moment. And for the briefest fraction of a second, before the sorrow returned, her gaze flicked over me, flat and cold and assessing. Then the grief was back, seamless as a closed door.
"You didn't have to go this far," she whispered, "just to humiliate me in front of everyone."
Dominic's expression changed in an instant. The drunken slackness burned off him, replaced by something far colder. He straightened away from me, and I felt the temperature of the whole room drop with him. He turned to his men, and his voice came out low and lethal.
"Who used my phone to send for her?"
No one answered. The silence in the room thickened until I could hear ice settling in an abandoned glass.
"I said." His hand rose to the heavy signet ring on his finger and turned it, slow and deliberate. "Who did it?"
His voice climbed, and with it the pressure in the room, that invisible weight only a man of his rank could press down on every soul present. No one dared speak. No one so much as shifted his weight. They stood there, made men and soldiers alike, frozen beneath the gaze of their Don, while his wife stood unseen at his side and the snake by the door wept her perfect, weightless tears.
