When I opened my eyes again, I had become nothing at all. A wisp of smoke without weight, a soul untethered, drifting in the cold air above the wet asphalt.
Before I could take one last look at the broken thing that had been my body, at the ruin the rain was already washing thin along the gutter of that back road, a gust of wind caught me like a hand and carried me somewhere else. It pulled me across the sleeping city, across the territories stitched together in silence under the code that ruled us all, and it set me down at Lorenzo's side.
He was sitting on a bench in the emergency waiting area of a private hospital, the kind the Family kept quiet and clean, all pale marble and hushed footsteps. And Bianca was beside him.
She looked so weak. She leaned against Lorenzo's shoulder as though her bones had turned to water, her lashes low, her mouth curved into something soft. Her face was full of sweetness, full of a contentment so complete it turned my absent stomach. There was not a mark of illness on her that I could see. Only that borrowed frailty she wore like silk.
At that moment his phone rang.
It was his mother. Carmela.
"Adriana didn't come home for your name-day feast?" I heard the old woman's voice thread through the speaker, warm and wounded at once. She had cooked for the whole house. She had waited.
"I think she's sulking on purpose," Lorenzo said, and each word landed on me like a stone dropped into still water. "I'm at the hospital with Bianca. Adriana is being cruel."
He hung up. He sat there with the phone still in his hand, and his face did not soften. It went gloomy, closed, a locked door with the key thrown into the sea.
"Adriana takes herself too seriously," he said, low, more to the cold air than to Bianca. "She thinks that because she's carrying my child she can do whatever she pleases. I won't go looking for her this time. It's time she learned her lesson."
I hovered above them, weightless, screaming with no throat to scream from. Your child, I wanted to say. Your child bled out on a country road while you sat here. I called you. I called you and you hung up. But the dead have no voice, and the code of silence is deepest of all beyond the grave.
There was pride in Bianca's eyes then, and joy, quick and bright as a struck match before she smothered it back down into that practiced tenderness. She lifted a hand and patted Lorenzo's back, all consideration, all devotion.
"Lorenzo, don't be angry," she murmured. "It's my fault. I never should have asked you to bring me here tonight."
And seeing her blame herself, watching that delicate hand press against his sleeve, Lorenzo did what I knew he would do. He drew her in and held her against him and comforted her, as though she were something fragile the whole world had wronged.
"Adriana isn't worthy of being compared to you," he said.
I looked at the coldness in his eyes when he said my name. Not heat. Not even hatred, which at least is a kind of caring. Just that flat, tired contempt, the way a man looks at a debt he never meant to owe. And whatever was left of my heart, whatever shred of it still clung to me in that airless waiting room, broke completely and without a sound.
I twisted at a ring that was no longer on any finger I still had. The thin silver band. The habit outlived the hand.
I remembered how it began.
The first time I met Lorenzo, I had gone to visit my brother, Marco Rizzo, at the school where the sons of the old bloodlines were sent to be sharpened into men. Marco was older, harder even then, already being groomed for the weight he would one day carry as Underboss of the Rizzo line. And there in the corridor beside him stood Lorenzo Falcone.
At first sight I was pulled toward him the way a moth is pulled, knowing nothing of the flame, only the light. I began to pursue him. Foolish, headlong, a girl who had lost her parents young and wanted so badly to belong to someone.
Back then Bianca had only just gone abroad, sent off to her allied bloodline across the water, and Lorenzo grieved her absence like a wound that would not close. He drifted through those days in a daze, silent, unreachable, a man half elsewhere.
I followed him anyway. In the beginning he did not even see me. Then, slowly, against everything he wanted, he began to let me stay.
