Embracing and kissing in the love nest I had carefully prepared before our wedding. The private suite at the estate I had chosen myself, where I had overseen every detail of the décor, down to the thread count of the sheets I imagined we would share on the night we sealed our vows before the Family.
And now, on the starlit mountaintop where he and I had once promised each other forever, they were tangled together without shame. The same terrace overlooking the valley where Dante had pressed my hand against his chest and sworn, on his mother's grave, that no other woman would ever stand where I stood. The city lights had glittered below us like scattered offerings, and I had believed every word because his voice had been the only scripture I needed.
I forwarded the videos to Luciana Marini, then went home alone, closed my eyes, and slept.
My thumb drifted to the pale band on my ring finger as I lay there, rubbing the bare skin where my wedding ring used to sit until the motion became mechanical, and eventually even that small betrayal of feeling stopped. I slept the way the dead sleep: heavy, dreamless, and utterly uninterested in resurrection.
The next afternoon, Dante finally came home, still carrying the satiated ease of a man who had had his fill. His overcoat smelled faintly of Serafina's perfume, something floral and deliberate, the kind a woman wore when she wanted the scent to survive the drive home. Two of his soldiers had trailed him to the foyer and now waited outside the reinforced front doors of the DeLuca estate, their shapes visible through the frosted sidelights like patient shadows.
He saw me sitting on the couch. I didn't get up to greet him.
He walked over on his own.
"Bianca, I was planning to have lunch with you, but the crew called an emergency sit-down at the club, so I—"
He stopped mid-sentence.
I followed his gaze down to my hand. The wedding ring I had worn for eight years was gone from my finger. I couldn't even remember when I had taken it off. The skin beneath it was paler than the rest, a ghost of an oath that had outlived its meaning, and when I looked at that faint band of white I felt nothing at all.
Dante undid a shirt button with one hand, his face darkening. The rosary beads that usually threaded between his thumb and forefinger were completely still in his other hand, looped against the fabric of his trousers. He was about to speak when I cut in first.
"This Friday, two to three-thirty in the afternoon. Are you free?"
I had booked an appointment with Luciana. A formal petition for dissolution. A meeting at the courthouse annex where such papers were filed quietly, away from prying eyes and Commission gossip. If he wasn't busy, we would go. We would be done.
"What now? This house has barely had a few days of peace and you're already looking to stir up more—"
Before he could finish with that cold little sneer, his phone rang.
It was Serafina.
The girl's voice came through syrupy and tearful, playing the helpless baby. I could hear every note of it from where I sat, the speaker carrying her performance across the distance between us as though the room itself refused to grant me the mercy of ignorance.
"Dante, what do I do? Wahh… I was trying to follow a tutorial and make you the most amazing seafood risotto, but I—" A fit of coughing, perfectly timed. "I accidentally cut my pinky, and now the smoke alarm won't stop going off…"
Dante was already heading for the door, brow furrowed, his voice dropping into something warm and concerned, a register I had not heard directed at me in years: "Silly kitten, turn off the stove. Don't move. Your husband's coming to rescue you right now."
Eight years of marriage. Dante never once let me call him "husband" in front of anyone.
If I slipped, his face would go cold and he would tear into me right there, calling me brainless, worse than an animal. Then he would leave me standing wherever we were and walk away without a backward glance. In the back rooms of social clubs, at church fundraiser banquets surrounded by capos and their wives, it made no difference. The correction was always swift, always public, always designed to remind me that whatever I believed our marriage to be, he saw it as something lesser.
I used to think he simply didn't like the word.
Until the last Family feast banquet, when Serafina lost a round of truth or dare at the after-party table. The capos' wives had been drinking Prosecco and laughing too loudly, and the game had started as something harmless before the stakes sharpened the way they always did when powerful people grew bored.
Dante, the winner, took Serafina's phone himself. In front of the entire inner circle, he changed her contact name for him from "Hot Eight-Pack Meanie Boss" to "Serafina's Dearest Brave Hubby," smiling the whole time. The room had erupted in laughter, and I had watched from across the table with a glass of wine I could no longer taste, my thumb rubbing the ring that was still on my finger then, pressing the gold into my skin as if I could fuse it there and make the marriage real by force of pressure alone.
While I was still lost in that memory, my phone rang.
Dante had his coat on, one hand on the door, and he seemed to catch me saying softly to whoever was on the other end: "Okay. I'll listen to you. Leaving tomorrow."
Leaving? Leaving for where?
His hand tightened on the doorknob. I could see the shift in his posture from where I sat, the almost imperceptible stiffening of his shoulders, the way his jaw set. A Don who controlled smuggling routes across three states, who decided with a nod whether men ate or starved, and still my quiet voice on a phone call was enough to make his knuckles go white.
Since the day we married, I had never left his side. Not even during the two years he spent expanding the Family's operations overseas, building new laundering pipelines through Mediterranean ports and negotiating territorial arrangements with foreign syndicates. I had dropped everything back home and followed him without a second thought, stuck to him like I couldn't survive on my own. Living in rented villas that smelled of sea salt and old stone, keeping house for a man who barely looked at me, attending dinners where I smiled and said nothing and was introduced as "the wife" in a tone that carried no warmth.
That thought loosened something in him. He pulled the door shut and left.
That night, a video of Dante proposing to Serafina spread through every elite circle in the city. The electronic display mounted on the DeLuca Holdings tower downtown, the legitimate front that laundered the Family's name alongside its money, showed a photo of the two of them locked in a tender kiss. The image rotated in slow, luminous cycles above the street, visible from the expressway and the harbor and the windows of every rival family's headquarters, a declaration so public it was either romantic or strategic, and I understood with the clarity of someone who had been married to this world for eight years that it was both.
My inbox flooded with messages from media contacts, gossip columnists, and the wives of men who owed the DeLuca Family favors. They were all waiting for the spectacle, expecting me to scramble out like a sideshow act and insist this was just another fabricated image, a deepfake, a misunderstanding blown out of proportion.
I didn't respond to a single word. I packed my bags carefully, folding each item with the slow deliberation of someone performing a final ritual, then got into bed.
The moment I closed my eyes, the phone on my nightstand lit up without a sound. Dante. He called twice. Both went unanswered. The screen glowed against the ceiling like a small, cold moon, and then went dark.
In the small hours of the morning, on the wide bed of the master suite, I lay perfectly still and listened to the silence of a house that had never once felt like mine. Somewhere beyond the estate walls, the soldiers kept their watch. Somewhere across the city, a billboard turned and turned, broadcasting the end of my marriage to anyone who cared to look up.
My thumb found the bare place on my ring finger one last time. The skin was smooth now, unremarkable, as though nothing of consequence had ever rested there.
