Adriana's POV
It happened in an instant. Lorenzo's mouth curved into a smile, and I knew without question that it was not meant for me. I had learned the difference between his smiles the way a woman learns the difference between thunder that passes and thunder that brings the storm down on her roof.
He glanced at his phone, the screen lighting his face, and murmured, "I'll take you out another time. Carla just messaged that she's here. We need to be at the club office. Now."
The "club" was what the family called the front, the elegant social hall on Mulberry Street where business was conducted behind velvet and brass, where men kissed rings and ledgers were never the kind anyone wrote down. I opened my mouth to answer him, but there was no one left to answer. He was already through the door, his shoes silent against the obsidian floor, his cologne and the faint trace of Turkish tobacco fading down the hall.
I rose to my feet just as her voice reached me, carrying clean and bright across the marble. "There you are, Lorenzo."
"My Carla." The two words came soft, intimate, the kind a man saves for the woman he means to keep. Their voices drifted, growing smaller, which told me they were walking together toward the car, side by side, the way a Don and his lawful wife were meant to walk and never did.
He was the Don. Not a soul in this family would dare let his name fall from their lips without a title chained to it. Don Lorenzo. Boss. Sir. No one called him simply by name except me, his wife, and now her. And he let it slide off her tongue like it belonged there. Was their arrangement truly only business, the way he swore it was? I held the question in my chest and did not let it breathe.
"Here. I bought roses for you. I know how much you love them." I could hear the grin in it, the pleasure of a man giving a gift he wanted to give.
So it was exactly as I had thought. The roses were for her.
He had never once bought roses for me. Not on a wedding anniversary, not on a name day, not on a single morning of our marriage. I turned my bare ring finger inward and pressed it into my palm, a reach for a band that was no longer there, a wound my own hand kept finding in the dark.
I let out a slow breath.
I knew they were going to the office for family work, real work, the careful arithmetic of a syndicate that touched every dock and casino in the city. So why this sickness pooling low in my stomach, this curdled, queasy thing?
The truth was simple and it shamed me. I wanted to go to the office. I wanted to stand at my husband's side. I was the Lady of the Moretti Family, and that title was supposed to mean we ran this house together, that we sat down over the books and the alliances and the quiet dangers as one. Instead he did all of it with her.
So my days had narrowed to the small things they left me. Checking on the family's people. Visiting the sick in the family physician's care. Cooking the Sunday meal that bound the men to the table and the table to the blood. Except that Carla had taken even that. The check-ins were hers now. Some of the cooking too. There was less and less of the family that was still mine, and I was the only one who seemed to notice the borders shrinking.
"I've won the bet. Don Lorenzo gave Capo Carla flowers." It was Lucia, one of the family's women, her voice carrying as she came into the house with her friends. She dropped it to a thrilled hush and I could picture her manicured fingers rising to cover her mouth, the way they always did right before she said something cruel. "It's obvious. They'll be wed soon enough."
"From what I've heard," Marcella answered, "they already are. In every way that counts."
"How can they be wed when he already has a wife?" Elena asked. Her voice was nearer, just outside the dining room, careful and low the way a sensible woman keeps her voice when she suspects the wrong ears are in the building.
Lucia muttered it like a secret too good to keep. "Well. I've heard the Lady Adriana isn't his true match at all. That it's Carla who's his lawful match by blood and bond, and the rest was just paper."
"And you believe that?" Elena asked, disbelief thinning the words.
"Yes," Marcella and Lucia said together, in one breath, two heads nodding.
Marcella's smile was in her voice, the way she nodded twice, too quickly, when she dressed up what she'd seen. "I saw them out at the lake house Friday night. Just the two of them, alone in the dark. Tell me that isn't romantic."
A small sound left my lips, and the floor seemed to tilt beneath me. My knees gave out. I went down against the cold marble, the world narrowing to a ring of white light and the impossible loud rush of my own blood.
They rushed in. I heard the scrape of chairs, the panic in their footsteps. Elena gasped, going silent first and then finding the words, glancing back over her shoulder the instant she understood who had overheard. "Oh. Lady Adriana. We had no idea you were here."
That was the last thing I heard before the dark folded over me.
When I surfaced again, the ceiling above me was unfamiliar and then it wasn't. Lorenzo stood beside the bed where someone had laid me, his frame blotting out the lamp. The second he saw my eyes open, the worry I might have imagined drained out of his face and left only irritation. He rolled the heavy signet ring around his finger with his thumb, slow at first, then faster, the way he did when he was lying to himself about something.
"Why weren't you answering my messages?" he scowled.
"Maybe because I was unconscious," I murmured, and pushed myself up against the pillows.
