Blood for the Throne: Return of the Mafia Wife

"Why? She's bold enough to sit on your lap in front of the whole crew, but too shy to bare her shoulders?"

"Don't talk nonsense. The girl's just modest."

Gianna Rossi, emboldened by the shield of his arm around her, slid me a glance that was all smug venom. The gems at her throat caught the low amber light of the private room, and her fingers drifted up to brush them, the way a soldier might check the weight of a piece tucked under his jacket. The necklace Lorenzo had clasped on her tonight. The one meant for me.

"Mrs. Castellano, it's the New Year." She let the name sit in the air like a coin tossed onto a table to insult a beggar. "Out with the old, in with the new. New blood replaces the old. You understand how it works."

Around the room, the others moved to smooth it over the way men always do when they sense blood in the water and don't want it on their own hands. They winked at me, half-pleading, half-amused, asking with their eyes that I give Lorenzo his way out, his step down, his clean exit from the thing he'd been caught doing.

"Mrs. Castellano, we were only playing a little game, that's all. Everybody's had too much wine, things got loose. We'll take three shots apiece as our penance, eh? On our honor. Just let it go for Lorenzo."

Their voices were warm and oily, the practiced charm of men who'd lied to wives and federal agents alike and never once broken a sweat. The cigar smoke hung low over the table, blue and thick, curling around the crystal decanters and the half-empty glasses. Somewhere a record turned, a crooner's voice drowning under the laughter. It all carried on around me, easy and ordinary, as if I were nothing but a draft of cold air that had slipped under the door.

I said nothing.

Lorenzo remained composed at the center of it all, the way a made man learns to be composed, expression carrying that faint edge of reproach, as though I were the one who had wandered somewhere I had no business being. "Why are you here?" His voice was low, even, almost bored. "I told you to stay home and mind the baby."

His words went through me like glass ground into the skin.

I could not make the two men fit in my mind. The one who had once sat on the floor of an empty room with me, sketching out where the crib would go, where the window should face so the morning light would fall soft on a sleeping child. And this one, standing with his hand resting at the small of another woman's back, looking at me the way you'd look at a stranger who'd interrupted a sit-down she had no rank to attend.

The tears came down my cheeks before I could stop them. But I bit down hard on my trembling lip and dragged my voice up out of the wreck of myself, steady, almost calm. "Lorenzo Castellano. You once told me that a man who betrays his own meets a miserable end."

His face darkened. For a half-second the easy charm drained out of the room, and I watched two of his crew go very still, the way men go still when they hear a thing said aloud that should only ever be thought. In this world there were words you did not speak at a man, not in front of others, not unless you were ready for what came after. Betrayal. The miserable end. I had laid them on the table like a knife between us.

His palm came up and smoothed back over his slicked hair, slow, deliberate, the gesture of a man buying himself a breath. I knew that motion the way I knew my own pulse. He only made it when he was about to lie to me, or save his own pride, and tonight he was doing both.

"Catherine, watch your mouth." The reproach hardened into something colder. "Gianna and I are nothing serious. A diversion. Besides." His eyes traveled down over me, over the swollen weight of my body, and his lip curled. "Look at what you've let yourself become. You've gone as fat as a sow carrying this child. I've done you a kindness, stomaching the sight of you, still putting myself in your bed at all."

The wine glasses caught the light. Gianna's fingers tightened on her necklace.

"And spare me the act, the wounded saint. No man in our circle keeps to one woman. You know that. It's the way of the thing." He spread his hands, magnanimous, performing for the room now, for the soldiers and the hangers-on who watched their boss with careful, deferential eyes. "At least I had the decency to mean to come back to you. To the family. After you've had the baby and made yourself fit to look at again."

My hand moved without my willing it, pressing flat against the swell of my belly where the child turned, oblivious, while a storm of grief and fury rose in me with nowhere to break.

After the child had taken root in me, my body had become a thing I no longer governed. The weight had come on. My legs swelled until they looked like roots dug out of cold ground. The cramps woke me in the dead black hours of the night, and the sickness rose in my throat at dawn and stole what little sleep was left. My skin, that he had once cupped in both hands and called the finest thing he owned, had turned rough and sallow under the long months.

In the beginning he had played at concern. It hadn't lasted. The patience wore thin fast, the way thread wears where it's pulled too often, and then he was gone, buried in the rackets, the late counts and the longer nights, every evening another reason to be anywhere but the rooms where I waited for him with our child growing heavier inside me and his name still on my hand.