Everyone Loved His First Love Until They Found Me

Hearing that, Lorenzo's face went dark, and his voice dropped to that low register the crew had learned to fear. "Why didn't you tell me you'd sent out for a plate of food? Adriana, how many times have I said it? There's nothing between me and Bianca. It's for show. For the peace between our families, for the picture we put in front of the Commission. I don't know why you make a war out of nothing. Since when did you become so small?"

Facing the man's smooth, practiced explanation, I answered coldly, "I'm not making a war out of anything."

It was the truth, plain as the band on my finger, but truth only fed the fire in him. He picked up the takeout box off the sideboard and dropped it into the trash with a slow, deliberate flick of his wrist, the way a man discards something beneath him. "Then why didn't you carry the medicine up to Bianca? I told you it's not clean for me to be seen walking into a hospital. Not with my name where it is now. It's a small thing, Adriana. Buying medicine. Is this really the ground you want to die on?"

Buying medicine was a small thing, yes. But what about the washing? The cooking? Bianca claimed she had a horror of germs, that every stitch of clothing touching her skin had to be scrubbed by hand.

So even when the family business dragged us up into the northern hills in the dead of winter, with the cold biting below ten degrees under zero and the wind coming off the ridgelines like a blade, Lorenzo ordered me to bear the split-open pain in my fingers and hand-wash Bianca's clothes. I remembered one night my hands had cracked so deep from frostbite that they bled, and the blood had stained the silk.

When he saw it, Lorenzo threw me out of the safehouse. He made me kneel in the snow in nothing but a thin nightgown, scrubbing her garments in the dark until my hands went numb past feeling. All because Bianca had murmured, soft and sweet with her lashes lowered, "Lorenzo, my cousins back home always said the cold snow draws the frost right out of the skin. It heals it."

In Lorenzo's eyes I had always been the obedient one. The shadow-hand. The woman who moved when he pointed and stayed silent when he didn't. Five years I built his name from a nobody soldier into a Capo men crossed the street to avoid, and five years I did it without complaint, without a face, without so much as my own name spoken at his table.

But I was tired.

I pulled the blanket up over my head and said, from beneath it, my voice flat as stone, "I'm not feeling well. I don't want to go."

The space on the other side of the blanket stayed quiet a long time. Longer than I expected. I could feel him standing there in the dark of the room, that contained violence of his coiling, deciding whether tonight was a night for words or something worse. Then his footsteps crossed the floor, hard and uneven, and the door shut behind him with the force of a slammed vault.

That night, Lorenzo and Bianca climbed to the top of every whisper in the city.

The picture moving mouth to mouth across the outfit showed Lorenzo carrying Bianca cradled against his chest, a princess in the arms of a man who denied me at his own dinner table, sweeping through the hospital doors and roaring for someone to come, now, quickly.

The talk that followed ran hot and adoring, the way it always did around him.

Is that Lorenzo Falcone himself? Is he making it official? Bringing an allied princess into the fold?

He carried her the whole way. God. If a man lifted me like that he'd throw his back out and I'd never let him forget it.

Doesn't anyone care what actually happened to Bianca? Why the emergency in the first place?

I was there. Bianca said her forehead felt warm, that she wanted someone to find a thermometer. The second Lorenzo heard the word "fever," he had her up off the lounge chair and into the car and drove her down the mountain himself.

I knew I had the right pair called. I knew it.

I was still scrolling through the flood of it, the taste of the whole thing gone sour in my mouth like good wine left open too long, when Lorenzo called.

I didn't even get the chance to speak. He came in fast, breathless, laying it all out before I could open my mouth. "Adriana, listen. I took Bianca to the hospital because she said she had a fever, that's all. I was worried it'd cost us the whole schedule, throw off the timeline on the job. That's the only reason. Don't read into what people are saying. There's nothing between me and Bianca. Nothing."

"Alright," I said.

The word landed, and it undid him. My plain, unbothered answer left him silent for half a minute on the line, and I could hear it, the ground shifting under his feet, the sound of a man reaching for the shoulder of someone who wasn't there to clap. "What did you say?" he asked, quieter now.

"It's all for the promotion of the new arrangement between the families," I answered. "I understand. Don't worry about a thing. I'll handle the reporters myself."