Nine-Year Marriage Cost Me Everything

Nina bit her lip and burrowed into Dante's arms, blushing as she playfully swatted his chest.

He laughed softly and apologized to her, taking all the blame, while watching my face from the corner of his eye. The Cadillac's interior smelled of her perfume and his cigarette smoke, and both scents were foreign to me now, belonging to a world inside this car that had been redrawn without my consent.

When he realized I wasn't angry at all, that same restless irritation from the clinic crept back over him for no reason he could name. His silver saint medal had been turning lazily across his knuckles since we pulled away from the curb; it stopped mid-roll, balanced on his index finger, catching the last light of the afternoon.

"Lucia, you've been staring at your phone since you got in the car."

His tone was sharp, almost jealous. The two soldiers in the front seats kept their eyes fixed on the road, but I could feel their attention thicken the air the way it always did when the Don's voice acquired that particular edge.

"Texting your cousin? Or someone else I don't know about?"

I'd just finished booking my ticket. A one-way seat on the red-eye to DeLuca-controlled London territory, purchased under the maiden name I hadn't used in nine years. I pressed the screen dark.

"Just reading the news."

That only deepened the displeasure between his brows. The medal disappeared into his closed fist. I felt more than saw the soldier in the passenger seat shift a quarter-inch in his seat, a reflex honed by years of reading that exact gesture and knowing mercy had just left the room.

Before I could react, Dante snatched the phone from my hand. His fingers were warm, precise, and utterly without gentleness. He demanded the passcode.

"My birthday."

Nine years of marriage. Nine years of a blood-bound union sealed over wine and witness oaths in the Vittori compound chapel, and he did not know six digits about me. He kept trying until the phone locked him out, and still never got in. His jaw tightened. I watched him stare at the locked screen with the expression of a man who had never been denied access to anything in his territory and could not quite catalogue the sensation. He set the phone on the leather seat between us rather than hand it back, a small territorial act that cost him nothing and told me everything.

The rest of the ride passed in silence. The city scrolled past the tinted windows, streetlights beginning to flicker on, illuminating the storefronts that paid monthly tribute to the Vittori name whether they knew it or not. Nina traced a slow circle on Dante's lapel. I watched the bare place on my ring finger where a wedding band had once sat, and my thumb moved over the smooth skin there, back and forth, a private metronome counting down the hours I had left inside this life.

The moment the car stopped inside the compound's gated courtyard, Dante helped Nina out with visible concern, his hand at the small of her back, guiding her across the flagstones toward the master bedroom while she leaned into him, queasy from morning sickness. Two household staff appeared on the portico as if summoned by instinct, falling into step behind them. The night air carried the faint scent of jasmine from the garden beds that the old patriarch, Salvatore, had planted decades ago for a wife who was now buried beneath Carrara marble in the family crypt.

Then Dante told the cook to prepare whatever Nina liked. His voice carried through the foyer with the easy authority of a man giving orders inside his own fortress, and no one questioned the arrangement, not the staff, not the soldiers stationed at the perimeter, not the silence itself.

Coming back downstairs, he caught sight of my back as I walked toward the guest room. The hallway was long, lined with portraits of Vittori men in ascending order of ruthlessness, and my shadow stretched thin across the marble floor beneath them. He paused on the landing. Something passed across his face that I did not see because I did not turn around, but the cook told me later, in a whisper, what he said next.

"Make a couple of dishes my wife usually eats too. Set three places for dinner."

The words reached me faintly through the corridor, and I stored them in the place where I kept all of Dante Vittori's small, useless kindnesses: a room in my memory with a locked door and no windows.

In the guest room, I opened my luggage and found every piece of clothing shredded. Silk blouses reduced to ribbons, wool trousers sliced with what must have been dressmaker's shears, each cut deliberate and unhurried. The kind of destruction that required patience and private satisfaction. Only one person in this household had both the access and the appetite for it, and she was upstairs now, being served ginger tea and sympathy.

The only mercy was that my passport and documents, tucked in the inner pocket's zippered compartment, were untouched. Perhaps Nina hadn't found them. Perhaps she hadn't thought I would ever have the nerve to use them. My thumb brushed the bare place on my ring finger once more as I gathered the papers and headed for the door.

Nina was blocking it.

She held a black bottle in one hand and looked me up and down with open contempt. She wore one of my robes, the pale grey cashmere one that had been a gift from Salvatore two Christmases ago, and she wore it as if it had always been hers. Her tongue wet her lower lip before she spoke, that small flash of hunger disguised as sweetness.

"Lucia, I have to say, you can really take it. I've moved right into your house, made you the laughingstock of every Family wife and mistress in this city, and you're still clinging to the Vittori name like a stray that won't leave."

The hallway behind her was empty. No soldiers, no staff. She had chosen her moment with the precision of someone who had studied the household's rhythms and found the gaps.

"Then again, that old woman from the Bellini family dropped dead last month, didn't she? Lost your biggest backer. No wonder you're hanging on to Dante for dear life."

My grandmother. The woman who had raised me after my parents died, who had brokered the original blood-debt alliance with Salvatore Vittori when I was still a girl, who had spent her last months in a private clinic under Family control asking why I never visited. I had not visited because Dante would not authorize the travel. I had not visited because the one time I begged, he had already made other plans.

Something seemed to amuse Nina, and she brightened, her eyes catching the hallway's dim light with a cruelty that was almost theatrical.

"You know, Lucia, you were crying and begging Dante to fly you to the clinic so you could see your grandmother one last time. Want to know why he said no? Because he'd already promised to take me to watch the sunset by the sea that day. See this photo on my phone? Us kissing. That's from right then."

The image on the screen was small but perfectly clear. Dante's hand cupping her jaw, the Mediterranean behind them bleeding orange and gold, and the timestamp in the corner matching the exact hour my grandmother's heart had stopped.