Seven Years Lost, A Lifetime of Vengeance

Vittoria let out a soft laugh and leaned close to my ear, close enough that the cloying sweetness of her perfume coiled into my throat like smoke.

"Adriana, since you've already handed over the ring, don't you think it's a little inappropriate for you to still be wearing the lady of the house's jewelry?"

She reached for the necklace, her fingers already curling toward the stones a beat too soon, the way a woman reaches for something she has decided is hers before anyone has given it to her.

I stepped back.

Vittoria used the momentum to tilt the champagne flute in her hand. Pale gold liquid splashed across the front of my silk gown, soaking through to the skin in a slow cold bloom. A sharp crack followed as the crystal slipped from her fingers and shattered across the obsidian floor of the Gilberti estate, the sound ringing out beneath the high ceilings like a gunshot in a chapel.

Vittoria immediately clutched the back of her hand, her eyes flooding red, fat tears rolling down her cheeks in an instant. The performance was flawless. She had always known how to bleed without being cut.

"Adriana, I just thought the necklace was pretty and wanted a closer look. If you didn't want to show me, you could've just said so. Why did you have to push me?"

The music stopped.

The string quartet in the corner let their bows fall silent, and every pair of eyes in the hall, every made man and every soldier's wife dripping in tribute and stolen gold, turned toward us. Glasses paused at lips. Somewhere near the doors, an enforcer shifted his weight, his hand drifting by instinct toward the lapel of his jacket before he remembered this was a feast and not a reckoning. In this house, a woman's tears at a Family gathering were never just tears. They were a question put to the room. They demanded an answer in blood or in banishment.

For the past seven years, any woman who tried to get close to Salvatore or provoke me had been put out without mercy. I had once ground a starlet's face into a tiered cake in front of all of Harbor Bay's ruling families for trying to crawl into his bed, and not a single capo had dared to laugh. I had been untouchable then. The lady of this house. The one whose word carried the weight of the Don's own.

Salvatore crossed the hall in long strides and pulled Vittoria behind him, putting his own body between her and me as though I were the threat in this room, as though I were the loaded thing that needed shielding against.

He looked down at the faint red mark on the back of her hand, and his brow furrowed tight. I watched his palm press flat against his stomach for the briefest moment, the old gesture I had learned to read across seven years, the one he disguised as impatience but which I knew meant something inside him had pulled taut.

"Adriana, what the hell is wrong with you? Vittoria just got back to the country. Why are you going after her?"

His voice dripped with undisguised favoritism and reproach. It carried across the silent hall so that every soldier and every wife could hear exactly where the Don's loyalty now lay, exactly whose rispetto had just been stripped in front of the entire Family.

I stared at that face. The face I had once loved down to the marrow of my bones, the face I had watched sleep, the face that had once turned to me first in every crowded room. And I felt a dull ache deep in my chest, low and grinding, the kind that does not announce itself with a cry but simply takes up residence and refuses to leave.

I drew a slow breath and forced the sting behind my eyes back down to wherever such things go to drown. I pressed my thumb against the faded scar on my forearm, hidden beneath the wet silk, and held it there until the heat in my eyes cooled to something I could control.

I didn't explain. I didn't lose my temper. There was no use in it. A truth spoken to a man who has already chosen which woman to believe is only more breath wasted in a house that no longer wanted me to breathe.

I lifted my hands, reached behind my neck, and unclasped the Pink Diamond Necklace. The clasp was cold against my fingers, the chain warm from my own skin, and for a moment the weight of it sat in my palm like the last thing I owned in the world.

Under the stunned gazes of everyone in the room, beneath the chandeliers and the hush and the watching eyes of men who answered only to the Don, I held it out to Vittoria.

"You like it? Then it's yours. I lost my footing just now. I'm sorry."