Seven Years Lost, A Lifetime of Vengeance

He smelled of faint Turkish tobacco and Vittoria's perfume.

The two scents tangled together in the close air of the study, and my stomach turned. There was something obscene about the way they mixed, the smoke he carried like a second skin and the cloying sweetness she had pressed into him, as if she had already begun marking what she intended to own.

Salvatore lowered his head, his lips brushing the shell of my ear. The gesture would have looked tender to anyone watching from the doorway, where his soldiers stood like statues against the dark paneling, eyes forward, hands folded. They knew better than to witness too much.

"Adriana, I know today was hard on you." His voice was low, intimate, the voice of a man who had ordered men's throats cut in the same gentle register. "Vittoria's older sister took a bullet meant for me. She'll never walk again because of it. I owe a debt to that blood. Looking after Vittoria is how a man of honor pays what he owes."

I pressed my thumb against the faded scar on my forearm and said nothing.

"As long as you behave yourself and stay in line, there will always be a place for you in the Gilberti house." His thumb traced an idle circle at my hip, possessive, careless. "You'll still be the woman who's stood beside me the longest. No one takes that from you. Not even her."

He was making me a promise. Delivered from on high, the way a Don tosses a coin of mercy to a beggar kneeling outside the social club, expecting the kneeling to continue forever.

He actually expected me to be grateful. To press my lips to the back of his hand for the privilege of being kept like a piece of furniture he hadn't yet decided to discard.

A frantic knock came from outside the heavy oak door. The two soldiers in the hall shifted, one of them reaching instinctively toward the lapel where his piece sat hidden, then stilling when no threat followed.

Vittoria's delicate voice drifted through the wood, pitched to carry, pitched to wound. "Salvatore, my chest hurts all of a sudden. Can you come be with me?"

His arms dropped from my waist instantly.

Not a second of hesitation. The warmth, the whispered debts of honor, the promise of a place at his table, all of it evaporated like breath off cold marble. He turned to leave, and the soldiers parted before him without a sound, the way water parts for the hull of a ship.

At the doorway, he paused and looked back. For a moment the lamplight caught the hard planes of his face, and I saw nothing in his eyes that had ever belonged to me.

"There's a sit-down tomorrow night. A charity gala, all the families under one roof, every Don pretending his hands are clean." His tone was flat, the matter already settled in his mind before he spoke it aloud. "I'm bringing Vittoria. She's only just come back to Harbor Bay and she has nothing fit to wear in front of those people." His gaze swept over me, utterly matter-of-fact, the way a man takes inventory of stock he no longer prizes. "That Starlight piece in your closet. Have the housekeeper bring it to Vittoria tomorrow. Tell the seamstress to take it in until it fits her."

I stared at him in disbelief, the cold of the obsidian floor seeming to climb through the soles of my shoes and into my chest.

That Starlight gown.

Five years ago, when he first claimed me before the whole of his organization and called me his, he had flown in the finest couturier in Paris to create it. Tailored to every line and measure of my body, made for me and no woman else alive.

Nine hundred and ninety-nine crystals, each one set by hand along the hem, so that when I walked they caught the chandelier light and threw it back like a slow fall of stars.

I had treated that dress the way the old families treat a relic. I wouldn't even let the housekeepers lift it from its hanger. It hung in the dark of my closet like something sacred, like the one thing in that house of borrowed loyalty that had been truly mine.

Once, a new associate's daughter, a girl brought in to serve at table, had slipped it out and tried it on before the mirror when she thought no one would know. The instant I learned of it, I had her dismissed and sent out of the Capital territory entirely, her family quietly told never to seek work under the Gilberti name again.

Salvatore had praised me for it then. He had taken my chin in his hand and said that what was mine was mine, that no one in his world had the right to lay so much as a finger on what belonged to me, and that he would break the hand that tried.

I pressed my thumb harder against the scar, and felt nothing move in my face at all.