Seven Years Lost, A Lifetime of Vengeance

My flat, unbothered tone infuriated him.

Salvatore seized my wrist, his grip brutal, the kind of grip that had crushed promises out of stronger people than me. The study seemed to shrink around us, all that polished obsidian and the low amber light catching the crystal decanter on his desk, and somewhere beneath the silence the grandfather clock kept ticking like a patient thing that had seen this before. He wrenched my sleeve upward, dragging the soft cashmere past my elbow, exposing the vicious scar that ran more than five inches along my forearm.

Three years ago, I'd thrown myself in front of him to take the blade meant for his heart. A rival Family had sent a man with a combat knife to a sit-down that was supposed to be neutral ground, and when the steel came toward Salvatore I had stepped into it without thinking. The knife had gone straight through my forearm. I'd nearly bled out on the surgeon's table that night, the one the Family kept on a quiet retainer, while Salvatore paced the corridor and the smell of antiseptic mixed with the gunpowder still clinging to his coat.

Salvatore stared at the scar now. There wasn't a shred of that memory left in his eyes. There wasn't a shred of sympathy in them at all. Only irritation, the cold flat irritation of a man inconvenienced by his own debt.

"Do you walk around with this scar on display every day just to remind me I owe you?"

His thumb pressed into the ruined skin as if he could rub the proof away. I didn't move. I didn't let him see how the old wound still ached when the cold came down off the harbor.

"Vittoria is easily frightened. She saw the scar on your arm today and was so shaken she couldn't even finish lunch." He said her name the way other men said a prayer, low and reverent, and the contempt in it when he turned back to me could have frozen the wine in the glass. "Starting tomorrow, you wear long sleeves inside this house. If you can't manage that, then move out to the gatehouse by the front entrance for a few days. Stay out of Vittoria's sight."

Every word was a stiletto, slid in clean and meant to be felt later. He was trying to wound me. Trying to provoke me into the kind of desperate, heartbroken defense I would have mounted before, the tears, the pleading, the what did I do wrong, Salvatore, tell me how to fix it. He was waiting for me to break. Waiting for me to crumble, to bow my head and kiss the ring the way an associate begs a Don for one more chance at life.

I looked at his face, handsome and twisted with fury, the face I had bled for, and I felt nothing but a vast and terrible calm. I pressed my thumb against the faded scar where his grip had loosened, and I swallowed the last warm thing left inside me until it was gone.

I didn't argue. I didn't cry.

I pulled free of his grip, turned, and picked up the black duffel bag I'd already packed.

"Fine. I'll move to the gatehouse right now."

I lifted the bag, stepped past him, and walked straight for the door, my heels quiet on the cold marble that the Gilberti soldiers polished every morning before the Don woke.

Salvatore completely lost it.

He hadn't gotten the reaction he wanted, and a man like him, a man whose word moved cash and bodies across half of Harbor Bay, could not abide being denied the one thing he was certain he owned. My compliance, in his eyes, had become the most brazen provocation imaginable. He pressed a flat palm hard against his stomach, the way he always did when something gnawed at him from the inside, and disguised it as impatience as he came after me.

He stormed across the study, ripped the bag from my hand, and threw open the heavy front door of the villa. Wind and snow howled into the foyer, swallowing the warmth, scattering the careful hush the house wore like a uniform. Out past the threshold the night was a wall of white, and the iron gates at the end of the drive stood like the bars of something.

Salvatore hurled my bag into the snowdrift outside and jabbed a finger toward the darkness beyond the door.

"Adriana, since you love putting on this little act so much, then get the hell out of this house! Don't ever come back!" His voice cracked off the marble, and even the enforcer posted by the stairs went stone-still, eyes lowered, pretending to be furniture. "I'd love to see how long a parentless orphan like you survives in this blizzard without me!"

There it was. The thing he believed was true. The thing the whole of his world believed was true. That I was nothing. No name, no blood, no Family at my back. An orphan he had taken in out of something he'd once mistaken for tenderness, now a clinging vine to be torn out by the root.

I stood in the doorway wearing nothing but a thin cashmere sweater. The wind came across the threshold and cut my face like a blade drawn slow. I looked at the bag lying in the snow, half-buried already, the dark canvas going pale.

Without a moment's hesitation, I stepped over the threshold.

One step after another, I walked into the storm. The cold reached through the sweater and found the scar and the bone beneath it, and I welcomed it, because feeling the cold meant I had stopped feeling him. I never looked back.

Salvatore stood inside, framed in the warm gold light of the house he thought was his fortress, watching me go. Then he slammed the door shut. The heavy thud echoed through the snowy night, final as a coffin lid, final as a vow.

I trudged into the snow, bent down, and picked up the duffel bag. I brushed the powder off its surface, my fingers gone numb and clumsy, my breath ghosting white in front of me.

My phone screen lit up against my palm, a small blue glow in all that white.

It was a voice call. From my brother. Lorenzo Frost, Don of the Castellano Family, the oldest blood in Harbor Bay.

"Adriana. The Castellano motorcade has crossed into Gilberti territory. Half an hour, and I'll be there to take you home."