The Ring Came Off Before He Knew About the Baby

There was one time the fever took me to forty degrees, and I could not keep my legs beneath me. Half-blind with the heat of it, I dragged myself through the marble corridors of the estate until I found Lorenzo, and I asked him, only asked, to have one of the soldiers drive me to a doctor. But there were made men within earshot, capos he had to keep in awe of him, and a Don does not carry his sickly wife through his own halls where the ranks can see it. He shook my hand off his sleeve as though it were something soiled and told me, low and even, to send word through the household and let them handle it.

Yet let Gia press a hand to her belly and whisper that her stomach ached, and Lorenzo would rise from a council of his own capos, leave men who had waited a week for his ear, and drive her himself to be looked over by the family physician as if her breath were the last in the world.

I followed Lorenzo into the study.

Gia had been settled behind the folding screen at the far end to rest, tucked away like something precious. With the room emptied of witnesses, he crossed the obsidian floor to me and took my hand in both of his, his voice dropping into that deep register he used when he wanted to be believed. "Are you still angry?"

I drew my hand free. My tone came out flat, distant, borrowed from somewhere colder than I felt. "I told you. I'm not angry."

He set his hand on my shoulder, and his gaze pressed into me the way the grandfather clock in the corner pressed its ticking into the silence, insistent, filling every gap. "Still being stubborn? You didn't call me once last night. Not a single word carried to me, and you have the nerve to stand there and say you're not angry."

I was thrown by that, honestly thrown, and I heard myself answer, "But Gia was with you. She's your runner. Of course she'd see you were taken care of."

Something flared behind his eyes, that heat that never once warmed me, and his fingers closed hard on my shoulder. Pain shot down my arm. I twisted to break loose from him, and in the struggle he shoved me back and I went down onto the leather sofa, the cold of it biting through my dress.

Pushing myself upright, I felt something snag beneath my palm. Without thinking I pulled at it, and out of the crease of the cushion came a scrap of pink lace. A woman's bra.

The anger drained from Lorenzo's face in a single breath. "This is…"

I had no appetite for whatever explanation he was already assembling behind those still lips. I dropped the lace back into the seam of the sofa where I'd found it and said, lightly, as though I were addressing an associate and not the man I'd bound my blood to, "If there's nothing else, I'll be going now, Don Falcone."

After the day's business, I was gathering myself to meet an allied boss when Lorenzo's car rolled to a slow, deliberate stop in front of me at the curb, the marked plate everyone in the territory knew catching the light. My thumb was turning the bare place on my finger where the ring used to sit; I did not remember starting.

"Get in," he said through the lowered window. "I'll see Gia home first, and then I'll take you to the seafood house on Maple Road."

Gia leaned across from the passenger seat, her smile bright and easy, the smile of a woman who had never once been made to wait in a corridor with a fever. "Sorry, Adriana. Hitching a ride off you again."

I was already lifting a hand for a passing cab, and I answered without looking back at either of them. "You two go on. Seafood doesn't agree with me."

Lorenzo's face went dark on the instant. He knew, better than anyone alive, that no shellfish had ever disagreed with me a day in my life. That house on Maple Road, the low light and the salt and the cracked shells, had been one of the few pleasures I let myself keep.

His jaw set, and I could see him gathering something to say, some quiet correction to put me back in my place before the god-sister he paraded like a jewel. But I didn't give him my eyes again. I stopped turning the bare place on my finger, and stepped clear of his marked car, and crossed to the far side of the road, and got into a taxi that owed him nothing.