The Woman in His Murder Case Was His Wife

The rain had not stopped since morning, and the private booth at the back of the Falcone social club held it out only by degrees, the tall windows streaked with water that turned the streetlights of Avar City into smeared coins of gold.

"He swore the car was doing no more than eighty," Bianca said, her voice thin, careful. "It was one of the back roads outside the territory. No eyes on it, no cameras, no soldiers posted. It was pouring. There wasn't a soul around to see."

She lowered her head as she spoke, and the lamplight caught the practiced tremble in her shoulders. She looked frightened, worried, a woman brought low by a brother's misfortune.

Lorenzo turned the fountain pen slowly between two fingers, the way he always did when a story was being laid before him and he had not yet decided whether to believe it. He weighed the shape of it in silence.

"You're certain," he said at last, "that Vincent didn't run. That he wasn't past the limit."

Bianca lifted her eyes. They were wet, glittering, fixed on him with wounded reproach.

"Lorenzo, are you doubting me?" Her hand rose to press against her chest, delicate, as though the accusation had stolen her breath. "Vincent called it in the second it happened. There's a record of the call at the hospital. And when they told him she was gone, he walked straight into the police station and gave himself up. He's sitting there now, waiting on the Feds. Would a man who ran do that?"

For a fraction of a second before her fingers touched her collar, her jaw had set hard, but the tears came fast enough that Lorenzo did not mark it. He only saw a woman weeping, and something in him went unsteady with panic.

"Bianca, that isn't what I meant." He set the pen down. "I need to understand every piece of it. That's the only way I can stand for him at the sit-down and pull the weight of this off his shoulders. That's how I keep him breathing."

She came apart then, folding into his chest, her sobs breaking against the fine wool of his jacket.

"You're the only one I can trust now," she wept. "Everyone else looks at us like we're already buried. You have to help me. You have to help Vincent."

The sound of her crying reached into him and turned. Lorenzo drew her close, and the old obligation and the old tenderness he had never learned to separate rose together in his throat.

"Cara," he said, low and grave, the vow of a made man behind it, "you don't have to be afraid. I'll find a way to bring Vincent through this. On my name."

Slowly her breathing evened. She stayed against him a moment longer than she needed to, then lifted her face to his, cheeks still shining.

"There's one more thing," she said. "I forgot to tell you before."

He waited.

"The one who died. She was carrying a child. She was pregnant."

The words landed strangely in the quiet booth. Somewhere beyond the door a glass touched a table and the sound seemed unnaturally loud.

Something shifted behind Lorenzo's eyes. A cold thread of unease he could not name pulled taut across the back of his skull. He looked at her, and for the first time that night his voice came out careful in a different way.

"Where," he said. "Where did it happen?"

Bianca dabbed at her lashes. "A country road, I think. Somewhere out past Barone City."

And I, who had drifted unseen into that lamp-warm room, who had watched my husband hold another woman and swear to save the very hand that killed me, felt the last false hope in me go dark. There was no mistaking it now. The pregnant woman on the rain-black road outside Barone City was me. The child was ours. And Lorenzo had just given his word to shield the man who ran me down.

I saw it strike him too, a beat behind. He went utterly still, the pen forgotten on the table, as though something had detonated silently inside his head and he was only now feeling the walls of himself come down. The color left him. His hand found the fountain pen again without his knowing it, and his knuckles whitened around it.

At that moment the door of the booth was thrown open without ceremony, hard enough to rattle the glass, and Marco came through it like a front of bad weather. The men outside knew better than to stop an Underboss of the Rizzo blood, and none of them had tried.

"Lorenzo." His eyes swept the room, past Bianca, past the tears, and back to the man who had married his sister. "Where's Adriana? She hasn't answered a single message in a whole day."