The Woman Who Survived the Falcone Family

Salvatore had reach. Within minutes a swarm of them turned up, every face from the surrounding blocks, every cheap phone held up at me, broadcasting to the court of the underworld he'd convened in the street.

"Listen up, everybody. I got a story worth hearing. This woman in front of you? Don't let the plain dress fool you. She's rotten all the way through."

"For years she's lived off her cousin like a leech. Whenever the cash ran dry, she came crawling back for more. And her cousin's carrying a child, big with it, and this one treats her like hired muscle. Sends her out on errands every single day, drags her through the markets, and when she drinks herself blind, the cousin has to come clean up the mess, belly and all."

"Her cousin treats her like blood, and instead of gratitude she spends like there's no tomorrow, sticks her cousin with every tab. And it's not just bleeding her cousin dry. She took over her cousin's villa to keep a kept boy, and maxed out her cousin's spare card paying off some gambling debt to men you don't cross."

"And here's the real kicker. This one sleeps around like it's a calling. Married woman, still messing around every day. Past the boy at the villa, there's plenty more on the outside. No conscience in her. Knew a man was taken and went after him anyway, got beaten for it by his wife and still didn't learn. Went and got herself cut open down there, playing the innocent to reel in more men. I hear she's been treated for the pox ten times over these few years. Never seen a woman this filthy. Like she'd die if she went one day without a man."

They piled invented sin after invented sin onto me, telling it like they'd witnessed every second.

Pure fabrication, blown bigger and bigger until it filled the street.

In no time every screen was flooded with people cursing my name.

"Damn, her cousin and her husband got it rough, chained to a shameless slut like this."

"Dio, that's not even a woman. That's a walking tumor."

"People like her are a danger to everyone near them."

The outrage spread fast. Within moments my face had climbed to the top of every feed in the territory.

"Leech." "Poison Cousin." "Town Bicycle." Names like these became mine.

They kept fanning it, the crowd working itself hotter alongside them, until they couldn't hold back. They started pelting me with eggs and rotten vegetables.

A few men drinking outside the social club flat-out hurled their beer bottles at me.

I stood in a heap of garbage like a lamb waiting for slaughter, taking every word they threw.

Then Marco came toward me, shouldering out of the packed bodies.

Looking at that familiar face, my lonely, battered heart felt like it had found somewhere to rest.

For me, Marco was the one solid thing at my back.

No matter what the world out there did to me, he'd always settle me, patient, and put right whatever was broken.

He was the man I loved, and more than that, the safe harbor I leaned on.

In that moment, all I wanted was to throw myself into his arms.

I let every guard down at once and walked toward him.

But the instant I touched him, he shoved me away without a flicker of mercy.

I had no time to brace. My balance went, and I fell straight backward onto the ground.

Broken glass littered the stones, and the shards drove deep into my palms and my thighs.

The raw, stabbing pain shot through my head, but it was my heart that was cut deeper, that hurt worse.

Even Marco didn't believe me?

"Adriana, I never imagined you'd turn out to be this kind of person."

Marco's face was dark, his eyes full of disappointment. His palms dragged down the front of his trousers, once, the way a man wipes off something he's already decided to let go.

"All the years we've been bound, I treated you like something precious. Anything you wanted, I gave it. I never once raised my voice at you, never let you feel slighted for a heartbeat."

"Your health was poor, so I taught myself to cook proper meals for you, did everything to build you back up, layered blankets on you, kept you warm, terrified you'd come to the slightest harm."

"And you?"

"You went behind my back to bleed your cousin dry, to gamble, to throw away your own decency and your name."

"The body I worked so hard to nurse whole again, you ruined it in that kind of filthy, disgusting business."

"Adriana, you're degrading yourself, and you're trampling all over what we swore."

Marco, always so gentle, had never come apart like this before.

His voice broke from shouting, every word soaked with the deepest disappointment in me.

Seeing him like this hurt worse. I forced myself up through the pain and tried to explain.

"Marco, I—"

Before I could finish, he slapped me across the face.

"Shut up. Don't say my name. You don't deserve to."

Then he pulled the wedding ring from his finger and threw it at my face.

"We're done. I want out."

His cold, merciless contempt cut straight into me.

And that slap brought everything I'd believed in crashing down.

I stood frozen, like the soul had been pulled out of me. Without thinking, my thumb found the bare skin where his ring used to sit, turning the empty finger, counting in silence everything they had taken from me.

Salvatore seized the moment to sneer.

"Adriana, now you know what it feels like to be ruined, don't you? A filthy woman like you, greedy, throwing herself at any man who passes, you don't deserve anyone's love, and you sure don't deserve everything Bianca did for you."

"Lucky I saw through you early and cut a leech like you loose. Having ever wanted you is the single greatest shame of my life."

"The only thing you were good for in this world was bringing a woman as fine as Bianca to my side. From here on, you can enjoy being spat on by everyone with eyes. I won't let Bianca near you again. Let's see how you survive without her protection."

His little speech struck a chord with every last one of them at once.

All together, the comments, the crowd, the men with the phones, they opened up on me with an endless stream of filth.

The weight of a whole crowd turning its finger on you is a terrifying thing.

Even braced for it, I couldn't stop myself from falling apart.

Just then Salvatore's phone rang.

The caller was Bianca.

The second he answered, her sobbing came through the line.

"Salvatore, I... I lost the baby."

His eyes went red in an instant. The cufflink he'd been rolling between his fingers went still against his palm. "What happened?"

Bianca stammered it out, her breath catching a beat too soon, the way grief does when it's been rehearsed. "It was Adriana. She was out there carrying on with a pack of pretty boys. I only tried to gently talk some sense into her, and she shoved me down. She made me lose the baby."

Her words let me, caught dead in the eye of the storm, breathe out hard in relief.

It was all finally about to end.