While He Protected Her, I Stopped Loving Him

I had spent my life with a needle in my hand, dressing the women of the Moretti Family and Lorenzo's own sister in silk that cost more than most men earned in a year. I knew the difference between a wife's commission and a lie. And I knew, the moment he set that bundle of fabric in front of me, that this dress was not for Gianna.

I answered him in a voice clipped down to the bone. "I can't have it finished before evening."

He sighed, the sound thick with irritation, his thumb already rolling slow over the gold signet on his finger. "When, then?"

"Tomorrow morning." I kept my eyes on the bolt of cloth, not on him. "I'm going out now to buy the materials."

Relief loosened something in his shoulders, and he nodded. He drew his wallet from the inside of his tailored jacket and peeled off a thick fold of cash, more than the work was worth, the way a man overpays to silence a question he doesn't want asked. "Here. For the materials."

I took it without comment, crossed to where my purse sat against the cold marble of the bedroom floor, and tucked the money inside.

His phone rang. He answered before the second ring had finished, already turning, already walking out of the room with the device pressed to his ear and his back to me.

Lorenzo did not like to answer my calls. Yet here he was, lifting the phone for someone else as though the act cost him nothing at all. In all the years I had been bound to him as his lawful wife, sworn before the Family and the priest, he had answered my call exactly five times. I had counted. A woman counts the small mercies she is denied.

Our husband doesn't want us anymore, Lucian murmured in the back of my mind, blunt as a blade laid flat against the throat.

"Don't worry," I told that buried voice, drawing in a long breath and letting it bleed out of me slow. "He won't be ours for much longer."

I rose from the edge of the bed and walked to the bathroom, and I caught my own reflection in the glass without meaning to, my left hand curled into my palm, the bare finger turned inward where the marriage band used to sit. I made myself open it.

The next day I was in the living room of the family estate, eating lunch in a silence broken only by the distant tick of the grandfather clock in the hall, when Lorenzo's message lit up the group chat. It was a small thread, the four of us only, Lorenzo and Carla and Vito and me, the kind of intimate circle that should have meant something.

[Adriana, the dresses you made are gorgeous.]

Carla answered before I could, gushing into the screen.

[Yeah, they're so beautiful! I could have bought them from a boutique, but you know how they'd cheat me. I can't tell the fine work from the cheap. Lorenzo just doesn't want me to get scammed.]

I knew the dresses were for her. I had known it from the first cut. And still he had let me believe they were for his sister, the way he let me believe so many things, gently, almost kindly, so the betrayal would have softer edges.

I typed back a single word. [Okay.]

Carla wasn't finished. [I'm wearing one of them to a friend's party. You can come too, it's four doors down from the estate, we'll be up on the balcony.]

Then Lorenzo, fast as a man slamming a door: [There's no need for you to come.]

I decided to let it lie, to swallow it the way I had swallowed everything else. But a few minutes later my phone buzzed again, this time a private message, just from her.

[I'm craving chicken wings. Pick some up on your way over.]

So designing her dress had not been enough. Now I was to run her errands as well, fetch and carry for the Don's favored woman like an associate's wife sent to the market. I scoffed at the screen, shaking my head slowly in the quiet of that big empty room.

Half an hour later I walked into the house four doors down. Music poured from the speakers, loud enough to swallow my footsteps, and bodies moved against each other in the front rooms, the kind of careless gaiety that belongs to people who have never been made to wait for anything.

I carried the box of wings out to the balcony.

Lorenzo and Carla sat alone at a table set for four. They were the only two there, the empty chairs like a statement, and they had pulled close, far closer than the space required. He was looking into her eyes. She was looking back into his, and neither of them noticed the night air or the music or the world that held them.

The sound of my heels on the tile finally turned their heads. A scowl came down over his face like a shutter, and he pressed his lips into a thin, white line, the way a man does when he is holding his temper by the throat.

Carla grinned, slow and mischievous, her fingers drifting up to the diamonds at her collar, brushing the proof of her place. "You made it."

Lorenzo's brows drew together. He spoke through his teeth, his thumb rolling fast over his signet now, faster and faster. "I told you not to come."

Her grin only widened, and she lifted both hands in mock surrender, the stones at her throat catching the light. "Guilty. I texted her to bring me some chicken wings."