While He Protected Her, I Stopped Loving Him

Lorenzo seized her hands and drew them down from her face, his voice softening into something I never heard him use for me. "You have nothing to feel guilty about, Carla tesoro."

How could he always stand on her side of every line?

The question burned and went nowhere, the way it always did. I remembered the real reason I had come into this room, the reason that had nothing to do with the woman draped on his arm, and I made myself reach into my bag and draw out the release papers. The grandfather clock in the corner of the study ticked through the silence, each stroke landing like a small judgment.

I pulled in a slow breath and let it out before I trusted my voice. "I came here for something important. A woman I know wants to be released to another Family. Her bound match belongs to them. I need your signature on her transfer." My thumb pressed the folded paper flat. My ring finger curled inward against my palm, a phantom reach for the band I had stopped wearing, and I forced my hand still before he could read it.

He glanced at me, a frown gathering between his brows as though the request needed weighing.

"Just sign it. Please." I set the words down quietly, the way Rosa would have, and he took the paper from me.

He scrawled his name across the bottom without reading a line of it, grumbling something low in his throat, then handed it back. The signet ring on his finger caught the lamplight as he passed it over, and his thumb was already rolling it, that slow restless turn I had learned to watch for.

Relief moved through me like cool water as my fingers closed around the form. Soon. Soon I would finally be free of this ache that lived under my ribs like a second heart.

"Is this why you interrupted us?" he asked, eyes flicking back to me.

"Yes." The single word was all I could spare.

His jaw set hard. His eyes narrowed, and he scoffed and turned his face away, as though the sight of me had curdled something in him. The mistress at his side watched the whole exchange with the patient amusement of a woman who has never once doubted whose name comes first.

"That mark on your wrist," Carla said, her gaze settling on my right arm where the word Mates was inked into my skin. "It looks just like the one Lorenzo wore a few months ago. The one that vanished. He told me he had it taken off." Her manicured fingers drifted up to the diamonds at her throat, a small reflexive touch, the gesture of a woman reaching for proof of where she stood.

I looked at his wrist. She was right. The matching token we had inked together five years ago, after he marked me before God and the Family as his lawful wife, was gone. Bare skin where the vow had been.

"It's only a tattoo," I told her, and the anger rose hot and bright behind my sternum even as my voice stayed level. "You can have one made for yourself if it means that much to you."

I was going to have mine removed today. It didn't mean anything to Lorenzo. There was no reason it should go on meaning everything to me.

I didn't wait for her answer. I turned my back on both of them.

My phone began to ring against my hip. I glanced at the screen and saw my brother's name. Nico.

I picked up at once, and his voice came warm down the line. "Adriana. How are you? Is Lorenzo treating you right?"

I sniffed, swallowing the thing in my throat. "I'm good. How's Mamma?"

He let the unanswered second question slide past, the way only family knows how to do. "Rosa's well. We've been missing you, all of us, but her most of all. When are you coming home? You told her it would be this week."

"I've missed you too." The truth of it nearly broke me. "Don't worry. I'm coming home in two days."

I was glad past words that he didn't ask why I was leaving Lorenzo. The Valente name carried its own weight, and Nico would not press at a wound until I was ready to show it to him. That mercy was its own kind of love.

As I ended the call, I heard footsteps cross the marble behind me, unhurried, certain. I turned to find Lorenzo walking toward me, his guards holding their places by the door, eyes lowered, the way men learn to stand when the Don moves through a room.

I couldn't tell whether he had overheard me or not. If he had, he said nothing of it.

"We'll stay here tonight," he murmured, already moving toward the staircase.

I didn't understand why he wanted us under this roof when the Family estate sat barely a mile down the road, every comfort waiting. But I followed him up the stairs the way I had followed him for five years, out of a habit my heart hadn't yet learned to break.

I woke to find his side of the bed cold and empty. The clock on the wall read one in the afternoon. The house was quiet around me, the particular hushed quiet of a place where men with guns stand somewhere out of sight and nothing happens that the Don does not permit.

The door opened and Lorenzo came in.

His gaze found me. "I had a special lunch made. Come down to the dining room and eat."

I climbed out of the bed and followed him down, his thumb turning that ring the whole way, faster now, around and around, as though there were something he was working very hard to convince himself of.