While He Protected Her, I Stopped Loving Him

Playing the part of Don Lorenzo Moretti's wife was nothing like the gilded fantasy I had once let myself imagine. The gala unfolded around me in a haze of crystal and candlelight, a sit-down dressed up as a celebration, where the heads of three Families circled one another beneath a chandelier the size of a small car. I knew none of the other wives, none of their husbands, none of the made men who lined the walls like well-tailored statues. And Lorenzo, who had brought me here on his arm as if I were an ornament he might or might not bother to wear, had not spoken a word to me in over an hour.

The silence between us had its own weight. I felt it in the cold marble beneath my heels, in the way the Turkish tobacco smoke curled toward the high ceilings and dissolved into nothing, the way I seemed to be dissolving too.

"Are you—" he began, finally, as if remembering I existed.

He never finished. Her voice cut through the murmur of the room first.

"Lorenzo!"

We turned, and there she was, crossing the obsidian floor like the whole evening had been arranged for her arrival. Carla. She moved without hesitation, without the careful deference the rest of the room afforded the Don, because she had never needed it. The men did not stiffen for her the way they did for him, but they watched her, and she knew it, and she wore that attention like silk.

She reached him and folded herself against his chest, both arms around him, holding him tightly in front of everyone.

"You look marvelous," he murmured, and his eyes traveled the length of her body in a way that made the wine turn sour on my tongue.

Carla took his hand and laced her fingers through his, slow and certain. "Thanks."

Then she noticed me. Her gaze flicked to where I stood, half a step apart, the lawful wife and the unseen one, and her eyes widened in a performance of surprise so smooth it could only have been practiced. She slipped her fingers free of his, her hand rising at once to the diamonds at her throat, a small reflexive touch, fingertips grazing the proof of her place.

"Oh no. Lady Adriana, I'm so sorry. It's just that we're very close."

I curled my bare ring finger inward, pressing it into my palm where no one could see, a phantom reach for a band I no longer wore.

"You don't have to apologize, Carla." Lorenzo answered her before I could open my mouth, before the room could even turn to me for my reply. His voice was the most generous it had been all night, and it was not aimed at me.

It was at that moment that Don Lombardi crossed the floor toward us, the temperature of the gathering shifting subtly with his approach, and he drew Lorenzo aside into the low, measured talk of men who decide things. I was left standing beside Carla and her diamonds, two women who shared a husband, neither of us speaking.

"Outsiders!" someone shouted from the far end of the hall. "Shooters at the perimeter!"

The word moved through the gala like a blade. Glasses were set down. Men reached beneath their jackets. The wives scattered toward the walls in a rustle of silk and panic, and for one breathless instant the whole gilded room remembered what it truly was.

"Come on, Carla," Lorenzo said, and his hand closed around hers.

He pulled her toward the back door, fast, his body between her and whatever might be coming through the dark. He did not look for me. He did not reach for me. He had a wife on one side of the room and a mistress on the other, and in the one second that fear stripped away all the careful manners, his hand had chosen her.

He didn't try to protect me. Instead, he was protecting Carla.

"Everyone, calm yourselves. There are no shooters." Don Lombardi's voice rolled across the hall, unhurried, and he lifted one open palm, calm as a man stilling water. The room obeyed it the way it would never obey a shout. "A boy at the gate saw the shadow of a hedge moving in the wind and thought it was a man with a gun. There is no one here who does not belong."

The men's hands eased away from their jackets. The wives drifted back from the walls. And I watched Lorenzo walk back into the hall with Carla still at his side, her color high, her diamonds catching the chandelier light, the danger already turning into a story she would tell prettily later.

I glanced at the time on my phone.

My flight would take off in the cold dark hours before dawn, and I needed sleep before then, needed to be steady for what tomorrow would cost me. So I did the only thing left to do at a party where I had never been wanted. I made my way out of the hall, past the made men at the doors who did not so much as turn their heads, and I had a car carry me back to the Moretti estate alone.

I did not curl my finger against my palm anymore that night. There was nothing left to reach for.

The next morning I was already in the air, the city falling away beneath the wing, when Lorenzo's voice tore into my head, frantic, stripped of all his cold composure.

Adriana! Why am I feeling pain from the blood vow breaking? Why are you leaving? Where are you going?