Chapter 5

I watched his fingers laced tight through Delphina's, the two of them leaning into each other beneath the low amber light of the private room.

My heart went cold all the way through.

Rosa heard what had happened and came back to find me, her heels sharp against the floor.

She was an old friend, a woman who ran her speakeasy on the edge of Falcone territory and answered to no man's ring, and she cursed Lorenzo up and down, calling him an animal.

She didn't understand why I wouldn't just take off the mask and shame that shameless pair before the whole house.

"Whether I take it off or not, would it make any difference?"

She was quiet for a long moment, then sighed and set down the bottle she'd carried over.

"A man who won't even let you touch him. I honestly don't know what you thought you were getting, swearing yourself to him."

I said nothing, only swirled the glass. The red of the wine looked exactly like the blood Lorenzo had bled for me as a child.

After his father's bankruptcy ended with a bullet, and his mother followed him into the ground.

The old steward, for money, sold him off like a toy into Gaspare Ashford's racket.

And I was the little slave Gaspare had bought. Because I refused to have my throat ruined by poison and be made truly mute for the trade, I played at being a little mute girl and used only sign language.

Lorenzo had once put a blade into Gaspare, and for it he earned beating after beating, and starvation in the dark.

I couldn't bear to watch such a beautiful boy die like that, so every day I split my own food and gave him half.

He was the only one who knew I could speak.

One late night, when the others weren't watching, I secretly let him go.

But we were discovered, and Gaspare meant to beat me to death right there on the floor.

Lorenzo threw himself over me, taking those iron bars in my place, his blood running down my face.

It was the first time I felt someone treat me like a person.

Later his aunt came with men and bought him out, and the Feds raided Gaspare's den, but we never got the chance to say goodbye.

Yet I remember what he promised me that night, softly, under the bars.

"We have to survive. We have to live and grow up. Wait for me to marry you."

I've forgotten now how I climbed over the mountains and thorns of my whole life just to meet him again.

Just as Lorenzo had long since forgotten the little mute girl from back then.

The day I came back from collecting my papers, a few strangers I'd never seen tied me and hauled me to the rooftop of a gutted building on the edge of the city, far past where any Family soldier walked.

Delphina's hands were bound, and she'd been left dangling out over the ledge.

And yet she was laughing.

"The lead's here. Now the show can begin."

A rush of footsteps on the stairwell, and Lorenzo appeared with his enforcers fanning out behind him.

"What are you doing?!"

"Lorenzo, Serafina hates you for ignoring her that day because of me, so she wants to throw me off to my death. Save me!" Delphina wailed, the sob arriving a fraction too fast, her stricken face held a hair too wide before she softened it.

It was the first time I saw Lorenzo look at me with murder in his eyes.

He had his soldiers pin those strangers to the gravel and threw himself toward Delphina without a second thought, hauling her back over the edge.

He crushed her into his arms, his face raw with the terror of a man who'd nearly lost the most precious thing in the world.

"Thank God you're all right. I'll never let you be in danger again."

Exactly the same as back then.

So when he passed me with that blank, indifferent look, I caught his hand on instinct.

"Lorenzo, it wasn't me."

His face went white in an instant. Fighting back his revulsion, he flung my hand away, hard.

The slap landed across my face before I could brace for it.

"Get away from me. Don't touch me. You make me sick."

"Delphina would never lie to me. She's the kindest woman in this world."

Blood trickled slowly from the corner of my mouth, and in that moment I suddenly didn't want to explain anything anymore.

"Serafina, everyone answers for their own sins. In this famiglia you're no exception."

The signet ring on his right hand stopped turning. His palm went flat against his thigh, and every man on that rooftop knew the word was already spoken.

"Break Mrs. Falcone's hand. Break it until she learns her lesson and never dares lay a finger on Delphina again."

The enforcers pinned me to the gravel, and the iron bar came down on my arm, again and again.

The sound of bone shattering rang out, clear, in a silence where no soldier so much as shifted his weight.

The pain was so violent my vision blacked out, and in that blur I felt like I was back on the night Lorenzo took the beating for me.

Half-conscious, I hummed, softly, the nursery rhyme I'd made up myself.

Back then he'd been beaten unconscious, and I was terrified out of my mind, afraid he'd just slip away like that, and there was nothing I could do.