Chapter 6

All I could do was stay beside him and sing to him, softly.

Hoping it might ease his pain, even a little.

Lorenzo's expression froze. He hesitated.:

“That tune. It sounds familiar somehow……”

He wanted to come closer and hear it clearly. In the hush of that cellar the only other sound was the drip of water somewhere in the dark, and for a heartbeat even the enforcer's boots went still.

But Delphina held him back.

“Enzo, my arm hurts so much.” The lie came a fraction too fast, her smile stretching a hair too wide before she softened it into a wince.

In an instant, the cold returned to Lorenzo's face. He draped his coat over her shoulders.

“Serafina, this is the last time.”

When the final blow of the rod came down,

I thought, Lorenzo, I don't owe you anything anymore.

Rosa rushed over and took me to a doctor the Family didn't own, one who set the bone and asked no questions.

She couldn't bear to leave me on my own, and a few days later, she boarded the plane abroad with me.

……

Lorenzo sat in the back office of the club, the talk he'd overheard from his associates still turning in his mind. Cigar smoke hung flat under the low lamp, and the men outside had lowered their voices the moment he passed, the way men do around a Don who is listening.

“Did you hear? The Don's wife got so jealous she actually tried to throw Delphina off the roof. Isn't that going too far?”

“No wonder he won't touch her. Even that baby she lost came from a clinic, not a bed. Everyone knows the allergy story is fake. He just finds her disgusting. It's a joke, five years bound to her and still an old maid……”

His mood was tangled.

So this was how everyone in the Family saw Serafina behind her back.

He knew his own affliction came from the shadow left by his years in the cages, from the boy he had been before he became a Falcone.

Things couldn't go on like this forever.

Serafina hadn't reached out to him for several days. It was the first time that had ever happened.

Perhaps he should give her a child the normal way, and shut those mouths for good. A whisper against a Don's name was a crack in the Family's respect, and cracks got men killed.

For the first time, he reached out on his own to Matteo, his Consigliere and blood-brother, a man who had been caged by that same flesh-peddler and had climbed out of the dark beside him.

Hearing that Lorenzo had found the girl from his childhood, Matteo offered congratulation after congratulation and asked to see a photograph of the little mute girl.

Lorenzo sent a picture of himself and Delphina together. He turned the heavy signet ring once on his finger as he waited.

Half a minute later, a message came back.:

“Lorenzo, I think you've got it wrong.”

“This girl is definitely not the little mute girl.”