Chapter 8

The week that followed was a torment beyond the reach of words.

They cursed me. They beat me. By the end there was not a single inch of unbroken skin left on my body. No one in that place cleaned my wounds or set the swelling. The doctors the Marchettis had bought looked through me as though I were furniture the Family had ordered stored. Whenever I resisted, whenever I so much as lifted my chin, they pressed the electrodes to me until my teeth locked, and then they slid the needle in and let the sedative pull me under.

Day after day slid past behind those locked doors, and my mind slowly dulled, sinking into a fog thicker than the antiseptic stink that clung to every hall of the sanitarium. This was where the Family buried the inconvenient. I understood that now. Not in the ground. Behind bribed doctors and steel doors, alive and forgotten, until forgetting became a kind of death.

Only after a full week did they finally open the door and let me walk out into the grey light.

Salvatore did not come to collect me, just as he had promised he never would.

But I still saw his face.

On the enormous LED screen mounted on the building across from the sanitarium, high above the street where the Family's fronts advertised their clean and legal names, his wedding to Vittoria was playing live. A grand union before the assembled bosses. The ratified alliance, broadcast for all the territory to witness.

She wore the wedding dress I had designed with my own hands, every seam of it dreamed over in the years I spent believing that dream was mine.

The thorn-flower ring was on her finger.

Salvatore's smile was impossibly gentle. I had never once been given that smile in seven years of belonging to him on paper.

My brothers stood at his side. Gennaro. Matteo. Both of them offering their sincere blessings, their hands warm on the shoulders of the sister who had come home to take everything, their faces bright with the pride they had never spent on me. Everything was exactly the same as the wedding I had once let myself imagine, down to the last white flower and the last kiss of a ring.

I thought I would cry.

But I didn't.

The sanitarium had already drained me of pain, of exhaustion, of feeling itself. They had left nothing in me for them to take. You cannot squeeze grief from a stone they have already ground to powder. I stood in the cold with my hollowed-out chest and I watched another woman wear my life, and I felt nothing at all. That was the true cruelty of the place. Not the electrodes. The emptiness they left where a person used to be.

My thumb found the cheap thorn-flower ring on my own finger. I twisted it, once, out of a habit older than my ruin.

"Serafina. I'm sorry. I'm late."

A voice reached me from behind, low and full of a tenderness I had almost forgotten a voice could hold, threaded through with something that sounded like real regret.

For the first time in longer than I could measure, I smiled. Truly smiled.

I turned. Lorenzo Rizzo stood at the curb in the grey daylight, heir to the Family sworn against the Marchettis, the man who had once made me a quiet vow when I was still someone worth vowing to. He was peeling off his leather gloves as he came toward me, finger by finger, unhurried, the way a man does when he has decided something and means to see it through no matter the cost. When the second glove was gone he held out his bare hand to me.

"Wait for me a moment," I said softly. "I'll leave something here."

I walked back to the sanitarium's front office, where a bored soldier of the Marchetti Family sat guarding the door, and I set down the envelope I had prepared. Heavy cream paper, my own careful hand across the front. Inside were three things. The clinic's report on the child I had lost inside those walls, the child no one had come for. The cheap silver ring Salvatore had slid onto my finger the night the alliance was struck, the one he had never once looked at again. And the forged registry entry I had finally seen with my own eyes, the Family document that had erased me as a wife and written me down instead as an outsider, an unrecognized nobody who had never truly belonged to him at all.

"Tell him," I said, and my voice came out calm, steadier than the sea itself, "that I've given everything to Vittoria."

Then I twisted the thorn-flower ring off my finger and set it down on the desk beside the envelope, and I left it there. The woman who had worn that cheap little thorn through seven years of kneeling was gone. Anyone who had known her would understand it the moment they saw the ring left behind.

I turned and walked away without looking back once.

At the entrance a Rolls-Royce waited, engine breathing low, the Rizzo crest hidden but present the way real power always is. Lorenzo opened the door himself. I did not know when Salvatore and my brothers would finally lift their heads from the celebration and realize that I was gone.

But I knew one thing with the certainty of blood.

I would never come back.