Chapter 2

The moment the bag left my hand, whatever softness Lorenzo had shown after seeing my cold face vanished completely.

He crossed the room in a few long strides, ripped the suitcase out of my hand, and slammed it into the marble.

Clothes spilled everywhere.

On his way over, his handmade Italian shoe flattened one of the dumplings on the ground. My teeth locked as I stared down at the sole of that shoe, at the meat crushed beneath a thing worth more than everything my mother had ever owned.

"Elena, my patience has limits. Whatever's between us, don't drag in someone who has nothing to do with it."

My hands trembled and my whole body froze in place.

Vittoria's eyes reddened, welling over with tears as she looked at me, all innocence, the picture of a girl the Family had chosen precisely because she could cry on command.

"I'm sorry, Elena. I only looked into her travel. I wanted to send a car for her, I never thought—"

Her tears dropped one after another, splattering on the floor and mixing with the ground meat.

"I was just afraid someone was deceiving Signor Fontana. The Fontana name is a special case, after all. There are so many who'd use a dying woman to force their blood into a bloodline that would never have them. I—"

She looked at Lorenzo, bit her lip, and shook her head. Her sympathetic little smile held a half-second too long before it fell, the way a card held a half-second too long tells you the whole hand is marked.

My gaze went colder and colder, and when I spoke there was no warmth left in my voice.

"Lorenzo. You think I'm lying too?"

He said nothing. But the look on his face was answer enough.

My mother's medical records were real, filed with a clinic outside the Family's reach. I'd sat beside her for the tests myself, six months ago. There was no faking them.

So Vittoria had turned her attention to my mother's travel instead.

She hadn't flown, it was true.

A flight cost so much. How could she bear to spend it?

To save the money for whatever small dowry she could scrape together for me, she'd forced her sick body through more than thirty hours crammed in the back of a coach, jolting across half the country on cracked vinyl.

All to attend her daughter's wedding that didn't even exist.

But Lorenzo wouldn't spare me even one line of the performance. He'd chosen to leave me standing at an altar the Family had already decided never to sanctify.

Think about it, and it was clear: he'd never once returned my feelings. From the moment we met, the ending was set.

I had gone hunting through every small detail of our five years together for proof that he loved me, lying to myself.

For five years everything held.

But from the moment Vittoria appeared, the balance on the surface finally broke.

The Underboss began to feel joy and anger and sorrow, like an ordinary man.

He began learning how to love someone.

When Vittoria's stomach hurt, he'd ask me what he should do.

When he could tell she was about to have an allergic reaction, he'd have her medicine waiting in the car ahead of time.

He'd bring Vittoria to every sit-down at the social club, to every dinner at his mother's estate, introducing her to every made man in the room as his perfect partner.

Next to that, I was like a rat in the gutter, giving off a stench.

Even if I offered up my pride with both hands and let him and his sweetheart trample it at will, I still couldn't buy a seat at that table.

What I couldn't have, I didn't want anymore.

Where the bag had struck, Vittoria's skin was already swelling red, tears rolling down one by one.

Lorenzo cursed out loud, furious.

But his hands never stopped. Practiced, he took the medicine from the bag, smeared it on his fingertips, and dabbed it onto her face. Somewhere in the still apartment a clock kept ticking, obscenely loud, marking every second he touched her with a tenderness he had never once spent on me.

Once he'd soothed her, he turned to me, his voice edged with threat.

"Elena, don't push your luck. Vittoria is innocent. She collapsed at the clinic yesterday, and the first thing she said when she woke was for me to get to the wedding and find you."

"Look at yourself right now. You're nothing but a jealous shrew. How can you face what she did for you?"

"Elena, I'll say this one last time. Apologize to her."

"Make a scene like this again, and you get out of here."

I acted as if I couldn't hear him, keeping my head down, gathering up the luggage that had spilled out. My thumb found the thin gold band on my finger, my mother's, the only thing of value I owned, and I turned it once, slowly, holding on to the one thing they hadn't taken yet.

Minute by minute, Lorenzo ran out of patience.

He stepped up in front of me, bent down, and fisted the long hair at my shoulders, his face vicious, twisted, monstrous.

My scalp tore with pain. I clenched my teeth and refused to cry out, my eyes bloodshot as I stared him down.

His voice went cold and cruel. "Can't hear me? Or don't you know how to apologize? Elena, I really have spoiled you rotten.

You wanted your mother's dumplings, didn't you? Then how about you taste them yourself right now."

I gritted my teeth, but my head was forced down against the floor and ground into it hard.

My lips crushed out of shape, tears and flour caking my face.

Even so, Lorenzo wasn't satisfied. He erupted, one hand yanking my head up in front of him, the other slapping my face over and over.

Something sweet and metallic filled my throat, and blood from my forehead blurred my sight.

"Open your mouth, then. Weren't you so tough a second ago? Come on, open up, let me see if my aim's any good."

Then he snatched a dumpling still mostly whole off the floor and ground it into my face until it was mush.

"Smell good? Enjoy your meal? Now apologize to Vittoria."

"Or I'll send your mother straight back to whatever hole she crawled out of."