Chapter 7

If a single ruined wedding dress could teach me everything I needed to know about a man's soul, then perhaps I ought to count myself fortunate. Grief was a cheap enough tuition for a lesson learned twice over.

After all, I was finally seeing Salvatore Falcone for exactly what he was. No illusions left to burn. No soft lies I still told myself in the dark.

Tonight was the family dinner at the Ricci estate, the sit-down where I would officially be presented to Lorenzo. The blood-alliance had been struck between the two Families before I ever laid eyes on the man, and tonight the ink of that pact would take on a face.

First impressions were currency in our world, and I knew I had to look every inch the daughter of the Ricci bloodline. I would not hand anyone the smallest thread to pull at, not the whispering wives of the capos, not my own mother, and certainly not Salvatore, who fed on the humiliation of others the way lesser men fed on wine. Not after everything that had unraveled between him and Adriana.

I took a quiet moment before the mirror to freshen up and gave myself a low, steadying word. My thumb found the base of my ring finger without my permission, pressing there the way it always did when I was steeling myself, an old habit dragged out of a marriage that had ruined me in a life no one else remembered. I made myself stop. When I felt ready, I went down to the underground garage beneath the estate.

That was when I noticed it. Salvatore's Maserati, sleek and black as a coffin, sitting in the far shadows of the concrete cavern and rocking gently, rhythmically, on its suspension.

Curiosity is a cruel thing. It gnawed at me and drew me closer across the oil-stained floor, my heels clicking against the cold concrete. When I got near enough to see through the half-lowered window, my stomach turned over on itself.

There they were. Salvatore and Adriana. She was sprawled across his lap, her eyes half-lidded, her body moving over his in a slow, deliberate rise and fall.

Even knowing, as I did with bone-deep certainty, that Salvatore Falcone did not love me and never had, seeing it with my own eyes still landed like a fist against the chest. Old pain has no manners. It arrives whenever it pleases.

For one suspended moment, his gaze lifted and met mine through the glass. A flash of panic crossed it, there and then gone, snuffed like a match. In its place came that smirk of his, the one I had learned to hate across two lifetimes. To wound me further, to make the blade twist, he swept Adriana's hair aside with a gentle hand and kissed her deep and slow, his every movement exaggerated for my benefit, a performance staged in a garage for an audience of one.

Adriana's soft whimpers echoed off the concrete, loud and calculated, each one aimed like a dart. She had always known how to make her pleasure sound like a taunt.

I turned away. I kept my face smooth as still water and walked to my own car, sliding in and shutting the door on the sound of them. Let them have their theater. I had more important matters tonight, matters that would outlast Salvatore Falcone and every cheap thing he did.

On the drive to the Falcone family estate, where the alliance dinner would be held on their neutral ground, I stopped at a boutique to collect a gift. A tie of heavy silk, the kind a man of real standing wore, chosen for Lorenzo. A small courtesy owed to the true power of the Falcone Family, and I would not arrive empty-handed to a man who could raise a bloodline or bury one.

When I pulled through the estate's iron gates, past the soldiers who nodded me through without a word, I was surprised to find Salvatore arriving at the same moment, his Maserati sliding into the space beside mine.

He stepped out, and from where I stood I could see clearly across the leather interior of his passenger seat. Used condoms, scattered there like refuse, plain as day in the estate lighting.

Real classy. The heir apparent to the Falcone throne, and he could not so much as clean up after himself before crossing his own Don's threshold.

For a moment his expression flickered with something close to embarrassment when he caught sight of me holding the gift bag. Then it passed, as all shame passed with him, chased off by that habitual smugness. He rolled his shoulders and tugged once at his collar, a small restless motion I had learned to read.

"Bought me a gift?" he drawled, taking a step toward me across the gravel. "Let me see it, then."

I drew the bag behind my back, out of his reach, my chin steady. "It's not for you," I said flatly.