Chapter 8

Before I could shape a single word, she swayed. It was a small, theatrical thing, the kind of lie the old wives in the village used to perform at funerals to prove their grief, and I saw it for what it was even as her weight came crashing into me. We went down together in a tangle of silk and limbs, the polished marble of the sit-down hall rushing up to meet us. Lucia landed clutching her ankle, her face folded into a mask of exquisite suffering that would have earned applause on any stage in the Territory.

"Why did you push me, Adri?" she wailed, and her voice carried the length of that vast hall, up past the chandeliers and into the ears of every made man and every soldier lining the walls. "My ankle. Dio, it hurts so much."

The microphone had fallen with her, and it lay now at her feet like a loaded thing, catching her every word and throwing it wide across the assembled bosses. Ensuring, with the precision of a well-placed shot, that no one in that room could pretend they hadn't heard the accusation.

A ripple moved through the crowd, low and cold, the sound of men who traffic in judgment finding a target for it. Every eye turned toward me. Contempt sharpened the air the way the scent of gun oil sharpens a quiet room. I did not lower my gaze. I met each stare as it came, one after another, and I refused to flinch, because in this world flinching is the same as confessing.

Salvatore came for the stage. His face wore that mask of concern I had learned to distrust across three years of arranged courtship, and even now some traitor part of me wanted to believe it. But before he could reach us, the platform beneath our bodies let out a low, tortured groan, the sound of old steel remembering it had a breaking point. A heartbeat later, it gave way.

Lucia screamed and threw herself at the nearest beam, clawing for it as the structure collapsed and debris came down around us like the ceiling of a church falling on the guilty.

"Salvatore! Save me!" she shrieked, her terror shrill and real for once, high enough to cut through the roar of falling steel.

In the chaos, in the choking dust, I looked down at my own wrist. It had been opened by a sharp edge that sliced clean through skin as I fell, and now the blood came, dark and fast, welling up along the length of the gash and running warm over my fingers.

Blood was everywhere.

I have been terrified of blood since I was a child, since a night in that world I do not speak of, and the sight of it climbing my own arm now froze me where I lay. Every instinct screamed at me to run, the way my body always begs me to run when the fear takes hold. My thumb found the edge of the wound without my willing it. But my legs would not answer. They lay under me like something that belonged to another woman.

Salvatore shoved aside a fallen beam and crawled toward the wreckage, and relief moved through me so suddenly it was almost pain. Whatever he had become, whatever these three years of pretense had cost me, in that moment he was the only power in the room strong enough to pull me out of it. I called to him the way a drowning woman calls to the only thing above the water.

"Salvatore, I'm here! Help me!"

His focus never touched me. It was fixed entirely on Lucia, on the woman half-buried in silk a few feet away, and when he reached her he lifted her out of the debris with the tenderness of a man handling something sacred. He spared me a glance, and only a glance, the way a boss glances at a body being carried out of a room.

"If you hadn't made a spectacle of yourself before the whole table, Lucia wouldn't be trapped under this. And now you have the nerve to beg me for help?" His voice came flat and lethal, the courtly warmth stripped clean off it. "Shame on you."

The pretense was gone. Three years of it, peeled away in an instant. Here, with the ceiling coming down around us and my blood pooling on the marble, he did not even trouble himself to hide the contempt he had carried for me all along.

Trembling, I lifted my ruined hand toward him so he could see it, so he could see the blood sheeting down my wrist. "Salvatore, my hand. It's bleeding. If I don't get to the clinic soon I could die. Please. Take me first. Take me to the clinic."

For one fleeting moment something crossed his face. Hesitation, or the ghost of the man who had courted me under all those false vows. His hand hovered.

Then Lucia's fingers curled into the front of his shirt, and her voice came thin and pitiful against his chest. "Salvatore. It hurts."

He turned back to her at once, panic flooding his features, everything in him bending toward her the way a compass bends toward north. "I know. I know, I'm sorry. It's going to be all right. We'll get you to the clinic. You're going to be all right, do you hear me. You're going to be fine."

He rose with her in his arms and he began to walk away.

The fear swallowed me whole. I dragged myself up and stumbled after them across the broken floor, my legs finally obeying only long enough to fail me, tears cutting hot tracks through the dust on my face. "Salvatore, please! I'm scared. Please, take me to the clinic!"

He did not look back. Not once. His pace only quickened as he carried her toward the light and the safety at the far end of the hall, his broad shoulders a wall between us. And over that shoulder Lucia turned her head and found my eyes with hers, and she smiled at me, slow and cruel and satisfied, the smile of a woman who has won something she planned for a long time. She said nothing aloud. She did not need to. Her lips shaped the words in silence, savoring each one.

Left behind again. Poor little Adri.

Their figures shrank down the length of the hall and were gone through the far doors, and the darkness and the dust closed over the space where they had been, and I was alone with the wreckage.

I sank down onto the ruined floor, my whole body gone weak and shaking, the blood still coming from my wrist in a slow warm insistence. Being abandoned was not my fault. It never had been, not the first time and not this one. But I could not abandon myself. That was the one law left to me in a world where every oath had turned to ash. I gathered what strength I had left, every last scrap of it, and I set my shoulder against the heavy steel beam pinning me and I pushed. The pain in my torn hand went white and blinding, the flesh dragging and splitting further as I strained, but I did not stop. For what felt like an eternity in that dark and silent hall I pushed against the dead weight of it. And then, at last, it shifted, and rolled, and I was free.

I made it to the clinic on my own two feet. No soldier carried me. No boss sent a car. The wound that should have taken five stitches took eighteen, because the flesh had torn wider when I forced the beam off my own body, opening what might have closed clean. I sat in that sterile white room with the needle going in and out of me, and I let the anger and the resolve turn over and over inside me, cold and clear, until they hardened into something I could use.

On the road to the airport I sent word to a fixer, the kind of man the Family keeps for making inconvenient people disappear, and I paid him a fortune in laundered cash to do the same for me. I gave him his instructions in a low voice. A body to stand in for mine. Every trace of my existence erased, every thread cut. I wanted to vanish from Salvatore Marchetti's world so completely that not even the Family's long memory could find me.

When the speakers overhead called the final boarding for the flight to Dubai, I stood at the gate with a single suitcase and eighteen stitches bound tight beneath my sleeve. I turned and looked one last time at the Territory, at the coastal city that had raised me and betrayed me and left me bleeding on a broken floor.

"Goodbye, Salvatore," I whispered.