Chapter 4

"If you really let Vittorio believe you're dead, maybe he'll actually regret it, and finally see Carmela for what she really is!"

On the phone, I'd laughed and said, : "Let's do it!"

In reality, I never even got the chance to start that offhand little joke of a plan before I died in the seawater that came crashing down over everything, in the black water where the flagship went under and no soldier of my father's ever reached me.

But the moment Vittorio heard the laughter in my voice, the guilt and worry he'd been carrying were swallowed up by rage.

He snatched Carmela's phone out of her hand and smashed it straight into the marble floor of the tailor's front, shattering it to pieces. The fitting clerk went still against the wall, the way men go still when a made man stops pretending to be civil.

"Adriana. Fine. Well done."

He ground the words out through his teeth, then stamped his heel down and crushed the phone flat, so furious it turned into a laugh. His thumb dragged once across the empty space on his own hand, where the ink used to sit. : "Just to get under my skin, you'd even fake your own death, and get your father to help you torture me too? You really are something!"

"You were the one who did everything to seal this pact between our Families, and now the second something doesn't go your way, you're the one pulling this vanishing act, this fake death. Is there no end to it with you?"

Then he suddenly jabbed a finger at the clerk, seething. : "Tell the Marchettis: ten days from now, if Adriana isn't standing at that altar, there won't be a union at all!"

"The Marchettis may be an old bloodline, but the Farlones didn't crawl up from nothing either. We won't be jerked around by her!"

"Pull another cheap stunt like this in front of me, and she can forget ever setting foot in the Farlone house as long as she lives!"

With that, he grabbed Carmela, who'd just finished changing, and refused to hear another word out of the clerk, turning on his heel and walking straight out past the soldiers waiting at the door.

And I stood quietly behind him, and as we passed, though our fingers brushed, he couldn't feel the cold radiating off me at all.

Watching his furious back, I gave a bitter smile, my heart aching as though it were being wrung to shreds.

Vittorio, I really did wish I could torment you.

But I lost. I lost to my own unwillingness to hurt you, to the trust I placed in you.

And in the end I lost everything.

Three days after being forced to trail Vittorio, I went from pain to numbness, and grew weary.

He never reached out to me again. Every day, apart from carousing through one Family club after another, night after night, he was out running cars through the harbor roads, throwing himself off bridges, chasing every kind of dangerous thing that could kill a man who'd stopped caring whether it did.

And of course, the one always at his side was Carmela.

At first he still consciously kept away from her touch, but when Carmela kissed his lips in tears after the jump, he didn't refuse.

He even deepened the kiss himself.

When it ended, he looked a little regretful, but Carmela said breezily, her smile holding a half-second too long before the words came, : "Oh, come on, you were just a little nervous back there, so I kissed you to steady your nerve."

"Don't you dare read into it, or Adriana would be furious enough to drop dead."

As she said this, I stood quietly off to the side, and if I hadn't already become a spirit, I would have wanted to cut their lines myself and let their flesh rot together in the water below.

And Vittorio, whether out of a guilty conscience or remorse, quietly took out his phone after that kiss and sent me a text telling me to show up at the union on time. Then his thumb went back to that bare patch of skin where the broken mark had been, rubbing at nothing.

But he never again refused Carmela's "steadying," and those so-called comforts gradually went from shallow kisses to late-night visits behind closed doors.

Yet even so, they still hadn't taken the final step.

No matter how forward Carmela was, Vittorio seemed to hold that last thread taut, refusing to let himself cross the final line.

But all of it came to an end, in the end, on the eve of our union.

That night, both Carmela and he were drunk.

I still stood off to the side, already used to the reek of seawater on my body, and to the two of them being intimate anytime, anywhere.

Until the moment he used the drink as an excuse and broke through that last barrier.

I'd already been in pain until I was numb, already grown used to every breaking of the code, every abandonment.

But in the moment I saw them tangled together at last, no matter how hard I bit down on my lips, the tears still slid down, traitorous and unstoppable. My thumb pressed to the base of my ring finger, to the raw place where the pinky had been torn away, as if pain could hold a spirit together where nothing else would.