"How do you intend to pay for your bills, Miss?" the nurse asked impatiently.
I gulped softly. "Credit."
She glared at me and nodded. Immediately she left, I grabbed my phone ready to call Giacomo and yell at him, but I thought against it.
If he didn't see me as his wife, then I would end this sham of a marriage.
I limped out of the clinic despite the doctor and nurses protesting for me to rest and recover. I hailed a cab on the avenue outside Russo territory and went straight to a consigliere's office downtown, a man who handled civil matters for families outside the old law.
I sat down in the reception area, patiently waiting for the consigliere to call me in. The office was quiet, wood-paneled, the kind of place where men came to dissolve things legally that could never be dissolved any other way.
Thirty minutes later, the consigliere called for me. I entered his office and sat across from him, my eyes filled with determination.
"How may I help you?" the consigliere asked.
"I'd like to file for dissolution of my marriage and erase all ties with Giacomo Russo," I answered.
The consigliere nodded and started typing on his computer when he frowned.
"Are you Nadina Greco? You'd like to dissolve your union with Giacomo Russo?" he asked me.
I frowned. "No, I'm Liliana Russo. I've been married to Giacomo for four years."
The consigliere frowned. "According to the official records, that's incorrect. There's no record of a Liliana Russo married to Giacomo Russo. The only marriage record here is the one for Nadina Greco and Giacomo Russo, blood-bound two years ago."
I frowned, shaking my head. "That's impossible, Sir. We had a ceremony, witnesses, all of it."
I showed him the picture of the marriage certificate on my phone, but he just shook his head.
"That's a fake, Miss. See for yourself."
He pushed the computer toward me and my heart stopped.
Right before my eyes was the legal proof that Nadina and Giacomo had been blood-bound for two years, and Pietro had witnessed it.
And the date? It was the exact date my car had broken down in the middle of a storm. I had called Giacomo and Pietro begging them to come pick me up, but they didn't answer my calls and claimed they were in a sit-down.
That night I took a shortcut through a stretch of contested territory and was robbed and stabbed twelve times and almost bled out in an alley, except for a stranger who saved me.