Something flickered across Tomasso's face. Not guilt. Something closer to alarm. The expression of a man who has just realized the ground beneath him might not be as solid as he thought. He reached for my arm. "Giovanna, don't be so petty. I was just helping her out. My love belongs only to you."
I wrenched my arm free.
"Don't touch me. You're filthy."
The words hung in the corridor like gunsmoke. Behind Tomasso, Catarina's hand drifted to her ear again, slow and deliberate, but I was already turning away. My wedding band had gone still against my finger. The turning had stopped.
And in this family, when the turning stopped, the decision had already been made.
I shook off his hand and walked toward my bedroom like a dead woman walking.
He didn't follow. Behind me, I heard Catarina coaxing him: "Tomasso, go check on her, please. I'd hate for her to be upset because of me."
"Let her cool down. She loves me too much to stay angry. She'll come around."
Each word landed like a stone. Every step I took felt like dragging my feet through wet concrete.
And the last five years with Tomasso began replaying in my mind, scene by scene, like a film I couldn't pause.
I'd met him seven years ago.
His syndicate had barely taken shape. A handful of soldiers, a single social club on the south side, and a name that meant nothing to anyone who mattered. I hid the fact that I was the sole blood-heir of the Valente dynasty and quietly opened every door my family's name could open. Alliances brokered through intermediaries so he'd never trace them back to me. Territorial disputes that resolved themselves overnight because a single phone call from the Valente compound reached the right capo at the right time. Protection from the Feds that he assumed was luck or the work of his own consigliere. From a man with nothing to his name to one of the most feared Dons on the Eastern Seaboard, and he never knew that the invisible architecture holding it all together was mine.
After we married, he treated me like I was the center of his universe.
When I got sick, he sat at my bedside and refused to leave. He posted a soldier outside the door and canceled a sit-down with the Calabrese family because my fever wouldn't break.