Chapter 4

Enzo came back to the bedroom before dawn.

Two hours had passed since I returned from the clinic, and the anesthetic in my palm had worn off. When he pushed the door open, I was using my left hand to sort through the share documents my mother had left me.

"You actually got stitches?"

His eyes went to the bandages wrapping my hand, and his face changed.

"I thought it was just a scratch."

"You saw perfectly well that my hand was covered in blood."

He stood where he was and didn't deny it.

After a moment he took the first aid kit out of the cabinet and sat down in front of me. He had cleaned up my injuries many times over ten years, and he still remembered which ointment to use.

He unwound the bandage, and his breathing grew heavier when he saw the crisscross of stitches in my palm.

"I thought Bianca was going to fall into the glass."

"So you pushed me out of the way for her."

"I never meant for you to get hurt."

"And after you saw I was hurt, you still carried her out first."

His hands stopped.

He did not explain again. He bent his head and rewrapped my hand. Those hands had never trembled while holding a gun, but now they were as careful as they had always been with me. When he kissed my fingertips, the hurt I had swallowed surged back.

When the tears came, he pulled me against him.

"All right, don't cry." His hand moved slowly over my back. "I know I have neglected you lately. Once Capo Rizzo's memorial is over I'll handle our contract myself, and Bianca won't go near it again."

I leaned against that familiar chest and almost believed him again.

Enzo kissed me. He knew exactly how to soften me after a fight. As our breathing tangled, he pressed me into the mattress, his hand sliding slowly down my waist.

Just as I closed my eyes, a document slipped out of his inside jacket pocket and landed beside the bed.

I saw the title.

Moretti Family Statement Acknowledging Temporary Marriage Protection for Bianca Rizzo.

His mouth stopped against the side of my neck.

"I was going to tell you about it tomorrow."

I pushed him off and picked the document up.

The statement required me to publicly confirm that the chapel photographs were part of a family operation and guarantee that the Moretti family would not withdraw from the alliance. So his tenderness that night had nothing to do with my hand. He needed my signature.

"The Bellini family has started questioning whether the photos are real." Enzo sat up. "Sign the statement, go with Bianca to Capo Rizzo's memorial once, and the whole thing is finished."

"And then you'll marry me?"

"Of course.

"Sofia, don't wreck an alliance between our families over pointless jealousy. What your mother wanted most before she died was to see us stay together."

He brought my mother up again but never noticed that I had stopped arguing. I picked up a pen and signed my name on the statement.

Relief visibly softened Enzo's face. He kissed my forehead as if rewarding a child who had finally come to her senses.

"There's my Sofia.

"I'll take Bianca to the memorial and be back tomorrow night. When I get back we'll go see the consigliere."

After he left, I set the estate keys and the engagement ring on the nightstand and took nothing that wasn't mine.

My father's car was already waiting outside. My father, Don Alessandro Moretti, reminded me that once the alliance was transferred to the Russo family, the De Luca family would never treat it as an ordinary broken engagement.

"I'm not going to regret it."

Once I was in the car, I called Don Matteo myself.

Three years ago, the Bellini family ambushed Don Matteo at a Moretti port. I dragged him into an abandoned warehouse while he bled from a gunshot wound to the shoulder, then pressed my own coat over the wound until his people arrived.

He kept his gun aimed at the door even while he was losing blood. The only thing he asked, when I took his hand, was, "You're not afraid of me?"

"I am," I said. "But I can't let you die."

I stayed with him that night until the ambulance came. Afterward Don Matteo sent the coat back to the Moretti estate, cleaned, with a card that said only, "I owe you one." He never contacted me privately, and he never used a single one of Enzo's mistakes to get close to me.

I learned later that for the next three years, his consigliere had kept watch over my safety from a distance. Russo operatives recorded only threats and irregularities connected to me. They never approached me or intervened in the De Luca family's internal affairs on my behalf.

When the call connected, the low voice on the other end dispensed with pleasantries.

"The Moretti family has initiated the formal dissolution?"

"The De Luca family's consigliere signed for the original. At noon tomorrow, the two dons will meet to negotiate compensation and the port handover."

"Are you coming to me to use the Russo family to punish Enzo, or is it truly over?"

I watched the lights of the estate shrink behind us.

"If I still wanted to punish him, I would have stayed and let him see how much it hurt.

"I'm calling you because I want out."

The other end of the line went quiet for a few seconds.

"Three years ago you asked me whether I would last until the ambulance came," Don Matteo said. "Now it's my turn. Sofia, are you really ready to leave him?"

"Yes."

"Tomorrow at noon, after the two dons sign the dissolution, come at one o'clock with the formal papers," Don Matteo said. "I only marry a free woman."