I remembered a night not long past. I had slipped away from the gathering, avoiding the soldiers and the wives with their sharp eyes, and made my way alone to the courtyard behind the main house. Beyond the reach of the wrought-iron lanterns, in the shadow of the old fig tree my adoptive father had planted the year I arrived, I saw them.
Standing too close. Their distance the kind that exists only between lovers or conspirators.
She laughed—that practiced, musical sound she deployed like a weapon—and the way Giorgio looked down at her carried a focus, an attention, that I had never once received. Not when I brought him coffee during his late-night meetings with the Capos. Not when I sat beside him at Family dinners, performing the role of the loyal betrothed. Not once in all those years.
She noticed me watching.
No panic touched her features. No scramble for explanation. Only the serene composure of someone who had already claimed victory and was merely waiting for the rest of us to acknowledge it.
From that night forward, I never asked him another question.