Page 23 of Ruthless Vow
His footsteps cross the room. Barefoot on hardwood.
The door opens. Closes.
Silence.
I lie still, listening to the nothing he’s left behind. Tracking his footsteps in my mind as they move down the hall. The creak of another door. The study, maybe. Or somewhere else in this house I don’t know yet.
He left.
Of course he left.
Don’t hope, I told myself. This is the arrangement.
But beneath my ribs, in that hollow space I’ve carried since I was old enough to understand what it meant to be second, a want had taken root. Small, stupid, stubborn. The kind that imagines tonight might be different, that sharing a bed might mean he’d stay.
He didn’t.
I turn onto my back. Stare at the ceiling, all shadow and nothing.
It’s 3:00 a.m., and my husband is somewhere else, doing anything but being here. With me.
The girl no one stays for.
The practical daughter.
The useful one.
I lie there until the gray light of dawn starts creeping through the curtains, and I still don’t sleep. But I don’t cry either.
I’m done crying for people who walk away.
6
DANTE
Seven days.
Seven days of necessary words and nothing else. Seven days of treating meals like obligations, of lying beside her in a bed that feels like a battlefield, of counting the hours until I can escape to the study and pour whiskey I don’t taste.
Seven days of treating my wife like furniture.
It’s working. That’s what I tell myself.
Some mornings I leave before it gets light, slipping out while she’s a shape in the darkness. The curve of her shoulder. The fall of her hair across the pillow.
Gone before she can stir. Before I have to look at her and remember what I’m pretending not to want.
Other mornings, when meetings demand a later start, we sit across from each other at the breakfast table. Polite nods. Pass the coffee. Nothing else.
I make my own eggs in the empty kitchen on the days I rise early, the way Mama taught me when I was eight. The staff knows not to interfere. The eggs are always overdone. I eat them anyway.
The days I fill with work. Meetings with captains. Calls with lawyers. The endless machinery of an empire that doesn’t care if its Don is sleeping or eating or losing his mind.
Renzo shadows me, silent and watchful. He knows. Hasn’t asked. Won’t. That’s not how we work.
Zio Pietro pulls me aside on day four.
“You look like death warmed over.”
