Leaned against the mahogany shoe cabinet by the door—a piece I had selected myself, back when I still believed this house could become a home.
Tears fell, one drop at a time, tracing hot paths down my cheeks.
"Nico."
I said his name.
The name I had whispered in the dark when he lay beside me but a thousand miles away. The name I had written on medical forms and emergency contacts. The name that had become synonymous with my own slow destruction.
"You never loved me. Why did you marry me?"
His throat worked visibly.
As if he wanted to say something. As if, for once, he might break his silence and offer me the truth.
But in the end, he stayed mute.
Omertà—the code of silence. He had kept it with me more faithfully than any oath sworn to the Family.
My phone screen lit up in my pocket.
A message from him.
Let me explain, Isabella.
I closed my eyes.
Forced myself to stay calm.
Pushed down the bitterness rising in my chest like bile, like blood, like all the words I had swallowed for three years of this blood-bound union.
"Leave."
My voice came out steady. Cold. The voice of a woman who had finally found the edge of her endurance and stepped over it.
"Take all your things and get out of my house."
His lips pressed into a thin line.
His hand gripped the recorder—still repeating goodbye, goodbye, goodbye—as if it were the only thing keeping him tethered to this world.
He walked past me without another word.
The door closed behind him with a soft click that echoed like a death knell.
My phone screen lit up one last time.
I'm sorry.
In the days that followed, I never saw Nico again.
But before I could disappear from Volpe territory for good, I had to return to the Family clinic to have my bandages changed.
The medical facility occupied the top three floors of a building the syndicate owned outright—a place where bullet wounds were treated without questions and loyalty bought silence more effectively than any bribe. I had spent enough hours in these sterile corridors to know every shadow, every whispered conversation that died the moment a door opened.
As I walked into the lobby, I looked up out of habit.
The wall of honored physicians on the first floor had been updated.