The Black Diamond

The grand ballroom had been decorated for five years of marriage. Our guests filled the tables while the orchestra played. Condensation ran down the champagne flute in my hand. Around me, guests watched Dante and tried not to look at me. Dante stood across the ballroom with one arm around another woman. Chloe. Silk stretched over the curve of her belly. She kept one hand there so nobody could miss it. Dante raised his glass. Before every important speech, he used to look for my nod. Tonight, his eyes found me, waited, and moved on when I gave him nothing. "To my wife, Siena. Five years of service." Several guests looked at me. With one word, Dante had introduced his wife as staff. He drew Chloe closer. "The Moretti family finally has a future. Chloe is giving me what Siena never could. An heir." The stem of my champagne flute pressed into my palm. Dante knew what the doctors had told us. He had chosen the version that humiliated me. He smiled down at Chloe with a care he had stopped showing me months ago. Her expression was ready for the photographs: wet eyes, lowered chin, one hand protecting the child she said she carried. He crossed the floor. Guests stepped aside, and Chloe followed him through the opening, blinking back tears for an audience that was too embarrassed to applaud. He stopped in front of me and lowered his voice. "She needs a symbol of her place. Give me your ring, Siena." My fingers closed. The black diamond sat in scorched gold, exactly as my mother had worn it. Dante knew that much. Years earlier, I had also made it the biometric trigger for the Moretti vaults and a dozen offshore accounts. He had watched me open them with it often enough. Nothing on the setting revealed its second purpose. My mother had left me an heirloom; I had made it the safest key Dante owned. "Dante, don't." "Don't make a scene." He held out his hand. "You're still the Donna. For now. It's a gesture." When I kept my fist closed, he grabbed my wrist and worked the ring over my knuckle. The scorched gold caught on my skin. I looked straight at him, giving him time to remember the shipyard, the bullet, or one of the companies I had built from his dirty cash. Five years earlier, he had held this same hand in the back of an ambulance while blood ran from the wound behind my ear. He had promised that nobody would ever take what belonged to me again. He pulled harder. The ring came free, leaving a red groove around my finger. Dante knelt before Chloe and pushed my mother's ring onto her hand. A few people clapped. The rest stared into their glasses. Chloe spread her fingers to admire the diamond. I watched her turn my mother's scorched gold under the chandelier until Dante faced me again. The ring sat loose on her. She curled her hand so it would stay in place, unaware that it would reject her the first time she tried to open a Moretti vault. "Raise your glass," he said. "Toast us." I opened my hand. The champagne flute struck the marble and broke between us. "No." Dante's smile vanished. He seized my upper arm hard enough to bruise it. "Ungrateful b***h. I gave you everything." He shoved me at two bodyguards. "No car, phone, or credit cards. Put her outside and let her walk." They marched me past the guests and through the estate's iron gates. One guard pushed me onto the road. The lock engaged behind me. No one followed. Through the bars, I saw the ballroom lights and guests moving inside while the party continued without its guest of honor. Rain came down before I reached the end of the wall. My gown clung to my legs, and champagne ran out of the hem in pale streaks. The cold reached the bruises on my arm first. I kept walking because turning back would put me at the gatehouse waiting for Dante to decide whether I deserved shelter. I walked until the heels began to cut my feet. At a deserted gas station, an old payphone still had a dial tone. I dug a coin from the emergency pocket sewn into my dress. While the call connected, my hand found the scar behind my ear. Shrapnel had opened it five years ago when I stepped between Dante and an explosion. I had once worn the mark with pride. I had survived the wound and gone back to work beside Dante. Tonight, he had sent me out barefoot in a storm. "It's me." My most trusted operative answered at once. "Siena? What's wrong? Where are you?" "Cut the West End routes. All of them. Effective immediately." Silence. The West End routes supplied eighty percent of Dante's liquid cash. I had built those routes and kept their accounts running. Dante knew the names. Only my people knew how the money moved. "Siena, that's a kill order. Financial suicide. Dante will come after you." Rain ran into my mouth. "Dante doesn't run the routes. I do." "And if he asks who gave the order?" The mansion lights glowed beyond the estate wall. "Tell him I finally stopped covering for him." I hung up. An electric motor whined behind me. Marco, the estate's butler, stopped a golf cart by the gas station and kept an umbrella over his own head. He looked at my bare feet, the ruined gown, and the payphone receiver still swinging on its cord. His smile came slowly. "The Don wants to know if you've come to your senses. Apologize to Donna Chloe, and he might let you sleep in the gatehouse." I took off my ruined heels and held them by the straps. "Go back and tell your Don something for me, Marco." Marco raised one eyebrow. "Tell him to check the West End accounts. He's already bankrupt."