My Mafia Husband Gave Her Couture—And Me Her Scraps Chapter 10
The day the lake thawed, Dante had them dredge that key up from the bottom.
The silver was tarnished with rust.
My name was still cut into it.
Elena.
The ring had never been in the lake.
It had been sitting all along in that silver casket prepared for the ceremony.
It had never been slipped onto my finger.
Dante took the key to the casket.
It wouldn’t open.
The Moretti master of rites was summoned. He hedged and stammered for a long time before he finally gave up the truth.
“Signore. That casket—it never had a lock.”
“The key was only a prop, a remnant of an old rite.”
“And that old rite—it was retired long ago.”
He bowed his head. His voice trembled.
“It was Miss Sienna who said… Elena wanted to be your Donna so badly, she should be made to suffer a little for it.”
“The position of Donna, she said, isn’t something you get for free.”
Dante stood by the lake for a long time after that.
Later Rosa told me he’d locked the key—the one that opened nothing—inside the safe, together with the old bracelet.
The safe held one other thing.
A rough sketch I’d drawn for him in college—a design for a necktie, done on a whim.
He’d had that tie made and sent it to Sienna’s exhibition, to be used in the opening display.
He kept everything.
And he gave everything away.
I didn’t ask.
By that time, I was in Paris.
The lights of the runway were bright as midday.
The designer brought the season’s showpiece to me herself.
“Mademoiselle Elena. This is the only one of its kind this season. Made for you alone.”
I ran my hand along the hem.
No scrap lace.
No mended ties.
No corners cut for me from someone else’s dress.
My phone buzzed.
Dante had sent a photograph.
In the picture was the silver key, blackened from the water.
Elena. I got the key back.
A few seconds later, another message.
I know it doesn’t open anything.
But I want to ask. Can you look back at me, just once?
I stared at it for a long time.
Not moved.
Just struck by how absurd it was.
After all these years, he had finally learned to ask whether something hurt, whether it was cold, whether it had left a wound.
I was done answering.
I typed back:
Dante. That key was never going to open anything. Not from the very beginning.
Just like your regret now.
He didn’t reply.
Back in the country, I saw him outside the Blackwood estate.
He’d lost weight. His suit hung on him. A paper cup of hot tea in his hand.
“You caught cold. Your knee will ache in this weather.”
I took the tea from him and dropped it straight into the trash.
The color drained from his face.
“Elena…”
“Dante. Don’t insult me with a memory that came seven years late.”
He stood in the rain. The corners of his eyes went dark red.
“I know. I have no right to ask for your forgiveness.”
“So long as you know.”
Declan’s car was waiting a little way off.
The driver opened the door for me.
Dante asked, suddenly:
“Are you going to marry him?”
I didn’t turn back.
“That’s not your concern.”
Later, every one of Sienna’s old ledgers—the money laundering, the frame-ups, the lives she’d played games with—was pulled apart by both houses together. She vanished from the East Coast circles entirely.
The Sullivan colors went up over the Red Hook warehouses.
Moretti’s men never set foot on the inner lines of the East River docks again.
To hold on to the ground he had left, Dante was forced to walk away, with his own hand, from the East Coast he had spent seven years building.
Margherita fell ill for a stretch. She never spoke again of bringing me back.
Every year, on the anniversary of that chapel wedding, Dante would stand at the edge of the frozen lake for the whole night.
Someone asked him who he was waiting for.
He said:
“For the woman I pushed into the water with my own hands—and who will never come out of it for me again.”
I heard about it while I was in Paris, signing a new season’s collaboration.
Snow was falling outside.
Declan stood by the door, holding an umbrella.
He asked me:
“Are you cold?”
I shook my head.
He hadn’t draped his coat over someone else first.
He hadn’t left me in the wind, waiting to prove anything.
The snow settled on the umbrella, quiet as a long-delayed rebirth.
I gathered up the couture hem that had been made for me and me alone, and stepped into the light.
This time, I didn’t need to scrape a shred of dignity from anyone else’s affection.