Back then, everyone in the city used to say: "The Valente Don's trueborn daughter, more delicate than a flower, more precious than jade."

My brother doted on me beyond measure. My childhood sweetheart loved me as if I were his life.

The only hardship I'd ever known was a terrible illness the year I turned ten.

To save me, Marcello knelt before the doctor's door for three days and three nights.

Enzo nearly died retrieving a rare herb from a contact deep in the mountains, where no sane man would go alone and unarmed.

By the time I recovered, the two of them were gaunt, barely recognizable.

Enzo, still burning with fever, tied a red string around my wrist.

"I'm a soldier's son. I don't believe in saints or curses. But for you, I'll make the exception. With this red string, we share one fate. Life or death, never apart."

"From now on, we'll bear this world's suffering for you. As long as we're here, Serafina will always be happy."

But that happiness shattered without warning.

Father was ambushed on the highway coming back from a sit-down in Providence. Killed alongside the associate who drove for him.

Before the driver died, he entrusted his daughter to our Family. That was how Gianna Caruso came into the Valente household.

No one could have predicted how swiftly the Family would fall.

Two daughters became bargaining chips, goods waiting to be sold.

Gianna moved first. With her wide-eyed innocence and pitiful tears, she won everyone's sympathy before I even understood what was happening.

They ached for Gianna. They ached for the Valente Family's generations of good name.

But not a single one of them cared how much pain I was in. Fatherless, abandoned by everyone I loved.

"Serafina, what are you standing there for? Get over here and apologize to Gianna!"

Marcello and Enzo glared at me, faces tight with anger.

Then they saw the pool of blood on the floor, and the fury on their faces went blank.

Enzo hesitated, stepped forward. "I didn't realize you were hurt this badly. Let me take a look."

"Don't bother."

My coldness unsettled him.

He wrestled down the anger rising in his chest.

"How long are you going to keep acting like a child? The Valente Family is on the edge of ruin. We don't have the luxury of coddling you."

"Fine. I'll buy you some candied almonds later. Just behave and stop making things harder."

I'd been pampered since birth. Afraid of anything bitter, anything that stung.

Even a scraped knee would have them fussing over me for half the day.

No matter how long I cried or carried on, they never lost patience.

Every time, like a magic trick, one of them would produce a bag of candied almonds to coax a smile out of me.

But now... I looked at the candied almonds in Gianna's hand, and it struck me that the sweets had never really been that sweet after all.

I went back to my room in silence.

By now every soldier and servant in the compound had been reassigned to attend to Gianna.

I packed my things alone.

The red wedding dress still hung in the room, and the sight of it sent a sharp ache through my chest.

Mother and I had sewn that dress together, stitch by stitch.

The pearls along its hem were gifts from the Commission, earned through Father's and Marcello's years of loyal service to the Families.

The rose jade hairpin that went with it had been carved by Enzo's own hand.

Even the daughter of the most powerful Don on the Commission had envied them when she saw the dress and the hairpin.

"The Valente girl is truly blessed. The treasures are costly, but the devotion behind them is rarer still. Every woman in this world must envy a love like this."

Now the dress was still vivid as the day it was finished.

But the heart of the man who loved me had already changed.

"Serafina, give your room to Gianna. She'll be leaving the Valente compound soon. Whatever time she has left here, we're giving her the very best of everything we have!"

Marcello's voice wrenched me out of the memory. His right fist clenched and unclenched at his side as he said it, though he didn't seem to notice.

Before I could react, the men were already carrying my belongings out.

Gianna's gaze locked onto my wedding dress.

"What a beautiful dress..." Her left hand rested delicately against her collarbone, fingers splayed. "Too bad I'm just a lowly concubine in a subordinate marriage. I'm not fit to wear red..."

She lifted her tear-filled eyes to Enzo.

"Enzo, I'm walking into something I may never come back from. Could you grant me one wish? Before I die, let me wear this wedding dress and bow before God with the man I love."

Those words turned both their eyes red in an instant.

Marcello wrenched the wedding dress from my hands without a word and held it out to Gianna.

In the struggle, the rose jade hairpin fell to the floor and snapped in two.

Enzo kicked it aside without a glance and strode toward Gianna.

"Here, Gianna, try on the dress."

"No! You can have everything else, but not this dress..."

I clung to one corner of it, unwilling to let go of this last thing I had left.

"Serafina Valente, it's a dress. Would it kill you to let Gianna have it? She gave up a lifetime of happiness for you!"

The two of them flanked Gianna, shielding her, glaring at me like I was the enemy.

I looked at their eyes. The hatred in them, as if I were some stranger who had wronged them.

Whatever was left of my attachment died right there.

I grabbed the wedding dress back and threw it into the fireplace along with the jewelry box and every letter we'd ever exchanged.

I didn't want any of it. None of it.

Years of devotion, gone in a single moment.

"Serafina, what is wrong with you? Do you have any idea how valuable those things are?"

Marcello was livid.

But when he saw me reach for the portrait album, his fury turned to panic.

He shoved his hands into the flames and pulled it out, burning himself to save it.

"Fine. Those are just things. We can replace them when the Family gets back on its feet. But this, Serafina, this isn't something you throw away in a fit of anger."

He wiped the soot off carefully and pressed it into my hands.

He and Enzo had drawn every page themselves.

It was the record of all three of our lives.

From the day I was born, to my first stumbling words.

From the childhood betrothal promise to the formal alliance engagement.

The three of us, growing closer with every passing year.

So close to becoming family.

But the deepest bonds are the most fragile, and what rises highest falls the hardest.

That last small distance between us became an unbridgeable gulf, pushing us toward strangers who would never meet again.

After they left, I lit the album on fire.

Every feeling from all those years, burned to ash.

The compound was silent around me. The low crackle of the flames in the grate was the only sound, and even the soldiers posted outside the corridor knew enough to stay away. I watched the pages curl and blacken. Faces I had loved dissolving into nothing.

The next morning, when I went out to pick up supplies from the front business on Mulberry Street, every street corner buzzed with talk of the Cripple taking a bride.

"The Valente family are supposed to be old blood. Sending their trueborn daughter off in a subordinate marriage to a cripple. How far they've fallen."

"I heard that cold-blooded cripple spent a fortune having a whole set of jade-handled instruments carved. He's the type who knows exactly how to break a person. That Valente girl is in for a world of suffering."

The gossip jolted me, but the feeling passed quickly.

Could any of it be worse than what I was living through now?

There was no place left for me in the Valente family.

When the agreed-upon day came, I meant to slip away without troubling anyone.

But passing through the main hall, I saw Gianna curled against Enzo's chest, crying. Her left hand rested delicately against her collarbone, fingers splayed like a woman catching her breath from genuine grief.

"It doesn't matter if I suffer a little. What matters is that the Valente name isn't dragged through the mud. Besides, I already have someone I care for... Once I've helped the Family through this crisis, I'll prove my loyalty with my own life!"

Marcello and Enzo crowded around her, falling over themselves to comfort her.

One moment swearing they loved her, the next vowing to go put a bullet in Dominic Ravenna themselves.

I said nothing. I stood quietly, smoothing the folds of the embroidered silk pouch I'd finished stitching the night before. My right hand drifted, briefly, to the thin scar along my left wrist, then returned to the fabric.

I was no longer the pampered, adored trueborn daughter of the Valente house.

I would need to learn to lower myself and please my future husband.

Enzo shot me a look of disgust.

"Serafina, you have time to sit there embroidering pouches? Do you even know what people out there are saying about us? Gianna is an innocent girl. How is she supposed to bear this kind of humiliation?"

Gianna, the innocent girl.

The two families, rising and falling together.

So he cared about the Valente family's future. He cared about where Gianna would end up.

The only person he didn't care about was me.

When I didn't answer, Marcello reached over and snatched the pouch right out of my hands.

The silk thread scraped across my palm, and the wounds that hadn't yet healed split open again — blood seeping fresh, slow and warm, pooling in the creases of my skin before it fell. In an instant it stained the clean pouch red, blooming through the pale fabric like a confession I hadn't meant to make. All those hours stitching through the night, the careful work of fingers that trembled not from cold but from something far worse, destroyed in a single moment. The mandarin ducks I had embroidered with such desperate precision were drowning now in the color of what I'd given.

The tears I'd been holding back finally fell, hot against my bruised cheeks, and I couldn't stop myself from looking up at them. Marcello, whose jaw was set like granite, and Enzo, whose broad shoulders filled the doorway as if even this room in the crumbling Valente compound wasn't large enough to contain his contempt. Both of them standing there, united in their disgust, while the silk pouch bled in my hands.

"If it were me being sent off in a subordinate marriage pact to the Cripple," I said, and my voice cracked on the word but I did not let it break, "would you two still react like this?"

"You're still picking fights over jealousy at a time like this!" Marcello's right fist clenched and unclenched at his side, that rehearsal of violence his body could never stop performing. "Don't think embroidering some pouch is going to win us over. We will never forgive what you did to Gianna."

Enzo's hand drifted toward the inside pocket of his jacket — the one that had been empty for months, the one where the photograph of me as a girl had once lived. The hand found nothing. It never did. But the reflex remained, an involuntary confession his body couldn't stop making. He opened his mouth to echo Marcello's words, his expression already sharpened into something righteous and cruel.

Halfway through, they both stopped.

They'd seen the character stitched on the pouch. Ravenna. The name embroidered in thread the color of old blood, surrounded by mandarin ducks swimming through water — the traditional symbol of union, of a bride going willingly to her husband. Their faces changed instantly, and the silence that dropped over the room was the kind I had come to associate with the moments before someone in this world got hurt.

"This pouch wasn't for us?" Marcello stepped closer, his voice dropping into something low and dangerous. The clenching of his fist quickened. "Mandarin ducks in the water — Serafina, what exactly are you playing at? Are you deliberately trying to humiliate Gianna?"

Enzo's lip curled. "When are you going to grow up? All you know how to do is stir up jealousy and make yourself a nuisance. You're completely useless!"

The words landed like blows, each one precise, each one aimed at the places where I was already broken.

They were the ones who promised to cherish me for life. Marcello, my brother, my blood — the boy who once carried me on his shoulders through the courtyard of this very compound, who swore on our father's grave that he would keep me safe. Enzo, whose alliance ring I had worn since I was sixteen, whose family had broken bread at our table, who had kissed my forehead on the night of our formal promise and whispered that nothing would ever come between us.

They were the ones now calling me useless and childish.

They were the ones who'd bungled the family's politics — Marcello outmaneuvered at every turn by rivals who smelled blood in the water, Enzo's Castellani connections crumbling because he was too proud to bend and too reckless to plan. Two men playing at being Dons in a world that ate pretenders alive, and between them they had driven both families to the edge of ruin.

They were the ones who pitied Gianna yet lacked the power to stand against Dominic Ravenna's empire.

And still they shoved every last bit of blame onto me.

As if the moment Gianna appeared, my very existence became a mistake. As if the trueborn daughter of Don Valente — the man whose blood ran through the foundations of this house, whose name had once made the Commission itself pay attention — could be reduced to nothing by a charity case with soft eyes and a gift for weeping on cue.

My right hand drifted to the thin scar along my left wrist. Not consciously. It never was. The scar was a reflex, a bruise I kept pressing to confirm it still hurt, to confirm I was still here, still standing, still capable of deciding that I would not bend.

Fine, then. I would leave.

Leave for good, and never come back.

I'd barely stepped into the courtyard — the air thick with the scent of roses that had grown wild and neglected since my father's assassination, the stone walkways cracked where no one had bothered to repair them — when Gianna sidled up to me. Triumph was written all over her face, though she wore it beneath a mask of gentle concern that might have fooled anyone who hadn't spent years learning the precise architecture of her performance. Her left hand rested delicately against her collarbone, fingers splayed like a woman catching her breath from emotion. The picture of innocence. The picture of a stolen life.

"Serafina," she murmured, and the sweetness in her voice was poisoned sugar, "so what if you're the trueborn daughter of the Valente family? Everything that's yours will be mine soon enough!"

The mask didn't slip. It never did when she was this confident. The fingers at her collarbone stayed perfectly splayed, perfectly still — the consummate performance of a woman who had already won and knew it.

Then she let out a sudden cry, sharp and theatrical, and tumbled into the overgrown rose bushes that lined the courtyard wall. The thorns caught her dress and scratched her arms, and the sound she made — that practiced, wounded-bird keen — carried across the compound like a siren.