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.

Marcello and Enzo came running the instant they heard the commotion, their shoes striking the cracked stone of the courtyard in unison, their faces already arranged into identical masks of protective fury. They didn't hesitate. They didn't look at me. They dropped to their knees in the thorns, shielding her with their own bodies as if she were the last precious thing left in a world on fire.

Gianna nestled into their arms, soft and fragile, weeping like a blossom beaten by rain. Her fingers clutched at Enzo's jacket, at Marcello's sleeve, and the performance was so exquisite that even I — who had watched her rehearse it a thousand times — felt something twist in my chest.

"I just slipped, that's all — it has nothing to do with my sister..." Her voice was a trembling thread of silk, perfectly calibrated. "Please don't blame her, or else when you're not around..."

She let the sentence die, and the implication bloomed in the silence like blood through fabric.

Enzo turned to stare at me. His hand had finally left the empty pocket. There was nothing left to reach for. The disbelief in his eyes hardened into disgust, and I watched the last trace of the boy who had once promised me forever curdle into something I no longer recognized.

"Serafina, ruining Gianna's chance at happiness wasn't enough for you? Now you want her life too? How can you be this vicious!"

Marcello came toward me, face like stone, and drove his foot into my body.

A trained enforcer's full force. The kick was the work of a man who had been raised to fight, who had broken bones for the family before he was twenty, and who had apparently decided that his own sister's ribs were no different from a rival soldier's. My forehead cracked against the corner of a garden stone, and blood ran freely, hot and immediate, painting the neglected roses a deeper shade of red. It felt like every bone in my body had shattered at once. The world tilted, and the scent of the courtyard — damp earth, rotting petals, the iron tang of my own blood — became the only thing that was real.

Through the haze of despair I saw Enzo walking toward me. His silhouette wavered in my dimming vision, and for one terrible, irrational second I thought he was coming to help. I reached out, barely able to lift my hand, the bloodied embroidery pouch still tangled in my fingers, begging them to help me. Begging the way a woman begs who has not yet learned that the people she loves are the most dangerous people in the room.

But he and Marcello seized my hair together and dragged me out.

Marcello's face was a demon mask. His voice held nothing human. His right fist had finally stopped clenching — it was wrapped around a fistful of my hair now, and perhaps that was the grip it had been rehearsing all along.

"A woman as vicious as you doesn't deserve to stay in the Valente family. From today, the Valentes have one daughter — Gianna. She's the only sister I recognize."

Enzo's voice came from behind me, cold and final as a Commission ruling: "There's no place for you in this house. Our engagement is over. Serafina — fend for yourself."

My body raked across the rose branches that lined the path to the compound's front gate, thorns tearing into my back, my arms, my legs, until I was slick with blood and the silk of my dress hung in ribbons. A long red smear trailed behind me on the ground, a trail that anyone walking through the Valente compound would see and understand. This is what happens to a woman who loses the family's protection. This is what it looks like when blood turns against blood.

Everything I'd once been so proud of — my name, my father's legacy, the alliance ring, the promise of a life that meant something — now cut me to the bone.

I begged them again and again. My voice broke against the courtyard walls and came back to me empty. They didn't care. They threw me out through the front gate of the Valente compound, and Marcello's voice rang out behind me with the authority of a man who believed he was a Don:

"Nobody touch her. Let the whole world see what a filthy heart she has!"

A crowd gathered around me. Associates, soldiers, the wives and children of men who had once bowed when my father passed. They formed a ring of silence and staring, and I lay there on the cold stone like a stray dog, broken and bleeding, enduring their eyes and their whispers.

"Who's this, thrown out of the Valente estate? What'd she do to get beaten like that?"

"A woman tossed out with her clothes half torn off — she'll never be able to show her face again. Pitiful, really."

"Pitiful? Probably got caught selling information to the Feds. A rat like that should be put in the ground — that'd teach the rest of them some respect."

Their voices blurred together into a single hum of contempt, and I felt my life draining out of me with the blood, pooling on the stone beneath my cheek. The sky above was the color of gunmetal, and I thought: This is how a trueborn daughter of the Valente family dies. Not in an ambush. Not in a war. On the pavement outside her own home, thrown away like refuse.

Then a black car rolled to a stop before me. Not a compound vehicle. Something sleeker, quieter, armored in ways that weren't visible to the untrained eye. The rear door opened, and a face appeared in the gap — sharp, cold, darkly striking. Eyes like a hawk's, the kind that saw everything and gave nothing back. He sat in a wheelchair positioned in the vehicle's modified interior, and his thumb rested on the arm of it, perfectly still. The decision had already been made.

"Serafina." His voice was low, unhurried, and it cut through the murmur of the crowd the way a blade cuts through silk. "The three days are up. The contract is in effect. You belong to me now."

So this was him — the man with the sharp, lupine features and the eyes that burned like cold fire. The Cripple. The Ghost of Ravenna. The one whose name alone made Capos lower their voices and soldiers check the exits. Dominic Ravenna, Don of the most powerful family on the Eastern Seaboard, and my husband by the terms of a subordinate alliance pact I had signed to save a family that had just thrown me away like a dog.

I forced the ghost of a smile onto my face and took his cold hand. His fingers closed around mine — steady, deliberate, proprietary — and he pulled me into the car with a strength that his wheelchair was supposed to make impossible. The door closed behind me, and the crowd outside disappeared, and the silence inside the armored cabin was absolute.

In that car, with blood still running down my face and thorns still embedded in my skin, I wrote a severance letter in my own blood. My right hand found the scar on my left wrist — pressed it, felt it burn — and then I opened the wound wider and used what came out as ink. The characters were unsteady but legible. Every stroke was a door slamming shut.

All debts repaid. All bonds severed.

From this day forward, I had nothing to do with the Valente family.

In this lifetime, we would never meet again.