My betrothed, Liam Falcone, the Young Don of the most feared crime family in Crestfield, had a childhood sweetheart who stabbed a man in a nightclub. He pushed me forward to take the fall, swore a blood oath that he would marry me when I walked free.

After five years inside the joint, Liam kept his word. He arranged the alliance ceremony. But on the day I stood in the fitting room wearing the gown meant to bind me to him forever, he climbed behind the wheel of his black Maserati and drove it straight into me, shattering both my legs.

He said, "I'm sorry, Clara. I was just too excited. I couldn't control myself when I thought about you becoming my bride. Don't worry, I will definitely find a doctor to treat your legs."

He postponed the blood-bound union and summoned every renowned surgeon the Falcone Syndicate's money could reach. None of them could make me walk again.

I remembered the person who had made me a promise while I rotted in that concrete cell, and I wheeled myself to my fiancé's study to ask for his help. But before I could knock, I heard his voice through the heavy oak door. Intimate. Breathless. Tangled with the unmistakable sounds of a woman who was not me.

After realizing it was all a scam, I pulled back from the door without making a sound and took out my phone. My fingers were steady as I dialed the only number that had ever meant safety.

"Donna Elisabetta," I said quietly. "I've repaid your kindness. Can you let me go now?"

A pause on the other end. Then the Donna's voice, warm and careful the way it always was when she spoke to me: "Clara, did Liam bully you? Tell me, and I'll go teach him a lesson, okay?"

I said nothing. Instead, I held the phone out toward the gap beneath the study door. The sounds of frantic, unrestrained breathing bled through the wood and carried clearly across the line.

The Donna's persuasive voice stopped dead.

I pulled the phone back to my ear, turned my wheelchair around, and began rolling myself toward the bedroom. The hallway of the Falcone compound stretched long and dark ahead of me, lined with oil portraits of men who had killed for less than what was happening behind that door.

"Donna Elisabetta, you pulled me from the wreckage on Fairview Bridge when I was a child. Afterward, I gave your son one of my kidneys so he could live. Now he has a new love, so I won't bother you anymore."

My words were firm. I left no crack for sentimentality to seep through.

The Donna hesitated. I could hear her breathing change, the faint clink of rosary beads shifting in her hands. When she spoke again, her tone was conciliatory, almost pleading. "Clara, why don't you wait another week? Your ceremony with Liam is in a week. If he's still like this then, I'll let you go, okay?"

——

I acquiesced to the Donna's request.

This was my last compromise.

Before long, Liam came in, having changed his clothes. The faint scent of another woman's perfume clung to him beneath the sharp notes of his cologne. As he approached me, I forced myself to suppress my nausea and said, "I know a highly skilled healer. Could you help me find her?"

Liam looked at me with that practiced tenderness, took my hand in his, and said, "There aren't that many powerful experts in the world. Don't worry, Clara, I will definitely find someone to heal you."

"What if it can't be cured?" I asked, staring intently into his eyes.

Liam smiled. It was the kind of smile he wore at sit-downs when he wanted someone to believe the knife wasn't coming. "How could it not be cured? It was all my fault for being careless and forgetting that you were taking something from the trunk. Don't worry, I will marry you no matter what."

"Clara, don't think too much. All you need to do now is be my bride. Leave the rest to me."

I lowered my eyes and said nothing.

Thinking of what I had just witnessed through the study door, my heart ached as if someone had drawn a blade slowly across it.

If I hadn't seen Liam on top of another woman with my own eyes, his body moving against hers while I sat crippled twenty feet away, I might have believed him.

Seeing that I was in low spirits, Liam assumed I was sad because I couldn't stand up.

He suddenly grabbed my hand and slapped it against his own face, saying as he did so, "I'm sorry, Clara, it's all my fault. I should have checked more carefully. I promise I'll never do it again. Please forgive me."

I pressed my lips together and remained silent.

Liam's expression shifted. The warmth drained from his face the way color drains from a man's cheeks when you press a gun to his temple. His voice turned to ice. "Clara, there's a limit to your temper. Don't you want to marry me? You'll get what you want in a week."

After saying that, perhaps realizing that his tone had been too harsh, he reached out and gently patted my head, the gesture almost grotesque in its false affection. "I have a dinner tonight with some associates. I'm going out first. You stay home and wait for me."

Liam didn't come home for a day and a night, but my phone was full of his whereabouts.

They were sent by his beloved Vanessa.

I scrolled through Vanessa Mercer's social media feed and found that five years ago, while I was locked in a concrete cell taking the punishment for her crime, Vanessa had been plagued by nightmares after stabbing that man. Liam had spared no expense to find reclusive healers, spiritual counselors, anyone who could soothe her troubled sleep.

All that effort, all that money, all those connections the Falcone name could buy. For a peaceful night's sleep for the woman who had let me rot.

I gripped my phone so tightly that my knuckles turned white, the bones pressing sharp against the skin.

The latest message was from just hours ago. Liam had spent midnight celebrating Vanessa's anniversary.

It read: "I'm still the beloved little princess of the Mercer clan! Someone said they're going to prepare a surprise for me tonight~ I can't wait~"

The accompanying picture showed Liam making a cake by hand. The Young Don of the Falcone Family was wearing a pink apron, and because his movements were clumsy, cream was smeared across his jaw, his forearms, the marble counter around him. He was laughing. I had never seen him laugh like that. Not once. Not for me.

I suddenly remembered a night when I had been sick, my body so weak I could barely lift my head from the pillow. I had asked Liam to make me a bowl of soup. Just broth. Anything warm.

He had frowned and said, "How would I, a man in my position, know about those things? Just bear with it for now, and if you can't stand it, just order something."

I reached out and traced the outline of the man in the photo with my fingertip, following the line of his jaw, the crease of his smile. But there was no longer any place for me in those familiar eyes.

I reached up and touched the jade pendant around my neck. It was the only keepsake left to me by my parents, the ones who had burned on Fairview Bridge.

Whenever I felt restless, I always reached for it without thinking, as if my mother and father were still beside me, as if the fire had never come.

I didn't know when she arrived. But Vanessa pushed open my bedroom door without knocking and saw that I was holding something in my hand. She crossed the room in three quick strides and lunged for it.

"What are you doing?!" I panicked, pulling back, but the wheelchair gave me nowhere to go.

Vanessa's face twisted with contempt. "You slut! How dare you hoard Liam's things? A filthy, despicable wretch like you doesn't even deserve to touch what belongs to him!"

In the violent struggle, her nails raking at my throat, I shoved her away with every ounce of strength left in my arms.

Vanessa stumbled and fell to the floor.

And Liam appeared in the doorway at that exact moment.

"What are you doing?!"

His voice cut through the room like a gunshot. The two enforcers flanking him in the hallway went still, their eyes trained on the floor. They knew better than to witness what happened behind closed doors in the Falcone compound.

Vanessa immediately dissolved into sobs. "Liam, I know my sister has never liked me, but I never expected she would push me over a jade pendant!"

She clutched her arm as though it were broken, her voice climbing to a pitiful, practiced tremor. "I just kindly thought that the jade pendant looked like the one you gave me before, so I wanted to ask her to take it off so I could see it. But she not only refused to give it to me, she also pushed me away..."

Liam stared at me. His jaw was set, his eyes flat and cold, the way they looked when he passed judgment at a sit-down. "Clara, apologize to Vanessa."

I clutched the jade pendant against my chest. "She was the one trying to steal it from me!"

My voice came out raw, desperate, and I hated the sound of it. I swallowed and forced the next words out flat and hollow. "Whatever my sister says goes. After all, I am the lowly wretch she speaks of. I should recognize my place. I'm sorry, sister."

Liam's face darkened further. "Clara, apologize to Vanessa right now, or I won't forgive you."

I didn't respond. I couldn't. My fingers were locked around the pendant so tightly that the edges of the jade bit into my palm.

Liam's gaze zeroed in on the spot I was covering. He crossed the room in two strides, and his hands closed over mine. He pried my fingers apart one by one, his grip bruising, methodical, and then he yanked the cord.

It snapped.

The thin rope dragged across the back of my neck and left a raw, bloody line where it had bitten into the skin before breaking.

"Give it back! That's mine!"

I reached for it, my body lurching forward, and the wheelchair tipped. I crashed to the floor, my useless legs folding beneath me. The cold marble of the Falcone compound pressed against my cheek. I could see the hem of Vanessa's dress from where I lay.

Liam looked down at me with a frown of distaste. "You pushed Vanessa just now. Consider this an apology."

"Why..."

My words were cut short. Vanessa bent down, picked up the jade pendant from Liam's outstretched hand, and held it up to the light. She examined it the way a jeweler examines a stone, turning it slowly, letting the lamplight catch its deep green heart. Then she looked down at me on the floor and smiled.

"This jade pendant is indeed a fine piece. I'll gladly accept your offer and thank you for parting with it, sister."

Liam's expression softened as he watched Vanessa clasp the pendant around her own neck. But when his eyes returned to me, crumpled on the marble, they held nothing but disgust.

"You should learn from Vanessa. Look how sensible she is. Vanessa is so generous and doesn't hold grudges."

He adjusted his cufflinks. A small, unconscious gesture. The same one he made after every verdict he handed down.

"Don't be unreasonable in the future. After all, you have no one to back you up. Reflect on your actions."

Two days later, in the grey hours before dawn, Liam Falcone dragged me out of bed.

He reeked of bourbon and cigarette smoke, his grip iron-tight around my wrist as he hauled me upright. The room swam in darkness. I could barely make out the hard line of his jaw, the flat contempt in his eyes.

"Vanessa's sick. Drank too much." His voice was a low rasp, stripped of anything resembling a request. "Get to the kitchen and make her something to eat."

I was forced down the corridor in my wheelchair, the cold of the Falcone compound's marble floors seeping through the thin soles of my slippers. I told him I couldn't cook. He didn't believe me. Or perhaps he simply didn't care. In Liam Falcone's world, my words carried no weight at all.

Left with no other choice, I made a simple egg drop soup. The kitchen was vast, industrial, built to feed an army of soldiers and associates during the Family's Sunday dinners. At this hour, it was empty and silent, the overhead lights humming faintly, casting everything in a sterile white glow.

I was stirring the broth when Vanessa Mercer walked in.

She moved like a woman who owned the place, her silk robe trailing behind her, her dark hair loose around her shoulders. When she saw me hunched over the stove, laboring in the wheelchair, a slow, smug smile crept across her face.

"Clara." She leaned against the doorframe, crossing her arms. "You should have just stayed in the joint and died peacefully. Look at you. Coming out here to compete with me for Liam's affections, and you haven't even gotten a scrap of food." She tilted her head, eyes glittering with malice. "How pathetic."

I said nothing. I kept stirring the soup. The spoon clinked softly against the pot.

Vanessa's expression shifted, something sinister flickering behind her eyes. She raised her hand, and I saw what she was holding.

My mother's pendant.

It was a small thing, delicate and old, the only heirloom that survived the Fairview Bridge bombing. My father had pressed it into my mother's hand on their wedding day. It was the last piece of them I had left in this world.

Seeing the way my face changed, Vanessa practically glowed. She dangled the pendant between her fingers, turning it so the kitchen light caught its surface.

"Tell me," she said, her voice dripping with sweetness, "if I were to split this thing in half with a knife, what would it look like?"

"You dare." The words came through my teeth like ground glass.

That was the only memento my parents left me. The only proof they had ever existed, ever loved me, ever held me close.

Vanessa's smugness was a living thing, radiating from every pore. "Why wouldn't I dare? Don't forget, Clara. Liam has always been on my side."

She let that settle. Then she smiled wider.

"If you don't believe me, how about we make a bet? Let's see if he chooses to believe you or me."

Before I could respond, Vanessa reached past me and picked up a spoon. She dipped it into the pot and scooped up a measure of the near-boiling soup. I watched her warily, every nerve in my body pulled taut.

Under my gaze, Vanessa poured the hot soup over her own arm.

Then she screamed.

The sound was theatrical, piercing, designed to carry through the compound's stone walls. She clutched her arm and staggered backward, and within seconds I heard the heavy fall of footsteps.

Liam burst through the kitchen door. He took one look at Vanessa and scooped her up in his arms as though she weighed nothing, cradling her against his chest with a tenderness I had never once seen directed at me.

Vanessa pressed her face into the hollow of his throat, her features twisted in a mask of agony, her skin gone pale. "Liam, it's my fault," she whimpered. "I shouldn't have come back to bother you. I should leave."

She drew a shuddering breath.

"My sister said I was a scourge and didn't deserve to live. She told me to die and even threw soup at me." A sob wracked her body, perfectly timed. "If I hadn't covered my face with my hand, my face would be ruined. Liam, I'm so sorry..."

Liam's gaze swung to me. Cold. Absolute. The eyes of a man who had already rendered his verdict.

I shook my head frantically, my hands gripping the armrests of my wheelchair until my knuckles went white. "It wasn't me. It really wasn't me..."

"If my sister says no, then no," Vanessa murmured against Liam's chest, her voice trembling with manufactured grace. "Liam, don't make things too difficult for her. Maybe she just doesn't like me..."

Liam said nothing. His jaw was set like stone. Without a word, he carried Vanessa out of the kitchen and through the compound toward the Family's private clinic.

He did not look back at me.

That evening, he returned.

I was in bed, drifting in the shallow waters of an exhausted sleep, when the bedroom door opened. Liam walked in carrying a kettle. I heard the faint whistle of steam before I understood what was happening.

He poured the boiling water without mercy.

It hit my skin at ninety degrees Celsius. The shock of it ripped me from sleep like a detonation, and I screamed, thrashing, scrambling to drag myself off the mattress. My useless legs tangled in the sheets. I fell to the floor and crawled, pulling myself across the cold tile with my arms, leaving a wet trail behind me.

But wherever I went, Liam followed. Wherever I dragged myself, the scalding water found me. He moved with the unhurried patience of a man disciplining a dog, tilting the kettle with casual precision, his face utterly blank.

Finally, I collapsed.

I lay on the floor of the bedroom, my body a geography of ruin. The skin on my arms and back was already blistering, angry red welts rising in patches, some areas already peeling away to reveal the raw flesh beneath. The pain was so total it had become a kind of white noise, a high-pitched ringing that drowned out everything else.

When I was certain Liam had left, I dragged myself to the nightstand and, with trembling, scalded fingers, managed to dial for an ambulance.

I heard the sirens arrive. Hope flickered in my chest like a guttering candle. I hauled myself from the bedroom to the top of the stairwell, every inch of movement a fresh agony, and looked down through the bannister.

Liam stood at the front door, framed in the entrance of the Falcone compound, his posture relaxed, his smile easy. He was speaking to the paramedics in the warm, reassuring tone of a man with nothing to hide.

"It's all a misunderstanding. My wife and I were just joking around. Who knew she would be so inconsiderate and accidentally make this call? Thank you for coming all this way."

The paramedics hesitated. But Liam Falcone was the Don of the most powerful family in Crestfield. No one questioned the Don in his own home.

They left.

My last glimmer of hope died on the cold marble of that stairwell.

When I woke, I was in the basement.

The Falcone compound's lower level was a place of concrete walls and bare bulbs, a space that had served many purposes over the decades, none of them kind. The air was damp and smelled of old stone. I lay on a thin mattress on the floor, my burns throbbing with a dull, relentless pulse.

Liam came to see me.

He stood over me, hands in his pockets, his expression that of a man conducting a transaction. "I'll let you out," he said, "as long as you're willing to go out and apologize to Vanessa."

I stared at the ceiling. The bare bulb above me buzzed.

"Okay," I said.

The word came out hollow, scraped clean of everything. There was nothing left inside me to resist with. Not then.

After I was released, I went to Vanessa and apologized. I spoke the words she wanted to hear, my head bowed, my voice steady and sincere. Vanessa accepted my contrition with the magnanimous smile of a queen granting clemency to a peasant.

Liam was pleased with my obedience. So pleased, in fact, that he took pity on me and brought me to the Family's private clinic for treatment.

After I woke from surgery, the room was quiet. Sterile white walls. The steady beep of a heart monitor. The faint smell of antiseptic and starched linen.

I reached for the phone on the bedside table and dialed a number I knew by heart.

The call was answered on the second ring.

"Brother," I said, and my voice broke. "Could you come pick me up in four days?"

There was a beat of silence on the other end. Then Ethan Serafini's voice came through, tight with barely controlled fury and something deeper, something that sounded like it might shatter if he let it.

"If you want, I can come and pick you up tomorrow. No. Right now."

Hearing his voice, that familiar cadence, the accent he'd never quite lost even after all those years in exile, I burst into laughter through my tears. The sound was ugly and broken and real, the first genuine thing to leave my body in days.

Just then, the door opened.

Liam walked in. He saw the smile on my face, and for a single instant, something unreadable passed through his eyes. A flicker. A fracture. He stopped mid-stride, as though the sight of me smiling had physically struck him.

I noticed him immediately and brought the phone close. "I have something to take care of," I whispered into the receiver. "I'll hang up now."

I ended the call and set the phone down.

Liam was not alone. Vanessa trailed behind him like a shadow he couldn't shake, her hand resting possessively on his arm. I watched in silence as the two of them approached my bed.

Liam's gaze traveled over the bandages wrapped around my arms, my torso, the places where the burns were worst. Something shifted in his expression. His hand moved toward me, an instinctive gesture, almost like concern.

I flinched away from him.

Vanessa pounced on the opening like a blade finding a gap in armor. "Is it possible that your sister knows someone else? Is that why she doesn't let you touch her?"

The shift in Liam was instantaneous. Whatever softness had surfaced was swallowed whole, replaced by a cold, familiar disgust. He looked at me the way one looks at something rotting.

"Clara, you were indecent five years ago, and I can't believe you're still unrepentant after five years in the joint." His lip curled. "I don't know what my mother was thinking. She kept insisting that I marry a slut like you. It disgusts me."

He turned and walked out without another word. The door shut behind him with a sound like a coffin lid closing.

Vanessa, however, did not leave.

She stood at the foot of my bed, her arms crossed, her smile the kind that belongs on the face of someone watching a house burn down. "The blood-bound union in three days will be Liam's and mine. Our show." She let the words hang in the antiseptic air. "As for you, you can just go cool off somewhere else."

I said nothing. I stared at the far wall. I gave her nothing.

The silence displeased her. I could see it in the way her jaw tightened, the way her fingers curled. And then, slowly, deliberately, she reached into her pocket and produced the pendant.

My dead eyes found it, and something inside me stirred. A faint light, returning to a place that had gone dark.

"Clara, are you really that concerned about this little thing?" Vanessa held it up, turning it between her fingers. "If you want it so badly, then I'll give it back to you."

She opened her hand and let it fall.

The pendant struck the clinic floor and shattered.

The pieces scattered across the white tile like fragments of bone, like the last remnants of a life that had been systematically dismantled, piece by piece, year by year, until there was nothing left to break.

Along with it, the last shred of whatever feeling I had ever held for Liam Falcone burned away completely. Not with a roar, but with a whisper. A quiet, final thing, like ash settling after a fire has consumed everything it can reach.

I fell from the bed.

I hit the floor like a dead thing, the IV needle ripping from the back of my hand in a bright flare of pain I barely registered. I crawled across the tile on my hands and knees, my useless legs dragging behind me, and I gathered the pieces. Every shard. Every fragment. My fingers closed around the broken edges, and the pendant cut into my skin, and my blood spread across the white floor and soaked into the fractured stone.

I held the pieces to my chest and did not make a sound.

Vanessa watched for a moment, savoring the image. Then she turned on her heel and left, her footsteps receding down the corridor, light and satisfied.

The next day, my phone rang.

Liam's name on the screen. I answered.

"Clara." His voice was brisk, businesslike, the tone of a man delegating an unpleasant task. "Go to the feds tomorrow and turn yourself in. Just say you accidentally stabbed someone again."

He spoke with such confidence. Such absolute conviction. As though this were a perfectly reasonable request. As though I had not already given five years of my life to a cell for a crime I did not commit.

When I didn't reply, Liam sighed. The sigh of a man burdened by the incompetence of those around him.

"Vanessa was with a client yesterday and she acted impulsively again. You know how it is when you've been drinking. More likely to act impulsively." A pause. "So you should turn yourself in tomorrow."

"What about the wedding?" I asked. My voice was flat. Toneless. The voice of someone speaking from very far away.

"The blood-bound union will be held as planned. Your legs are useless anyway. I'll have Vanessa attend the ceremony in your place. Your name will still be on the marriage certificate."

"I'm not going," I said.

Silence on the other end. I had surprised him. In the years he had known me, in the years he had broken me down and built me back into something compliant and small, I had never refused him. Not like this. Not with this quiet, immovable certainty.

Then he laughed. A sharp, incredulous sound.

"I know you really want to attend your own wedding, but you stabbed someone, so you have to take the blame, right?" His tone turned reasonable, almost patronizing. "Vanessa attends the ceremony in your place, and you turn yourself in for Vanessa. What's wrong with that? In the end, Vanessa is the one who suffers. After all, you know how important a girl's reputation is."

I was stunned. Not by the cruelty. I had long since stopped being surprised by Liam Falcone's cruelty. What stunned me was the sheer, breathtaking shamelessness of it. The way he could rearrange reality with such casual ease, making the victim into the debtor and the monster into the martyr.

Before I could form a single word of refutation, the line went dead. He had hung up on me.

I sat in the silence of the clinic room, the phone still pressed to my ear, listening to nothing.

After a long moment, my gaze drifted to the small box on the bedside table. Inside it lay the shattered pieces of my mother's pendant, each fragment carefully collected, still stained with my blood.

I closed my eyes.

Tears slid from beneath my lashes and traced slow lines down my temples, disappearing into the pillow.

Liam. This time, I'm really letting you go.

When I returned to that so-called "home" after being discharged from the private clinic, the stench hit me before I'd even crossed the threshold—hard liquor and cloying perfume braided together into something rancid. The living room of the Falcone compound looked as though a storm had torn through it. The crystal ashtray lay in shards across the cashmere carpet. My old books—the only possessions I'd been permitted to keep from the Serafini house—were torn apart and scattered like confetti. The glass of the framed wedding photograph was cracked in a jagged line, and Liam's smiling face in the image, his arm draped around me in a grotesque pantomime of devotion, was stained beyond recognition with red wine.

The source of all this chaos was coming from the kitchen.

Ambiguous sounds of water. The wet, rhythmic collision of skin against skin. A woman's theatrical panting braided with a man's guttural growl—all of it weaving together into a nauseating web that filled the ground floor of the compound. My hands froze on the wheels of my chair. My blood seemed to crystallize in my veins, cold and still.

As if possessed, I wheeled myself toward the half-open kitchen door.

The scene beyond it drove into my eyes like a blade. Liam, with his back to me, had Vanessa Mercer pinned against the cold marble countertop, his movements savage. Her arms were coiled around his neck, her upturned face flushed with ecstasy—but when her gaze drifted past Liam's shoulder and locked onto mine, something else erupted behind those eyes. Something vicious. Something triumphant.

Her red lips moved without sound, each word shaped with deliberate, crystalline precision:

You piece of trash. Have you looked enough?

Then she pulled herself tighter against him, releasing a deliberately high-pitched, sickeningly sweet moan that echoed off the marble and stainless steel. Her gaze never left my face—fixed on me like a poisoned needle pressed against pale skin.

My stomach lurched.

I jerked the wheelchair around and fled, the wheels catching on the edge of the carpet before I broke free and careened toward the first-floor bathroom. I barely made it to the toilet before my body convulsed. I vomited violently, but there was nothing to give—my stomach was hollow, and only bitter bile scorched its way up my throat. Tears came on their own, mixing with the cold sweat that slicked my temples. I gripped the ceramic rim until my knuckles went blue, my entire body shaking like a leaf caught in a gale that wouldn't stop.

I don't know how long I lay slumped on those cold floor tiles. Minutes. Maybe longer. Eventually I dragged myself upright, rinsed the acid from my mouth, and forced myself to look in the mirror.

Sunken eyes. Sallow, paper-thin skin. The unhealed burn scars on my neck, still raw and weeping at their edges, crawling up from beneath the collar of my hospital gown like evidence of a crime no one would prosecute.

Was this really Clara Serafini? The girl who once smiled without reservation, who believed in love, who trusted that the future held something worth surviving for?

I dragged my exhausted body back through the corridor and up the service elevator to the second floor. When I reached the bedroom door, Liam was already there—leaning against the wall in the shadows, waiting. He had changed into a silk robe, his dark hair still damp, and he carried the languid, heavy scent that clung to a man freshly spent. Beneath it, unmistakable, was the trace of Vanessa's perfume.

The moment he saw me, he straightened. He moved fast—three strides that ate the distance between us—and his hand closed around my thin wrist like an iron manacle, the force so sudden and brutal I felt the bones grind.

"Clara." His voice was ice poured over granite. His eyes held nothing but undisguised disgust. "Do you have any shame? Lurking around the compound like a ghost, spying? Are you out of your mind?" He leaned closer, and I could smell the whiskey on his breath. "Didn't I tell you to turn yourself in for the stabbing? Do you have to wait for the Feds to come knocking, slap cuffs on you, and let every family in Crestfield know that I, Liam Falcone, am bound to a murderer before you're satisfied?"

His furious roar echoed down the empty corridor, bouncing off the dark wood paneling and dying in the silence that followed. He raised his other hand—the motion automatic, rehearsed, the wind-up to the backhand he'd delivered so many times before.

But he stopped.

His gaze had fallen on my neck and arms. The hideous, unhealed burn blisters. The gauze that had yellowed at the edges, tissue fluid seeping through in small, damning stains. Under the corridor's dim light, the wounds were grotesque and undeniable.

Something complex passed across Liam's face. His pupils contracted as though he'd touched a hot stove. His Adam's apple bobbed. The insult that had been coiling behind his teeth stuck there, unspoken, curdling into something that looked less like guilt and more like irritable frustration—the annoyance of a man confronted with a mess he didn't want to acknowledge.

I seized the moment. I wrenched my wrist free with a force that surprised us both, leaving a vivid red band across my skin. I looked up at him, and when I spoke, my voice was so calm it startled even me.

"Liam." Each syllable was measured, deliberate. "How could I—a woman with paralyzed legs, who can barely transfer herself from a bed to a wheelchair without help—have the strength, or the opportunity, to stab Vanessa Mercer's perfectly strong and healthy companion at that nightclub?"

My voice was hoarse, scraped raw from the bile, but every word landed with precision. "The Feds won't believe it. A forensic examiner will look at the wounds and then look at me, and the story falls apart. If you're going to fabricate a case, Liam, at least make it believable."

"You—!" He recoiled half a step, visibly thrown by the directness of my rebuttal. Liam Falcone, the Young Don who ruled through fury and fists, was not accustomed to being challenged in his own house. Shock curdled instantly back into rage. His face went ashen, the tendons in his neck standing taut, and he was a breath away from erupting—

Ring. Ring.

His phone cut through the silence like a blade, vibrating urgently in the pocket of his robe. He glanced down. The screen glowed with a single word: Mamma.

He shot me a look that promised this wasn't over, then stepped aside and answered.

"Mamma? …I know, she just got back. …I didn't! …She's the one who's indecent! …Fine. Fine. We'll discuss it tomorrow."

The call was short. His tone shifted from clipped impatience at the start to barely suppressed fury by the end. Donna Elisabetta's voice was too faint for me to hear, but whatever she'd said had pulled some invisible leash taut around his throat. After he hung up, he didn't come for me again. He simply fixed me with a look—dark, smoldering, the kind of look that in this world preceded unmarked graves—then turned on his heel and descended the stairs. Toward his study, most likely. Toward more whiskey.

I wheeled into the bedroom and locked the door. The deadbolt slid home with a sound that meant nothing. I knew it was useless against him—every lock in this compound answered to the Don. But I did it anyway, because the alternative was admitting I had no barrier left at all.

I slid from the chair onto the cold floor, my back against the door, and wrapped my trembling arms around myself. I buried my face in my knees.

The tears came then. Not for him. Never again for him. They came for the five years of blind devotion I'd poured into a man who had crippled me and called it justice. For the hellish humiliation of watching another woman wear my suffering like a trophy. For every morning I had woken in this compound and chosen to believe that endurance was the same as hope.

Only one voice screamed inside me, wild and desperate, holding my fracturing mind together like wire around shattered bone:

One more day. Brother, just one more day.

I groped my way to the bedside and dragged myself beneath the blankets, pulling them tight around my body as though the fabric could seal out all the filth and violence of this world. Exhaustion—physical, spiritual, absolute—dragged my consciousness down into a gray space between despair and the faintest, most stubborn thread of hope.

Sleep was almost there. Almost merciful.

BANG.

The door exploded inward, the lock splintering from the frame as though it were made of paper. The sound detonated in my chest like a gunshot, and my heart seized.

Liam stood in the doorway. He was ten times more furious than before—whatever he'd found in his study, whatever message or call had reached him, had stripped away every remaining layer of restraint. He was a beast fully unshackled now, chest heaving, the silk robe hanging open. He crossed the room in two savage strides and ripped the blanket from my body. The icy air of the compound rushed over me, finding every inch of skin beneath the thin hospital gown.

"Clara!" His eyes were bloodshot, the veins in his temples and forehead standing out like cords. He seized me by the shoulders and hauled me upright, then grabbed my chin in a grip that forced my face toward his. "Do you really want to die?"

His breath was hot and reeked of whiskey. His fingers dug into my jaw hard enough to leave bruises.

"You went crying to my mother again. Didn't you?" The words came through clenched teeth, each one a controlled detonation. "'Liam brought a woman into the compound. Liam assaulted me.'" He mimicked a pitiful, whimpering tone, then his voice dropped to something low and lethal. "You're quite the little messenger, aren't you? Sending texts from your sickbed. Who are you trying to fool with this pathetic act?" He shoved my face to the side, then yanked it back. "You'll stop at nothing to secure your position as the Donna of this Family. It's disgusting."

I stared at him, my mind reeling, genuinely unable to comprehend what he was accusing me of. "I didn't—"

"No?" He let out a short, brutal scoff—the sound of a man who had already decided the verdict before the trial. His gaze dropped to my hospital gown, and something shifted behind his eyes. The rage didn't diminish. It mutated. A cruel, mocking edge crept into the corners of his mouth.

"Fine," he said, his voice dropping to a murmur that was somehow worse than the shouting. "Isn't this what you wanted? To marry into the Falcone Family? Didn't you go to extraordinary lengths to get my attention?" He leaned in until his lips were beside my ear, and the whisper that followed was stripped of everything human. "Then I'll grant your wish."