Matteo scooped her up without a second's hesitation and ran for the doctor the Family kept on retainer two blocks over. I screamed after his retreating back until my throat gave out, but he never once turned around.

The house staff carried me back. I had barely been bandaged when he stormed in, face dark with fury.

He accused me of drugging Viviana's horse, said it was my fault she'd been thrown.

He didn't ask a single question. He ordered the beating on the spot.

The men carrying out the punishment had their own instructions. Two or three strikes in, they broke both my legs.

From then on, every grievance Viviana suffered, Matteo laid at my door.

I was heartbroken, furious, but I told myself he only treated me this way because Viviana had deceived him, twisted his mind.

Now I saw the truth.

He had never cared about me. He never would.

I shook my head with a hollow, dazed smile. Something in it seemed to reach him; he started to lift his hand toward the top of my head.

Then Viviana's voice cut in.

"Cousin, you don't understand how a woman thinks. She's only angry that you're good to me, so she's putting on this pitiful act to make you feel sorry for her..."

"We're both women. Leave her with me. Let me talk some sense into her. Maybe she'll come around?"

"But..."

Matteo's gaze swept between the two of us, uncertain. His thumb drifted to the leather band of his watch, smoothing it once, twice.

"Cousin! I'll be entering the Moretti heir's household in a few days. After that, it'll just be the two of you here. If I don't straighten things out with Josie now, and my being here drives a wedge between you, I'll never have a moment's peace..."

Matteo could never stand to see Viviana upset. He nodded, got up, and left.

A sly little smile curled at the corner of Viviana's mouth.

"Now it's just the two of us. I can finally drop the act..."

"I haven't even thanked you properly. Without you, Lorenzo Moretti would never have noticed me. It's not the position of his wife, but for someone of my background, serving at his side is already more than I could have hoped for..."

"The problem is, keeping you alive is a threat. If the Moretti heir ever found out..." She stopped herself short, voice going hard. "No. I will never give him the chance to find out."

"Until I leave for the alliance ceremony, you're not going anywhere. Not until I've secured my footing inside the Moretti compound. And if you ever get another chance like that day to catch Lorenzo's eye, I'll have Cousin kill you."

She dropped that threat like a blade, turned, and walked out. The locks clicked shut, every one of them, inside and out. The sound of each deadbolt was deliberate, the way a man counts rounds into a magazine.

I lay on the bed and let the tears soak into the pillow.

Three full days. No one came except the servant who brought meals. The silence was suffocating. I drifted in and out of consciousness, fever rising and falling, images flashing through my dreams that I couldn't tell from memory.

Warhorses and iron blades, bodies collapsing before me one after another.

Then someone gripping my hand, calling me sister.

I was about to make out the face when the dream shattered. My eyes snapped open to the empty room. Through the high window, the distant hum of the city felt like another country. A single thought rose through the fog.

If brushing against death triggered visions like these, then maybe if I tried enough times, I could find out who I really was.

I dragged myself upright and pulled a length of white silk from the cabinet.

I flung it over the crossbeam and tied a dead knot.

The moment I pushed my neck through, the fabric bit into my throat.

Agony and suffocation hit at the same instant. Everything went black.

Consciousness began peeling away, and the face in my vision sharpened inch by inch.

I was so close to seeing it clearly.

BANG.

The door was kicked open.

Viviana stood in the doorway, two older house women behind her, one of them holding a bowl of broth.

"Oh, still alive?"

She strolled in with a smile, crouched down in front of me. Her fingers rose to touch the pearl at her throat, a quick, satisfied brush. "Trying to die? Did you ask my permission first?"

I lifted my head. My throat hurt too much to make a sound.

Viviana tilted her head, putting on a show of pity.

"Oh dear, look at that. Your neck's all red. Must hurt terribly. Why would you go and do something like that, Josie? It's just a baby. Matteo already said you could always have another one."

She set the bowl of soup on the ground, stood, and brushed off her skirt.

"But since I happened to catch you, I suppose I should help."

She turned to the old house woman. "Go fetch Matteo. Tell him Josie tried to hang herself, and I saved her just in time."

The woman left without a word.

Viviana crouched down, bringing her face close to mine, and dropped her voice. The pearl at her throat caught the low light as her fingers drifted to it, a brief, satisfied touch.

"Do you know what he's going to think? He'll think you're threatening him. Using your own death to make him push me aside."

"He despises that kind of trick."

She was right.

When Matteo burst in, his face held no trace of concern. Only fury. The door hit the wall hard enough that the single lamp on the shelf rattled, and the two soldiers who flanked the hallway went still, their eyes fixed on the floor.

"Josie! Have you lost your mind?!"

He seized me by the collar and hauled me off the ground. "Do you have any idea what you've done?!"

I opened my mouth, tried to explain that I wasn't threatening him.

But my throat wouldn't make a sound.

Viviana was shaking with sobs, pressing herself into Matteo's arms. "Is she blaming me? Is it because of what happened to her... because of me..."

He held her, patting her back gently. "Don't be silly. None of this is your fault."

Then he turned to me, his voice cold as stone.

"I thought you were a sensible woman. I didn't realize you'd stoop to these pathetic stunts. Crying, screaming, hanging yourself for attention."

"Don't be angry with her..." Viviana was still pouring oil on the fire. "She just lost the baby. She's in so much pain..."

"Enough." Matteo released Viviana, walked over, and stood above me, looking down. His thumb moved once across the leather band of his watch, slow and absent, as if the decision had already passed through him without stopping. "You want to die? Fine. I'll oblige. But don't do it in my house. I won't have the stain on this Family's property."

He turned to the house woman. "Lock her in the storage room out back. No one visits without my say-so."

"Matteo..." Viviana caught his sleeve, a pretty show of hesitation. "Don't be too harsh. She's still..."

"She needs to learn."

He walked out without looking back.

Viviana trailed after him, but at the doorway she stopped and glanced over her shoulder. Her lips moved, shaping words without sound.

Lie down and die.

The door slammed shut behind them.

The storage room had no window. The only light was a thin line bleeding through the crack beneath the door. Somewhere beyond the wall, the muffled voices of Matteo's men drifted and faded, and then there was nothing. Not even the sound of a lock being checked. Nobody was coming.

I curled into the corner, the skin of my neck burning raw, my body covered in wounds, a dull ache still pulling through my lower belly. My thumb found the hardened line along my forefinger and pressed into it, rubbing back and forth, the old callus the only solid thing I could hold onto in the dark.

After nightfall, the lock scraped open.

Viviana stepped inside. Moonlight fell across her pretty, pale face, and the smile she wore had something vicious underneath it.

Two heavyset men followed close behind. Not Matteo's regulars. Outsiders. The kind of muscle you hired for a night and never spoke to again.

"Tomorrow I walk into the Moretti heir's compound for the alliance ceremony. I mentioned, just in passing, that I wanted a strand of black Tahitian pearls for my dowry, and Matteo rushed off to source them tonight. No one will disturb us. We have the whole night. We can take our time."

I pressed back until my spine hit the cold wall, every nerve alert.

"What are you going to do?"

Viviana smiled, drew a thin leather switch from beneath her coat, and let the warmth drain from her eyes.

"I've waited so long for this."

Then the lashes fell, one after another.

"This one is for seducing Matteo. He's mine..."

A second. A third.

She counted each one, slow and deliberate. Soon there wasn't an inch of skin on my body the switch hadn't found, and every welt was wet with blood.

The two men pinned me down so I couldn't twist away. All that escaped my lips was a thin, broken whimper.

Viviana coiled the switch and looked down at me.

"Look at you. You're worth less than a dog."

She gripped my chin and tilted my face up, her voice dripping with satisfaction. "Tomorrow I walk into the Moretti compound and live in glory. And you? You'll rot here, thrown away like the trash Matteo finally sees you are."

She produced a small glass vial as she spoke. "I went through a great deal of trouble to find this little gift for you…"

The malice in her smile sent my heart plummeting.

Before I could react, her people pinned me down and forced the ice-cold liquid down my throat.

Moments later, fire erupted low in my belly, and I knew at once: an aphrodisiac, and a devastatingly potent one.

Viviana clapped her hands. Two men shuffled in from the alley entrance, hollow-eyed and leering. Drifters. The kind no one reported missing and no one mourned.

"Crawling with disease, the both of them. A perfect match for filth like you."

She retreated to the doorway.

"When my dear cousin comes home tomorrow and finds you tangled up with street trash, what do you suppose he'll think?"

A vicious scheme.

But she'd overestimated how much I had left to lose. She needn't have bothered. I'd already given up on Matteo.

The moment my body healed, I would leave on my own.

The drug's grip tightened, scattering my thoughts, but I bit down on my lip until the pain kept me anchored.

The two men closed in from either side.

I fought with everything I had, but my broken hands couldn't strike back. They slammed me to the ground.

The back of my skull cracked against the stone floor beside me. Blinding white light split across my vision.

Images flooded in, countless and unstoppable.

A long black car rolling through iron gates. Myself at the head of a convoy moving north through territory no other Family dared touch. Atop the steps of the Moretti compound, the Don gripping my hands, eyes red, calling me "sister."

Every capo and soldier in the inner circle on their feet, glasses raised, voices carrying through the banquet hall in a single toast to my name.

I remembered.

I was no orphan called Josie. I was Adriana Moretti, Donna of the bloodline, Commander of the Northern Routes.

Running border operations at twelve. Securing three contested corridors at fourteen. Pacifying the entire northern territory at sixteen. The elder sister the Don revered. The blood daughter the whole Moretti Family had been searching for.

My eyes snapped open. I wrenched the slender blade from my hair with every ounce of strength I had left and slashed it across both their throats.

The next morning, the Rinaldi house blazed with ceremony.

Viviana wore a white gown fitted for an alliance bride, pearls at her throat and wrists. Matteo himself pinned a diamond into her hair and escorted her out to be wed.

Lorenzo Moretti, the heir apparent, had come in person to receive the bride. A level of ceremony that far exceeded anything owed to a political arrangement with a protected associate's cousin.

When he saw Viviana's delicate face, something nagged at him. She looked different, somehow, from the woman who had played the strings at the gala.

Still, he stepped forward and took both of Viviana's hands in his. His signet ring sat motionless against his knuckle.

She lowered her eyes with a coy smile. One finger drifted to the pearl at her throat. She was lifting her foot toward the waiting car when

a voice, cool and clear as winter steel, cut through the crowd and silenced every soul present.

"I do not consent to this marriage."