"I agree to marry that man instead of Serafina. But on one condition. I want one billion and a letter of you announcing us breaking off as family."

I stood inside the family study, the room where every arrangement that had ever shaped the Moretti bloodline had been decided beneath the oil portrait of my grandfather and the faint, permanent smell of old leather and cold cigar ash. I tossed the agreement onto the table. The pages fanned once and settled against the green felt blotter, and the silence that followed pressed against every wall.

The moment I finished speaking, my father slammed his wine glass onto the floor in rage.

"One billion? Do you want to drain the Moretti Family dry?"

The glass shattered against the marble, letting its sharp shards slice into my ankle. I felt the sting distantly, the way you feel rain when you are already soaked through. It did not matter. Instead, I just let out a smile while looking up at my biological parents, the Don and his wife, seated across from me like a tribunal. Salvatore Moretti's jaw was set, the cords in his neck tight. Beside him, Elena smoothed a wrinkle that was not there on the sleeve of her silk blouse, her eyes already calculating how to reshape whatever came next into something she could live with.

"What? Is Serafina's life not worth that much?"

My father froze for a few seconds, staring at me with suspicion. His thumb came down once against the tabletop, a single muted tap, the gesture he always made before he started converting people into numbers.

"Why are you suddenly agreeing to this? Don't you love Dante the most?"

I let out a bitter laugh, which caused my ribs to throb with the effort. Three of them were still cracked beneath the wrapping Dr. Ricci had wound around my torso five days ago, and every breath reminded me that the body keeps its own accounts even when the heart tries to close the books.

Two weeks ago, it was my twenty-fifth birthday. Unfortunately, I had been kidnapped. The kidnapping was arranged by my so-called sister, Serafina Moretti.

The men she hired were not street-level thugs. They were professionals, the kind who knew how to work a body without leaving marks that would show in a casket and who understood that real terror is not about volume but about duration. They broke three of my ribs and whipped my back until it was raw and bleeding. I had always suffered from claustrophobia, so they locked me in a small, dark room for a full twenty-four hours, a windowless storage space beneath a warehouse on the docks where the Moretti shipping containers were stacked six high. The air tasted of rust and brine, and the walls were close enough that I could press both palms flat against opposite sides. Just when I was losing hope, Dante Falcone and his soldiers found me.

His eyes were filled with tears as he looked at my bloodied body. The Falcone heir, the man whose signet ring I had kissed a hundred times, dropped to his knees on the filthy concrete as though the sight of me had cut something vital behind his ribs.

"Bianca, please don't close your eyes. We're almost at the clinic. Just hold on a little longer."

I clung to his scent, sandalwood and gunmetal and the starch of his collar, comforting myself with it until we reached the emergency room at the family clinic on the north side. The moment I was on the bed, I fell into a deep sleep, the kind that is less rest than surrender. When I woke, my entire body trembled with pain as if my bones were being broken apart and pieced back together again, and the overhead light was a white blade that made my eyes water.

As I was about to call for help, I overheard Dante speaking with his aide just outside the door. The hallway was tile, and tile carries voices the way water carries ripples.

"The crew who originally took Miss Moretti have been caught," Nico DeLuca reported. I could picture him without seeing him, his stack of papers aligned edge to edge before he delivered information that could not be softened. "They confessed. It really was Miss Moretti who hired them to stage the whole thing."

Dante's face must have gone grim. He then sneered, his voice dripping with mockery as he said, "Serafina was right then."

Nico hesitated, then continued carefully, "But why did you hire someone to keep her locked up for another twenty-four hours? Miss Moretti looked seriously injured when we found her."

Dante's tone turned cold as ice. "She loves playing the victim so much. That's why I gave her a real lesson. The crew called Serafina for ransom money. She was so scared she came down with a fever."

"I already told those men to just rough her up a little, nothing serious. She's just too fragile."

Lying in my clinic bed, my scalp prickled and a chill swept through my entire body. So this was the truth. Serafina had already blamed everything on me, calling it my own scheme, and Dante believed her completely. The man who had wept over my broken body had been the one who ordered the extra twenty-four hours in the dark. He had paid for my terror and then knelt beside me as though he were my savior.

I pressed my thumbnail into the inside of my wrist until a pale crescent appeared, a habit I had learned in childhood when the panic needed somewhere to go that was not my face.

When I was eighteen years old, the Moretti Family finally brought me back home. I had spent my childhood outside the compound, raised by distant relations who never explained why a Don's blood daughter lived without the Don's name. That was when I learned about the arranged marriage between the Falcone and Moretti families. Everyone in London's underworld whispered that Dante and Serafina were childhood sweethearts, raised in each other's orbit at Sunday dinners and communion parties, and that he would definitely choose her when the alliance was formalized.

Surprisingly, Dante fell madly in love with me instead. He pursued me relentlessly, showed up at every family gathering with his attention fixed on me like a scope, while Serafina accused me of stealing everything that should have been hers. Yet Dante responded by looking at her coldly with a grim face.

"I only care about your sister. You're the one who has been enjoying everything all along. Bianca has suffered for years outside without saying a word, so why are you making such a fuss?"

Back then, he stood firmly by my side and gave me a sense of safety and love. Unfortunately, that love had now vanished. It had expired like a lie. Like a pact drawn up in disappearing ink, binding only until the signer chose not to remember.

Taking a deep breath, I pushed away my thoughts and asked calmly, "Have you decided yet?"

Salvatore and Elena exchanged looks. I knew what they were weighing. The Bellandi Family's reputation preceded them, carried north from Edinburgh in cautionary whispers traded at sit-downs and funeral receptions. Lorenzo Bellandi was not a man who made alliances lightly, and the rumors about what happened to those who displeased him varied only in the method, never in the outcome. After a long pause, they finally nodded before signing the agreement and pressing their fingerprints on it, the old way, ink and skin, because in this world a signature without a print was just a suggestion.

"Fine. In seven days, you'll receive the money to make the alliance ceremony happen. But you must not reveal anything about this marriage exchange."

I grabbed the agreement before turning to leave. However, my chest was aching as though my heart was being torn apart. Only then did I fully realize that they had never loved me. My father had tapped the table, done his arithmetic, and concluded that one billion was a price he could pay to keep Serafina safe from the Bellandi arrangement. My mother had smoothed her sleeve and let it happen. Neither of them had asked about my ribs, my back, or the twenty-four hours in the dark.

The only person my parents cared about was Serafina, their adopted daughter who was not even related to them by blood. Since that was the truth, I no longer wanted a family or love. I would give them exactly what they wanted, and then I would give them what they had earned.

After that, I pulled out my phone and called Sofia Conti. She picked up on the second ring, the way she always did when the caller was me.

"Find all the security footage that proves Serafina's involvement in my kidnapping."

After a brief pause, I added, "Also, spread the word about the new concession. Get Dante to invest through the Falcone front companies, then cut off access to the critical supply routes for both the Falcone and Moretti operations."

Within seven days, I would give them a gift that they would never forget. Sofia said nothing for a moment, and in that silence I heard her fingernail hover near the screen, not yet pressing, testing whether the truth on the other end was intact. Then she exhaled once and told me she understood.

I ended the call and gathered every photo of me and Dante from the drawer beside the study door, pictures from charity galas, from the private garden behind the Falcone estate, from the night he had put his signet ring in my palm and told me it would be mine one day. One by one, I tossed them onto the marble floor and set them on fire with the brass lighter that had belonged to my grandfather.

Watching the flames rise, I whispered coldly, "This time, we'll never meet again."

The fire ate through the last photograph, curling the edge of Dante's smile into black, and the smoke alarm in the hallway stayed silent because in a house like this, someone had disconnected it long ago.

I packed everything I owned into two leather bags before stepping out of the bedroom that had been mine since childhood, the one at the far end of the second-floor corridor where the Moretti family kept what they didn't want visitors to see. The hallway smelled of cold stone and the dying trace of someone's perfume, and the moment I crossed the threshold I understood why.

Serafina was leaning against the wrought-iron railing of the second-floor gallery, casual as a cat sunning itself on a windowsill. Between her thumb and forefinger she held the engagement ring Dante Falcone had given me, tilting it so the hallway sconce caught the diamond and threw a sliver of light across the wall. Her smile arrived before her words did, slow and satisfied, the smile of someone who had already won and wanted you to watch her enjoy it.

"Bianca. Was that little kidnapping game fun last time?"

Her voice carried the lilting sweetness she reserved for moments when no one who mattered could hear the poison underneath. She turned the ring once, letting the facets wink.

"You still haven't learned your lesson, have you? No one will believe you. They'll only believe me. You're nothing but a liar."

I said nothing. My thumbnail found the inside of my wrist and pressed until the skin went white, a pale crescent forming beneath the nail. The hallway was quiet enough that I could hear the grandfather clock ticking two rooms away, the faint hum of the compound's security monitors behind the paneled walls. Somewhere downstairs a door closed, and the sound traveled up through the bones of the house like a held breath.

Serafina's lower lashes fluttered, one quick involuntary beat, and then she leaned closer, dropping her voice to the conspiratorial register she used when the lie was the point.

"Oh, I forgot to tell you. The men who beat you? They were sent by Dante himself. His punishment for making me sick with your little self-made drama."

She laughed. It was loud and bright and perfectly crafted, the laugh of the favored daughter who knew no one in this house would ever ask her to account for it. Her fingertips rubbed along the smooth band of the ring as though it had always been hers, as though every promise Dante had ever made to me was a thing she could pick up and set down at will.

Then her grip loosened.

The ring slipped from her hand and struck the marble step with a sound like a pistol crack, bouncing once, twice, skating down the staircase with a series of sharp, bright impacts that echoed off the stone walls of the Moretti gallery. Each collision sent the diamond sparking under the low light, and I watched it tumble as though something inside my chest were falling with it.

"What did you just do?"

The words tore out of me before I could stop them. I lunged forward, reaching past her toward the stairs, my body moving on instinct toward the only physical proof I still carried of what Dante and I had once been. But as I passed Serafina she stepped into my path, smooth and deliberate, her lips curling into a smile that had nothing warm left in it. She caught my hand and placed it on her own shoulder, pressing my fingers down against the silk of her blouse, and for one frozen instant I understood exactly what she was about to do.

She screamed.

The sound was piercing, theatrical, a note held long enough to reach every corner of the compound's second floor. Serafina threw herself backward with the practiced abandon of someone who had rehearsed the fall, her body twisting as she tumbled down the marble steps. By the time my mind caught up with my eyes she was already on the landing below, half-kneeling, one hand braced against the cold floor, tears streaming down her face in two perfect lines.

"Ah! It hurts!" she wailed, and the sound was pitiful, broken, exactly the frequency that made grown men in this family abandon reason.

Footsteps thundered up from the ground floor. Heavy, urgent, the kind of footsteps that in a Moretti household meant soldiers reaching for holsters before they even knew what they were running toward. But it was not soldiers who appeared. It was Dante Falcone, still in the dark suit he wore when he came to discuss family business with my father, and behind him my parents, Salvatore and Elena Moretti, their faces already arranging themselves into the verdict they had carried for years.

From where they stood at the base of the staircase, the picture was simple and damning: me at the top, my hand still extended, my breath ragged. Serafina crumpled on the landing below, sobbing.

Dante took the last steps two at a time. His hand closed around my arm, fingers digging in hard enough to leave marks, and the signet ring on his right hand pressed cold against my skin. His voice was a blade.

"Bianca! How could you push Serafina?"

"I didn't push her!"

I glared at him, forcing every word out through gritted teeth. "She fell on her own."

My father's face darkened to a color I had only ever seen when an associate brought bad numbers to a sit-down. Salvatore Moretti's thumb came down once on the bannister, a single tap, the gesture he made before he stopped seeing family and started seeing liabilities.

"Are you still lying?" he shouted. "You know Serafina's health isn't good. How could you be so cruel?"

My mother's expression was a closed door. Elena Moretti stepped forward, smoothing a wrinkle on her sleeve that was not there, and shoved me hard with both hands. My lower back struck the iron railing. The impact sent a sharp bolt of pain through my spine and I gasped, gripping the rail to keep from going over, my vision swimming for a single terrible second before the world steadied again.

On the landing below, Serafina sat up just enough to cling to the lapel of Dante's jacket, her fingers curling into the expensive fabric, her eyes glistening with tears that caught the light as perfectly as the diamond had.

"Dante, don't blame Bianca. Maybe I accidentally bumped into her and made her angry. Just … pretend I fell on my own. Don't make things difficult for my parents."

Her voice trembled with exactly the right amount of selflessness. Each word was a brushstroke on the portrait she had been painting for years: the fragile adopted daughter who loved too much, who forgave too easily, who would swallow her own pain before she let it touch the people around her. And every person in this house believed it. Every single one.

Dante's jaw tightened. The fury in his face deepened with each syllable of Serafina's performance, and I watched his expression grow darker and darker, a storm building behind his eyes that had nothing to do with truth and everything to do with the story he had already chosen. He snatched the engagement ring from my hand. I had not even realized I had retrieved it from the steps. His fingers closed over it for one instant, and then he hurled it to the marble floor with enough force to shatter the band. The diamond separated from its setting and the fragments scattered across the stone in a burst of glittering shrapnel, spinning into the cracks between tiles, disappearing into shadows where no one would ever bother to look.

The sound it made when it broke was small. Smaller than it should have been for the end of everything it had once meant.

Dante turned to me. His eyes burned with a fury so absolute it left no room for doubt, no room for questions, no room for the possibility that the woman standing in front of him might be telling the truth.

"Why do you always hurt and put the blame on Serafina? Do you know that intentionally harming someone can land you in prison for years?"

I stared at the broken ring. The fragments lay scattered across the Moretti marble like the aftermath of something detonated, and my heart twisted with a pain so physical I had to lock my knees to stay upright. The man I loved most stood firmly by Serafina's side once again. He was defending her without question. He had not hesitated for even a breath. He had not looked at the angles, had not wondered why my hand would have been on her shoulder instead of on her back, had not asked a single question that might have cracked the surface of Serafina's perfect, poisoned story.

Slowly, a bitter smile spread across my face. It felt foreign there, like something borrowed from a woman I hadn't yet become.

"You want to send me to the police because of this? Fine by me. Let them check the surveillance footage and see who staged this little performance."

I shoved Dante away. The surprise of it rocked him back half a step, and in the silence that followed I turned to Serafina, crossed the distance between us, raised my hand, and slapped her across the face.

The crack echoed through the gallery, bouncing off stone and iron and the oil portraits of Moretti patriarchs who stared down from the walls with painted indifference. It was a sound that did not belong in this house of whispered arrangements and careful power, and for one clean instant it cut through every layer of pretense in the room.

"See that?" My voice was steady now, steadier than it had any right to be. "This time, I really hit you. I won't let him falsely accuse me without proof."

Serafina froze. Her hand rose to her cheek where the mark was already blooming red against her skin, and for one unguarded moment the mask slipped. Her eyes were not wounded. They were calculating, recalibrating, running through the next move. She forgot to cry.

It lasted less than a second. Then Dante snapped out of his shock and his hand came up, and his palm struck my face with the full weight of his arm behind it. The signet ring caught the edge of my cheekbone and I tasted copper, bright and metallic, flooding the inside of my mouth. My head snapped to the side and the gallery spun, the Moretti portraits blurring into a single smear of dark oil and gilt frames.

His eyes looked at me coldly. There was no conflict in them, no fracture, no trace of the man who had once held my face in both hands and promised me I would never stand alone.

"I haven't even dealt with what happened last time. You've barely left the hospital and you're already targeting Serafina again." His voice was flat, judicial, the voice of a man pronouncing sentence. "I'll have you taken in. You can stay in a holding cell until you've reflected on your actions. When you finally understand what you've done, I'll come to get you."

Before I could respond, two of his soldiers stepped forward from the shadows at the base of the staircase. I had not even noticed them. They took my arms with the efficient, impersonal grip of men who had been trained to move bodies without leaving visible bruises, and they turned me toward the door. Dante did not glance at me. He had already turned away. He gathered Serafina into his arms, his hand cradling the back of her head, his eyes full of heartache as he murmured something low and soothing against her hair, and the last thing I saw before the compound door closed behind me was Serafina's face over his shoulder, her gaze meeting mine, her mouth curving into a smile so faint that no one else in the room would have seen it.

The precinct they brought me to was one of the local stations where the Moretti name still carried weight, the kind of place where officers looked the other way when Family business walked through the door. Dante arrived shortly after, his suit unwrinkled, his composure restored, as though dragging the woman he had once promised to marry into a police station were simply another item on the evening's agenda. He threw a confession document onto the table in front of me. The paper was crisp, official, already typed. All it needed was a signature.

"Put your name on it," he ordered coldly.

I picked up the pen. The weight of it was familiar in my hand, and for one breath I held it above the page, letting him believe, letting the silence stretch until it filled every corner of that narrow room. Then I tore the paper in half. And then in half again. The pieces fell onto the table like shed skin.

I looked up and met his gaze and let out a low, mocking laugh that surprised even me.

"Dante. Why should I sign something when I've done nothing wrong? If you really want to put me in a cell, don't hide behind excuses. I want to see just how far you'll go for Serafina."

He looked as if something had lodged in his throat. His expression shifted several times, anger to frustration to something that might have been shame if he had been capable of recognizing it, and then he turned away sharply, his hand rising to roll the signet ring over his knuckle once before he caught himself and stopped.

"Lock her up for now. Release her tonight. Let her reflect on herself," he ordered the officer at the door without looking back.

He walked out. His footsteps were measured, unhurried, the footsteps of a man who had already moved on to the next thing. I watched his retreating figure through the smudged glass of the interview room, my eyes swollen with unshed tears that I refused to let fall in a place where cameras recorded everything and silence was the only dignity left.

My heart felt like it was being stabbed over and over again. Between Serafina and me, he had never once hesitated. Even when I was innocent, he would always choose her. He kept pushing me deeper and deeper into the abyss, and the worst part, the part that burned more than the ring-mark on my cheekbone or the bruise forming on my lower back, was that some traitorous piece of me still wanted him to turn around.

He didn't.

The door clicked shut, and the fluorescent light above me buzzed like a trapped insect, and I pressed my thumbnail into the inside of my wrist until a pale crescent appeared, holding it there, holding it until the sting replaced the ache, until the only pain I felt was the one I had chosen for myself.

As soon as Dante left, my parents arrived.

They came through the station's back entrance, the one reserved for families with enough influence to bypass the front desk entirely. Salvatore Moretti walked half a step ahead of his wife, his overcoat still buttoned, his jaw set in the particular way it always was when he considered an errand beneath him. Elena Moretti followed with her gloves still on, her fingers laced in front of her like a woman attending a funeral she had not wanted to attend. Neither of them looked at me the way a parent looks at a child found in a holding cell. They looked at me the way a Don looks at a failed arrangement.

Their faces were full of disappointment. Their voices cold and sharp, without a trace of sympathy.

"Bianca," my father said, and the single word carried the weight of a sentencing. "Admit your mistakes. Only then will Dante release you."

I couldn't help but give them a bitter smile.

Since the day they brought me home, I had been forced to admit fault for everything. If I scored higher than Serafina on an exam, that was my fault, because it embarrassed the daughter they had chosen to favor. If I won recognition in anything, a recital, a school prize, a whispered compliment from a visiting capo's wife, that was my fault too, because the light was supposed to fall on Serafina and nowhere else. If I didn't perform the same theatrical helplessness Serafina wore like a second skin, if I stood too straight or spoke too clearly or failed to shrink myself down to an acceptable size, that was the worst fault of all. The Moretti household had a single unwritten law more binding than any oath: Bianca exists to make Serafina shine, and any deviation from that purpose is betrayal.

But now, I no longer wanted to bow my head or admit to anything.

Swallowing the bitterness in my heart, I asked them calmly, "What's the point of admitting anything? Should I admit that I didn't push Serafina hard enough?"

The words had barely left my mouth when my father's hand struck my face with a loud smack. The sound was sharper in the concrete-walled room than it would have been at home, amplified by the bare floor and the steel door and the silence that followed. Pain stung my cheek, spreading hot and immediate from the point of impact up through my temple. Salvatore Moretti did not hit like a man losing control. He hit like a man correcting an error in a ledger, precise and without hesitation. I felt the heat bloom across the side of my face, felt the skin tighten where the bruise would form, and I held back my tears. I lifted my chin stubbornly and let out a cold snort.

"I was taken. Snatched right off a street that your soldiers were supposed to be watching." My voice came out steadier than my hands. "But you only worried about Serafina. Now she stages a fall so clean it wouldn't fool a child, and you force me to confess again." I pressed my thumbnail into the inside of my wrist, felt the familiar sting, held it. "Am I just some piece of trash you picked up off the street?"

My parents didn't even flinch. They stood shoulder to shoulder and stared at me as if I were a vicious enemy threatening their beloved daughter. Salvatore's thumb tapped once against the edge of the metal table between us, that single, measured tap he always made before reducing family to numbers. Elena smoothed the front of her coat where no wrinkle existed, her fingertips brushing the fabric as though flattening something invisible, something only she could see, a version of this moment she was already rewriting to protect herself.

"Bianca, you're being ungrateful," my mother said, her voice thin and final. "Just stay here then."

They did not look back. Salvatore held the door for Elena, and she passed through it without a word, and the door closed behind them with a mechanical click that sounded nothing like a lock and everything like one. Meanwhile, the Neris ignored my protests and shoved me into a small cell at the end of the corridor, the kind of room that existed in every precinct house touched by Family money, the kind of room where people who inconvenienced the right families were kept until they stopped being inconvenient. The room was pitch black, with only a thin beam of light slipping through a narrow window set high in the wall, barely wide enough for a hand.

My body trembled uncontrollably as my breathing turned shallow and ragged. The walls pressed inward, not literally but with the absolute certainty that only claustrophobia provides, the sensation of the ceiling lowering, the air thickening, the darkness acquiring weight and texture until it lay against my skin like something alive. My claustrophobia surged, choking me with terror that had nothing to do with the Morettis or Serafina or any human threat. This was older. This was the panic that lived in my chest like a second heart, beating only in enclosed spaces, only in the dark.

Instinctively, I called Dante's name. The syllables left my mouth before I could stop them, before pride could intervene, before the rational part of my mind could remind me that calling for the man who had put me here was its own kind of defeat. Yet there was no answer. Only endless darkness pressed down on me, heavy as earth, and the faint drip of water somewhere in the pipes behind the wall, and the distant sound of voices that did not care.

I had no idea how much time passed before the cell door swung open.

A group of tall, rough-looking Sisters stepped inside. There were four of them, broad-shouldered and hard-eyed, dressed in the kind of plain clothes that suggested they had been brought in from outside, not pulled from any holding area. Their eyes gleamed with malice under the fluorescent light that spilled in from the corridor, and they moved with the coordinated ease of Sisters who had done this before.

"Is that her?" The first one spoke without lowering her voice, without any concern that a Neri might hear. "Miss Moretti said to teach her a lesson."

Miss Moretti. Not even the courtesy of a first name to distinguish which Moretti daughter had paid for this. But I knew. I had always known. The order carried Serafina's particular cruelty, the kind that hired others to do the bleeding so her own hands stayed clean.

As one of them spoke, a short-haired woman cracked her knuckles and stepped toward me. Before the first hit, the Sisters cracked gum in relay, one after the other, the sound popping through the small cell like a countdown. My heart dropped. I backed away until my shoulder blades hit the far wall, but another one grabbed my hair and slammed me to the ground before I could escape. The impact drove the breath from my lungs, and then the fists came, and then the kicks, and each blow sent sharp waves of pain through my body, layering on top of injuries that had never been given time to heal.

I tried to fight back. I drove my elbow into the nearest body, felt it connect with something soft, but my old injuries hadn't healed yet. The wounds from the kidnapping were still stitched and swollen beneath my clothes, and the first solid kick to my ribs turned resistance into agony. I was too weak to defend myself. All I could do was curl up and endure it silently as they vented their anger on me, pulling my arms over my head, tucking my knees to my chest, making myself as small as the room demanded.

They didn't stop until a Neri's voice shouted from outside the bars. "Enough! Stop right now!"

The shout came late. It came after the short-haired woman had pressed her boot against my spine and leaned her weight onto it. It came after I had stopped making any sound at all. Officer Neri stood in the corridor with one hand on his belt, and before he spoke again he rubbed the back of his neck with his free hand, the gesture of a man rehearsing the lie he had been paid to keep.

Finally, the Sisters backed away. They filed out without urgency, without fear of consequence, because there would be none. The Moretti name had purchased this hour the same way it purchased silence and loyalty and convenient blindness.

I was lying motionless on the cold floor. My body was covered in blood and bruises. The concrete beneath me had gone warm where my blood had pooled, and the smell of it filled the cell, copper and salt and something older, something that reminded me of the warehouse where Rocco Greco's men had held me. My back was torn open again, old wounds mingling with fresh ones, the stitches from the hospital split along their seams. Every move felt like my bones were shattering from the inside. Slowly, I lost consciousness, and the darkness that took me was not the darkness of the cell but something quieter, something that did not press down but simply erased.

After a long while, the cell door creaked open. I was dragged out by the arms, my feet trailing behind me, and their laughter echoed in my ears as they mocked me openly. But I didn't even have the strength to respond. The corridor lights passed overhead in a blur of fluorescent bars, and the words they said dissolved into sound without meaning.

A full day and night passed before they finally threw me out of the station. The morning air hit my face like a slap, and sunlight blinded me. I raised a trembling hand to shield my eyes, squinting against the brightness that felt violent after so many hours in the dark. Then I staggered to my feet and limped toward the family clinic on Via Serena, the one Dr. Ricci kept open for associates who could not afford questions at a proper hospital.

After my wounds were bandaged, the gauze pulling tight across the reopened gashes on my back, I turned to leave only to see Dante and Serafina walking toward me down the clinic corridor. He froze when he saw me. His eyes widened in shock, his gaze moving from the bandages visible at my collar to the bruises mottling the side of my face to the way I held my left arm close to my body because something inside it ground against bone when I let it hang. For a while, he was stuck in place, and I watched his right hand drift toward his signet ring before he caught himself.

"How… how did you end up like this?" he asked, frowning deeply as he looked at me with a flicker of heartache that surfaced and submerged in the same breath.

Dante tried to reach out, his hand lifting almost as if to help me, and for one fraction of a second the gesture looked real. However, I stepped back to avoid his touch. The movement sent pain screaming through my ribs, but I would have crawled before I let him steady me. Before I could speak, Serafina hurried to his side, clutching his arm like a devoted lover. She looked at me with fake worry swimming in her eyes, her lower lashes fluttering once too quickly, the way they always did whenever the lie mattered.

"Bianca, Dante arranged your release yesterday. Why didn't you come home last night?" Her voice was silk over glass. "And how did you get yourself into such a state?"

Then she turned to Dante and added, her tone softening into something almost maternal, "Don't blame her, Dante. Bianca probably just wants attention. Look at how badly she's hurt. Let's get her treated first, okay?"

Her gentle words worked like poison. The pain in Dante's eyes vanished in an instant, replaced by cold fury. The shift was so complete, so immediate, that I understood for the first time that Serafina did not merely manipulate him. She was the lens through which he saw me, and she could turn that lens whenever she wished. He glared at me coldly as he accused, "You're doing this again. Bianca, your lies are so obvious now. No one believes you anymore."

This time, I didn't answer. Instead, I just stared at him as I silently memorized the face I had once loved so deeply. The line of his jaw. The way his dark hair fell across his forehead. The shape of his mouth when it formed words designed to cut. His eyes were still beautiful, but now, they no longer held even a trace of love for me. Whatever had lived there once had been poisoned so thoroughly that he could stand in a clinic corridor, look at a woman covered in bruises his silence had permitted, and feel nothing but contempt.

Dante turned to Serafina, gently holding her hand, and spoke while looking at me. "If you have the strength to hurt yourself, then you have the strength to walk home."

He addressed the nearest soldier without raising his voice. "Watch her closely. Don't let her take a single shortcut."

After that, both Dante and Serafina walked away. His arm around her shoulder. Her head tilted against him. The picture of devotion disappearing down the corridor, past the clinic's front desk, through the door, and into the black car that waited at the curb.

Step by step, I forced myself to walk home. The Moretti estate was four miles from the clinic, and every step burned through the soles of my shoes and up through my shattered ribs and into the place behind my sternum where something had once been whole. The soldier followed ten paces behind, close enough to ensure I didn't deviate, far enough to make clear that helping me was not part of his orders. The city moved around me in its ordinary way, cars and voices and the smell of bread from a bakery I passed, and none of it touched me, and none of it mattered.

Every painful step burned the same words into my mind.

I would make them pay for this. All of them.