The next morning, I was pulled from sleep by a commotion rising through the floorboards of the Falcone estate — voices, the grind of something heavy being dragged across flagstone, a hollow metallic clang that didn't belong in the manicured quiet of this household.

Still groggy, I sat up in the narrow guest room they'd given me. The sheets smelled faintly of starch and someone else's perfume, as though the linens had been pulled from Serafina's closet and tossed my way without laundering. A dull headache sat behind my eyes. Before I could orient myself, knuckles rapped against the door — three crisp, evenly spaced taps. The way the staff knocked here: neither warm nor cold, just efficient. Just enough to say they'd done their job.

"Miss, Mr. Falcone has arranged a fire performance troupe in the courtyard. He asked me to let you know you're expected downstairs."

I pressed my thumbnail into the inside of my wrist, felt the half-moon of pressure form against the bone. Expected. Not invited. Expected. There was a difference in this world, and the Falcone household enforced it without needing to explain.

I straightened my clothes — the same ones from the night before, wrinkled and stiff at the collar — and stared at the closed door, disbelief pooling in my chest like something cold and heavy. A fire performance. Did Dante Falcone genuinely believe that spectacle and showmanship could paper over what had been done to me? That I could watch flames leap into the air and somehow forget the way his family had discussed my future like a shipping manifest, every line item negotiable, every cost already absorbed? I had never liked these kinds of performances. The heat, the noise, the forced gasps of admiration. It was always Serafina who craved spectacle — the louder and brighter, the better. Not me. I had always preferred silence to applause.

I opened my mouth to refuse, the word already half-formed on my tongue, but the door swung open before I could speak, as though my consent had never been part of the equation.

Serafina entered first, her arm looped through Dante's with a possessiveness so practiced it looked like muscle memory. She wore a pale silk blouse unbuttoned one notch lower than modesty required, her hair swept into a careless knot that had probably taken twenty minutes to arrange. The sweetness on her face was instant, automatic — a smile that bloomed like something painted on porcelain, bright and hard and completely hollow. Her lower lashes fluttered once too quickly as she crossed the room toward me, and I knew before she opened her mouth that every word out of it would be performance.

She grasped my hand with both of hers, squeezing just hard enough to make the gesture feel like restraint rather than affection, and her voice dropped to that coaxing, honeyed register she reserved for moments when someone was watching.

"Bianca, come on. Just come downstairs. Dante's been planning this for a long time — all for you. If you don't go, he'll be hurt."

Dante stood behind her, framed by the doorway's heavy molding. His gaze fixed on me with a faint, cautious glimmer of anticipation, as though this circus in the courtyard were some grand peace offering and all I had to do was accept it for everything between us to reset. He rolled the signet ring on his right hand absently, one slow rotation over the knuckle, and his jaw was set the way it always was when he wanted to appear generous but couldn't quite hide the calculation beneath it.

"Let's just go take a look," he said. His voice carried the quiet authority of a man accustomed to having suggestions treated as orders. "Alright?"

The two of them were perfectly in sync — their timing, their expressions, the angle of their bodies toward me — like a well-rehearsed duet performed so many times the performers no longer noticed the artifice. I felt as if a heavy stone was pressing down on my chest, suffocating me. Each breath cost more than the last. But with Serafina's fingers locked around my wrist and Dante's gaze pinning me in place, I had no choice but to follow. I was dragged downstairs like a prisoner being walked to a verdict already decided.

The Falcone courtyard had been transformed. A makeshift stage of blackened iron and fireproof canvas occupied the center of the flagstone yard, surrounded by a cordon of rope and weighted stanchions. The morning air was already warm, but here, close to the performance area, the heat pressed against my skin like a living thing. A fire-breather stood at the stage's edge — bare-chested, scarred along the ribs, the kind of man who looked like he'd served time and found his talent afterward. He inhaled, tipped his head back, and sent a blazing column of orange-red flame shooting high into the grey sky. The heat reached me from six paces away, fierce enough to tighten the skin on my cheeks and dry the moisture from my eyes.

Serafina positioned herself at Dante's side with the ease of someone who had claimed that spot a thousand times. She leaned into him, whispering something against his collar, her lips brushing fabric, and then laughed — a soft, musical sound engineered to carry just far enough for me to hear. Dante responded without thought, the gestures instinctive and damning: he wiped a sheen of sweat from her forehead with his thumb, tucked a strand of dark hair behind her ear, let his fingers linger on the curve of her jaw a beat longer than necessary. They moved together like a couple deeply, effortlessly in love, and every tender motion was a blade slid between my ribs.

I stood off to the side. Completely forgotten. Just a silent observer, my thumbnail pressed into the crescent already forming on my wrist, watching the man who was supposed to be mine gentle another woman's face as though I didn't exist.

Then Dante's phone rang — a sharp, vibrating buzz against his jacket pocket that cut through the roar and crackle of the performance. He leaned close to Serafina, murmured something against her temple, and she nodded once with that practiced look of patient understanding. He stepped away, moving toward a shaded corner of the courtyard to take the call, his voice dropping into the low, clipped register he used for Family business.

And I was left with her.

I couldn't help but stare at the raging flames. The fire-breather had switched to a spinning baton, twin heads of fire carving arcs through the air, and the heat pulsed outward in rhythmic waves that I could feel against my breastbone. There was an uneasy feeling creeping over me — a cold, animal awareness that had nothing to do with the performance and everything to do with the silence at my side. My instincts screamed that something terrible was about to happen. The way the courtyard staff had drifted toward the far gate. The way no one stood between me and the cordon. The way the morning felt suddenly, deliberately empty.

And then I met Serafina's gaze.

The sweet, sisterly smile she had worn moments ago had vanished. In its place was a strange, twisted smirk — the corners of her mouth pulled tight, her eyes flat and bright and utterly without warmth — that sent chills racing down my spine. It was the expression of someone who had already decided what was going to happen and was merely waiting for the moment to arrive.

Before I could react, she lunged forward and grabbed my arm with a grip like iron, her manicured nails digging into the soft flesh above my elbow. The force of it stunned me — Serafina, who played at fragility, who let Dante carry her bags and hold doors — suddenly had the strength of someone driven by something far uglier than performance. She shoved me toward the flames, past the safety line, and the heat hit me like a wall.

"Ah!" I screamed. I struggled desperately to pull free, twisting my arm, planting my feet against the flagstone, but her fingers were locked around me and her weight was behind the push and the fire was right there, leaping and snarling and reaching for my skin with tongues of white-edged orange. The searing heat rushed against my face, my neck, the bare skin of my arms, and I felt something beyond pain — a raw, primal terror that turned my bones to water.

Then Serafina let go of me in a single, deliberate motion. And with a loud, pitiful cry that could have won her a theater award, she flung herself even closer to the fire, stumbling against the cordon, throwing her arms up as though she'd been the one shoved.

"Help me! Dante!" she screamed.

Dante's head snapped up the instant he heard her voice. The phone dropped from his hand, clattering against the flagstone, and he charged across the courtyard through the cordon like a man possessed. In one swift move, he scooped Serafina into his arms and stumbled back to safety, his body between hers and the flames, shielding her with every inch of himself.

After he managed to keep his balance, his face changed. The concern drained away and what replaced it was something colder, something rigid and grim that hardened every line of his jaw. He turned to me. His eyes blazed with fury — not the hot, impulsive kind, but the deep, settled rage of a man who had already decided the verdict.

Without warning, his hand struck my cheek with a sharp crack that echoed off the courtyard walls.

He shouted at me through gritted teeth, his voice shaking with a violence barely leashed. "Why did you push Serafina? Do you want to kill her?"

My ears rang. My whole body went still, stunned into a silence so complete I could hear my own pulse thundering behind my eyes. I stared at him, utterly bewildered, unable to comprehend what had just happened — how the world had inverted itself in the space of a heartbeat, how the victim had become the accused and the liar had become the wounded. Dante didn't wait for an answer. His expression twisted with disgust, and he shoved me hard with the flat of his palm against my shoulder.

I lost my balance and fell backward, hitting the ground. The flagstone was hot beneath me, baked by the radiant heat, and my shoulder struck the edge of the spreading flames — close enough that I felt fabric catch, felt the instant searing bite of fire against skin.

Immediately, I screamed.

The sound made Dante freeze. He looked down at me lying on the ground, my arm clutched to my body, smoke curling from the scorched fabric of my sleeve. For a brief second — one single, fractured moment — a flicker of heartache flashed in his cold eyes. Something human, something that remembered who I was to him, surfaced and then was smothered.

Because Serafina clutched at his chest, her fingers curling into his jacket, and weakly said, "Dante… Bianca looks more seriously hurt than I am. Take her to the hospital first…"

The performance was flawless. Her voice trembled at exactly the right pitch. Her eyes glistened with unshed tears. Her lower lashes fluttered once — just once — and Dante looked at her as though she were the most selfless creature ever born.

Without further deliberation, he glanced back at me with visible disgust. Then he looked at the fragile woman in his arms, and his voice went cold and commanding — the voice of a man giving orders to soldiers, not tending to someone he'd once promised to marry.

"Take her too," he ordered the Soldiers. "We're going to the hospital."

Then he carried Serafina to the waiting car like she was the most precious thing in the world, cradling her against his chest, his hand cupped protectively over the back of her head. He did not glance back at me. Not once.

I lay on the courtyard ground. The pain in my shoulder deepened with each breath, spreading outward in waves that turned the edges of my vision white and then grey. The flagstone was rough beneath my back. Somewhere above me, the fire-breather had stopped his performance, and the silence that replaced the roar of flames was worse — a hollow, ringing emptiness that seemed to confirm what Dante's retreating back had already told me. I was nothing.

Just as the Soldiers' hands closed around my arms to lift me, the grey at the edges of my vision rushed inward, swallowing everything — the courtyard, the pain, the smoke, the sound of the car pulling away — and everything went black.

Thanks to the constant injuries, I developed a high fever that refused to break. I was unconscious for three full days. During that time, I had a long, vivid dream.

The dream was filled with warm light.

In it, I was never lost. My parents had never taken in Serafina. They loved only me, their blood daughter, the one they called their precious girl. Dante was still the same boy who used to wait outside the iron gate of the Moretti estate every morning, his coat buttoned wrong, just so he could walk beside me on the way to school.

Later, he told me he loved me. He said he wanted to marry me in a garden thick with climbing roses, away from the families, away from the arrangements that made marriages into territorial mergers. At the ceremony he held my hand and promised me forever, and his voice never wavered, and nobody in the pews was calculating what the union was worth in shipping routes or clean-money fronts. After we married, we had a child, a sweet and perfect thing. The three of us were a happy, whole family, untouched by the syndicate world that had shaped every other part of our lives.

But in the next moment, everything changed.

The warm light went out as though someone had cut the power at the fuse box. My parents' smiles turned cold. Dante's hand, the one that had been so warm around mine, became icy and distant, the signet ring on his finger pressing into my skin like a brand.

The three of them stood at the edge of a cliff. They were laughing, all of them, that particular cruelty that only people who once loved you can produce. And then they pushed me down into the darkness below. I woke with a sharp gasp, my chest heaving. My eyes flew open to an empty room in the family clinic.

My body felt weak and impossibly heavy. My shoulder throbbed with each pulse, a deep, nauseating ache that radiated down to my fingertips as I slowly pushed myself upright. My arm was numb and trembling. With great effort I pulled the IV needle from the back of my hand, pressed the cotton swab over the bead of blood, and slid out of bed. The tile floor was cold enough to make me flinch. The clinic was small, discreet, the kind of place the Moretti Family kept on retainer for injuries that did not need public hospital records. No police. No questions. Just silence and locked doors.

As I stepped into the hallway, I heard hushed voices coming from the nurses' station around the corner. I stopped. My bare feet made no sound on the linoleum.

"Look at those two young ladies from the Moretti Family. Their lives couldn't be more different."

"I know, right? Serafina only had a few minor injuries, but the Boss and his wife stayed by her side every single day, and Dante Falcone never left her for a second. Meanwhile, Bianca was seriously hurt and no one even came to visit her these past three days…"

One of them clicked her pen cap shut, and the other finished the thought she should not have said aloud: "Three days unconscious and not a single family member through that door. Not one."

Their whispers were crystal clear, cutting into my heart like a blade.

My knees went weak for a moment, but I steadied myself against the wall. I pressed my thumbnail into the inside of my wrist until a pale crescent appeared, letting the small, focused pain anchor me to the present, to the facts. Nobody had come. Not once. The fact did not surprise me. What surprised me was how much it still hurt, after everything, to have the proof laid out in the mouths of strangers.

It made me not hesitate. After that, I walked slowly to the nurses' station while holding on to the wall for support, and I signed my own discharge papers. The nurse behind the desk glanced up, glanced at my shoulder, and opened her mouth to object. I met her eyes and she looked away. In this world, you learned early: a Moretti daughter's signature was still a Moretti signature, even if the family treated her like a ghost.

When I returned to the Moretti estate, it was eerily quiet. The courtyard fountain trickled in the stillness. No soldiers at the front entrance, no staff moving through the halls. Everyone was out, orbiting Serafina like planets around a brighter sun. I went straight to my room and began packing. There was not much. One small suitcase. That was all I had left in a house where I had lived my entire life. One suitcase, and even that felt generous.

After I finished, I went downstairs to get some water. Just as I reached the living room, I heard the sound of laughter outside the front door. Voices, car doors, the particular note of a family arriving home in good spirits. They were back.

My parents entered first, carefully supporting Serafina as she limped inside. She leaned into them with practiced fragility, her bandaged ankle presented like a medal of war. Dante followed close behind. His eyes were full of tenderness as he looked at her. The four of them chatted happily, warmly, as if nothing had happened, as if I had not spent three days unconscious in a clinic bed two miles from where they stood.

When they saw me standing at the foot of the stairs, Dante's steps faltered. For a brief second, I caught a flash of heartache in his eyes as he noticed my pale face, the way my hand still gripped the banister because my legs were not entirely trustworthy yet. His right hand moved, almost involuntarily, and I watched him roll the signet ring over his knuckle once before he caught himself.

But before he could speak, my mother rushed toward me. Elena Moretti's voice was sharp and full of blame as she confronted me. "Bianca, what is wrong with you? Why didn't you tell us you were being discharged? Do you know how worried we were about you?"

My father immediately added his weight to the accusation. Salvatore Moretti stood with one hand resting on Serafina's shoulder, a display of protection so automatic it could not have been staged. "Serafina already explained what happened. She said she lost her balance that day and accidentally dragged you into the fire. Out of guilt, she pushed you away to save you. She didn't mean it."

He tapped once on the side table with the pad of his thumb, the gesture I had seen a hundred times before a negotiation reduced someone to a number. "And you… you're being ungrateful, leaving the clinic on your own and throwing a tantrum?"

Serafina lowered her head, her expression pitiful and weak, the portrait of a girl still suffering for her innocent mistake. But at the corners of her lips there was a subtle, triumphant smile. It was a smile meant only for me to see. Her lower lashes fluttered once, quickly, the way they always did when the lie mattered.

She looked at me like a victor claiming her prize.

I stared at them all and suddenly laughed bitterly. The sound was thin and hard in the marble foyer, and I saw one of the household staff freeze mid-step in the corridor behind them.

"Worried about me? So worried that during my three-day coma, you only cared about Serafina and never once came to see me?"

My eyes shifted to Serafina and I spoke coldly. "Serafina, this time you're claiming you 'lost your balance' again? You really do change your excuses quickly."

This time, I looked at them coldly. I was no longer the obedient girl they used to know, the one who swallowed every slight and called it love, the one who kept her head down because the Family demanded it.

I pressed my thumbnail into the inside of my wrist one final time, felt the crescent bite, and let my hand fall to my side. My voice was level and clear, carrying the way a warning carries in a quiet room full of dangerous people.

"Watch your precious daughter carefully. If she dares to lay a hand on me again, I won't hold back. If I'm not happy, I won't let her be happy either."

After that, I turned and walked up the stairs. I did not look back at their shocked and furious faces. I did not need to. I could feel the silence I had left behind me, heavy as gunpowder before a match.

This house. These people. They were no longer worth a single moment of my time.

I had already explained everything, made my position clear to anyone in that house willing to listen. Now I stood in the narrow guest room on the second floor of the Moretti estate, folding the last of my clothes into a leather overnight bag that had seen better years. The room smelled of old wood polish and dust, as if the staff had stopped bothering to air it out the moment they learned who slept here. I pressed my thumbnail into the inside of my wrist, felt the familiar half-moon bite into skin, and told myself the next twenty-four hours were all that remained. One more night under the Moretti roof. Then Edinburgh. Then whatever hell the Bellandi name carried with it. At least it would be a hell I had chosen.

The door did not open. It slammed inward against the plaster hard enough to rattle the crucifix on the opposite wall.

Serafina walked in on heels that cracked against the hardwood like a judge's gavel. She wore a fitted black dress, gold earrings catching the overhead light, her chin tilted at the precise angle of someone who had already decided the conversation was won before it started. Her gaze swept the overnight bag, the bare hangers in the open wardrobe, the stripped bed, and her mouth curved into something that was not quite a smile. She looked at me with eyes full of defiance, the way someone looks at luggage they are glad to see packed.

She strode up to me, close enough that I could smell her perfume, something floral and expensive that clashed with the venom in her voice. "Bianca, do you really think you're so special just because you're our parents' biological daughter? They love me now."

The words landed the way she intended them to, each one placed like a card on a table during a rigged game. Her lower lashes fluttered once, a quick tremor that someone who did not know her tells might have mistaken for emotion. I knew better. That flutter meant the lie sitting behind the next sentence mattered to her more than the one she had just delivered.

"I've known all along," she continued, folding her arms and letting her weight settle onto one hip as though we were discussing something as trivial as dinner plans. "You're going to marry that lunatic for me. Isn't the bride price just one billion? After I marry Dante, there will be far more money. Plenty more."

She let the number hang in the stale air of the room. One billion. The figure Salvatore Moretti had negotiated for my hand, the sum the Bellandi outfit had agreed to funnel through clean channels in exchange for a blood-bound union that would open their shipping lanes through Moretti-controlled docks. I was the goods. The dowry was the receipt.

Her tone dripped with arrogance as she pressed on, and the floral perfume seemed to grow heavier with every sentence. "Dante's concession is going to generate more revenue than I could spend in ten lifetimes. The Moretti and Falcone families are far ahead in territory and connections. With us together, we'll be unstoppable."

She leaned closer. I could see the thin line of concealer beneath her left eye, the slight unevenness in her lipstick where she had reapplied it in a hurry. Her voice dropped to a vicious whisper, intimate and edged, the kind of voice reserved for confessionals and threats. "And you… you're just trading one hell for another. The Bellandi Family is cruel beyond words. Once you marry into their family, you might not even survive three days."

A pause. She tilted her head as though considering whether to say the rest.

"If you manage to live, you'll get the money. If you die… you'll leave it all behind, untouched."

Her cruel words echoed in my ears. They bounced off the bare walls, the empty hangers, the stripped mattress, the crucifix that no one in this house had prayed to on my behalf. Every syllable was designed to remind me that in the Moretti ledger I was an entry to be written off, a cost of doing business, a daughter whose only remaining value was the price tag someone else had stapled to her name. The anger I'd been holding back for so long, through the coma, through the hospital silence, through the nurses' whispered pity, through the moment I had watched my own parents choose the daughter they had purchased over the one they had made, finally exploded.

I raised my hand and slapped her hard across the face. The sharp sound rang through the room like a gunshot.

It was louder than I expected. It silenced the corridor outside. Somewhere down the hall a floorboard creaked as if one of the household staff had frozen mid-step, unwilling to be a witness. The imprint of my fingers bloomed pink across Serafina's cheekbone, vivid against the careful foundation she wore like armor, and I watched the shock crack through her composure the way a stone cracks a frozen pond.

A cold smile spread across my lips as I glared at her.

"Really? Then I hope you get exactly what you deserve."

Serafina's hand flew to her cheek. She stared at me, her manicured nails pressing into the reddening skin, and for the first time since she had walked through that door the superiority drained out of her face. What replaced it was not fear. It was outrage, the kind that comes from someone who has never once been made to feel consequence.

"You… you dare hit me? Bianca, how dare you hit me!"

I didn't waste a single breath on her. I swung again. Harder. The second slap connected with a crack that I felt all the way up to my shoulder, and this time blood welled instantly at the corner of her mouth. A thin crimson line slid down her chin, bright against her pale skin, and dripped onto the collar of her black dress like a seal on a letter I had been composing in silence for years.

At that moment, the sound of hurried footsteps echoed outside, heavy and careless, the stride of a man who expected doors to open before he reached them. The door burst inward for the second time. Dante Falcone filled the frame, broad-shouldered in a charcoal suit, his jaw locked and his dark eyes already scanning the room before his body had fully crossed the threshold. The signet ring on his right hand caught the light as his fingers curled. The second he saw Serafina's bloody mouth, his eyes filled with rage so intense it was almost murderous. His hand moved to the ring, rolling it over the knuckle once, twice, a tic I had learned to read the way sailors read a darkening sky.

"Bianca! Have you gone mad? Who gave you the right to hit her?"

He did not wait for an answer. He crossed the room in three strides, boots grinding grit into the hardwood, and pulled Serafina into his arms. She folded against his chest as though she had been rehearsing the collapse for hours, her bloodied lip pressed to the lapel of his jacket, her fingers clutching the fabric. He tilted her face upward and carefully wiped the blood from her lips with the pad of his thumb, and the tenderness in that gesture cut deeper than any slap.

Before I could speak, before I could explain, before I could do anything at all, his open palm struck my face with a loud crack. Pain exploded across my cheek, white-hot and instantaneous. My head jerked to the side, my vision swimming, and my mouth filled with the metallic taste of blood. The inside of my cheek had split against my teeth. I tasted iron and salt and something that might have been the last residue of whatever loyalty I had ever felt for the man standing in front of me.

I swallowed it down. Slowly, deliberately, I lifted my head and looked at him. His chest was heaving, his ring still catching the light, Serafina still curled against him like a wounded bird performing for an audience. I did not give him my anger. I gave him something worse.

I smiled. Cold. Finished.

"Dante, I hope you won't regret this."

My parents arrived right after him, Salvatore Moretti leading with his broad frame and Elena a half-step behind, her hand already reaching for the doorframe as though she needed its support. They crossed into the room and immediately rushed to my side. Not to protect me. Not to ask what had happened. Not to check the blood I could feel pooling against my gum line. They came to scold me like I was a stranger who had wandered uninvited into a house that no longer considered her family.

"Bianca, you ungrateful wretch! How could you hurt Serafina like this? What has she ever done to you?"

Elena's voice cracked on the last word, and her fingers moved to the front of her blouse, smoothing a wrinkle that was not there, pressing and pressing at the fabric as though she could iron out the scene before her into something more palatable to her conscience.

Serafina clung to Dante, crying pitifully, her shoulders shaking with sobs that came at perfectly timed intervals. Yet her trembling voice was laced with false kindness as she spoke, each word calibrated to land like a blade wrapped in silk. "Dante, Mum, Dad… please don't scold Bianca anymore. It's my fault. I shouldn't have upset her."

She drew a shuddering breath, pressed her face deeper into Dante's chest, and delivered the final line with the precision of someone who had practiced it in the mirror. "I'm leaving tomorrow. I won't trouble this family again. I just don't want her to keep being unhappy because of me…"

Her performance only added fuel to the fire. Salvatore's face hardened, his thumb tapping once against the outside of his thigh, the same gesture he used at the head of the dining table before reducing family to numbers. Dante's expression became even more grim. His rage was nearly uncontrollable, a muscle twitching in his jaw, his hand still curled at his side as though the first strike had not been enough.

Dante then shouted toward the doorway, a single sharp command, and two enforcers in black entered the room with the silent coordination of men who had been waiting on the other side of the wall. Their faces were blank. Their hands were gloved.

"Drag her outside. Hang her upside down from the tree in the yard," he ordered.

He paused. The room was so quiet I could hear Serafina's breathing, deliberate and theatrical, against his jacket. His tone cut me like a knife when he continued. "Let the sun warm her dark, filthy heart. The Falcone Family does not tolerate Sisters as vile as her."

The enforcers moved without hesitation, seizing me by the arms. Their grips were iron, indifferent, the grip of men who did not distinguish between a woman and a crate that needed moving.

"Dante! Let me go! You can't do this to me!"

But no one listened. Not the enforcers whose fingers dug into the soft flesh above my elbows. Not Salvatore, who watched from the doorway with an expression that might have been discomfort or might have been nothing at all. Not Elena, who had turned her face away entirely. They dragged me down the corridor, through the back entrance, and out into the courtyard where the old oak spread its branches over the flagstones like a hand waiting to close.

My struggles were meaningless against their strength. I kicked, twisted, threw my weight sideways, and they adjusted their grip without breaking stride as though they had done this a hundred times before for men who had displeased the Falcone heir.

The rough rope bit into my ankles as they tied me up, the hemp fibers scraping skin that was still tender from the hospital. With a hard yank, they hoisted me upside down from the thick lowest branch. The world inverted. Blood rushed to my head, making me dizzy and nauseous, the pressure building behind my eyes until the courtyard swam in blurred greens and grays.

The scorching midday sun beat down mercilessly on my body. My skin burned. My chest tightened. My breath came in ragged gasps that tasted of rope fiber and heated air and the distant smell of rosemary from the kitchen garden no one had ever let me tend. Through the haze of heat and pain, I tilted my head, the movement sending a wave of vertigo crashing through me, and caught sight of the living room window.

Inside, Dante was tenderly applying medicine to Serafina's wounds, dabbing at the split lip I had given her with a cotton pad as though it were a war injury. My parents sat beside her, speaking softly, comforting her, Elena's hand resting on Serafina's knee and Salvatore nodding along to whatever gentle fiction she was spinning. The three of them looked like a warm, happy family, framed by the window like a portrait commissioned to hang over a fireplace, and I was the shadow they had cut out of the canvas.

Tears streamed from my eyes, falling upward from my perspective, dropping down to the flagstones below. The hot sun dried them instantly, leaving no trace. No evidence. No record that I had broken at all. I clenched my teeth until my jaw ached and swore silently to myself.

Just one day. I only had to endure this for one day. When I got free, I would make every single one of them pay for what they had done to me.

I pressed my thumbnail into the inside of my wrist, felt the crescent form even through the numbness spreading down my arms, and held it there like a brand. A promise. A receipt of my own.

Meanwhile, the sunlight grew hotter and hotter. My vision blurred. The courtyard, the oak, the rope, the window with its happy family portrait, all of it spun wildly around me, faster and faster, until the edges dissolved and the center followed.

Finally, everything went black.