The screen glowed between us like something obscene, and every face in that private room of the Valente compound turned toward it at once. Image after image scrolled past under the soft amber lamplight, gruesome things, bloodied infants rendered in some sick artist's hand, effigies scratched over with curses, each one stamped with my name at the top like a confession signed in my own blood. The timestamps ran the full length of her pregnancy, month after month, a patient campaign of malice. All of it seemingly sent from my account.

But I had cut the cord to this bloodline long ago. Since the day I walked out of the Valente name's shadow, I had never once reached for Nadia. Not a message. Not a word. Not even in the dark hours when loneliness might have made a weaker woman crawl back. I knew it the way I knew my own heartbeat, and yet the room was already deciding otherwise, already sharpening itself against me.

"You vile disgrace." The Don of the Valente Family moved first. My father crossed the marble in three strides and struck me open-handed across the face, the crack of it loud in the stillness. "You can't carry a child yourself, so now you'll curse your own sister's?"

The blow snapped my head sideways. Heat bloomed across my cheek, but it was the Matriarch's eyes that cut deeper, my mother watching from her chair with nothing in them but hatred and a cold, curdled disgust, as though I were something that had crawled up out of the harbor to stain her floors.

Then the room erupted, voices overlapping, the household's soldiers and their women, capos who had known me since I was small, all of them finding their courage now that the Don had drawn first blood.

"I always said it. A woman broken like that, hollowed out, she rots on the inside too."

"So poisoned she couldn't even spare her own pregnant sister. Her own blood."

"A creature like this deserved to have her womb taken. Pity the man bound to her. What sin in a past life earns you a barren, heartless wife?"

The words landed like stones, each one thrown with the easy cruelty of people who had never once feared for their own place at this table. Dazed, my ears ringing, I did the thing I had done for three years without ever choosing to. I turned toward Lorenzo.

For three years he had been the one wall between me and the world's teeth. The Underboss of the Falcone Family, a man whose stillness could empty a room faster than a raised gun, and he had spent that stillness standing at my shoulder. When the Families whispered, he silenced them. When my own bloodline spat at me, he had been the one hand that did not. I turned to him now the way a drowning thing turns to the last light on the water.

But this time he did not defend me.

His fingers closed around my wrist instead, hard, the grip of a man who fixed bodies for the Family and knew exactly how much pressure a bone would take. His voice came sharp, edged with a fury I had never once had aimed at me.

"Serafina. How could you do something so vile?"

I felt the room lean in. Somewhere behind me a glass was set down on wood with deliberate care, and the sound was enormous.

"Do you truly need to drag every soul in this house down into the mud with you before you're satisfied?" His grip tightened. "Apologize to Nadia. Now. Stop pulling innocent people into your misery."

How could I have forgotten. Between Nadia and me, he would always, always stand on her side of the blood. I had known it in my marrow for three years and let myself pretend otherwise, and the pretending had cost me everything a body could be made to give.

I lifted my head. My thumb had already found the empty band of skin on my finger, pressing hard against the ghost of a ring that was no longer there, the phantom weight of everything they had taken from me one careful cut at a time. I forced the tears back down my throat. I would not let them fall in this room, before these people, on this floor.

"Why should I apologize for something I never did?" My voice came out steadier than I felt, low and even in the ringing quiet. "You call her innocent, Lorenzo. Tell me, then. Are you? Is she?"

Something moved across his face. Just for the span of a single breath, a flinch behind the surgeon's calm, something that looked almost like guilt surfacing from a place he kept locked. His eyes caught mine and held, and for one heartbeat I saw the truth swimming just beneath the ice of him. Then he shut it away, the way a man closes a wound he does not want to look at, and steeled himself into the cold thing the Family had made him.

"Serafina, enough." His jaw set. "You're making me doubt everything I ever believed. Perhaps taking you in out of pity was the greatest mistake of my life."

I let out a small laugh. It surprised even me, quiet and broken and strangely free, and I lifted my hand to wipe away the tears that had gathered at last at the corners of my eyes before they could betray me.

Lorenzo. You don't have to wonder anymore. And you don't have to keep pretending.

Because soon, we would no longer be bound to one another at all. Soon the pact that chained me to the Falcone name would be nothing but ash and signatures.

Without Lorenzo's protection draped over me like borrowed armor, the others in that room wasted no breath. The insults came quick and low, the way soldiers speak when they know the Underboss has already turned his back on a woman. Hands found my shoulders, my arms, and shoved me toward the door as though I were something spoiled and reeking, a thing to be carried out with the rest of the refuse. No one met my eyes. In the world of the Families, that is its own kind of sentence. When they stop looking at you, you have already ceased to exist.

I staggered into the back-room washroom off the infirmary corridor, the tile cold beneath my shoes, and caught the edge of the marble sink before my knees could betray me. The mirror threw back a woman I barely recognized. Pale. Hollow at the temples where they had bled me too many times. My thumb found the naked band of skin on my left hand where a wedding ring used to sit, and I pressed down hard, as if I could summon back a promise that had never been real. The phantom weight of it was the only thing that had ever made me feel safe. Now even that was a lie I had let them tell me.

I turned the tap and began to wash the shame from my face, and just as the water ran warm the door creaked open behind me.

Nadia stepped inside.

She did not rush. She let the door fall shut and stood with her arms crossed, her shoulders loose, her chin lifted at exactly the angle the cameras loved. Every trace of the trembling, weeping girl who had knelt for the Family's soldiers minutes ago had drained away. That performance had served its purpose and been folded neatly and put away. What remained was something colder. In her place stood a woman who had already won and knew it, who wore victory the way our mother wore her pearls.

"My dear sister." Her voice curled soft as smoke. "How does it feel to be hated by everyone all over again? Pretty familiar, isn't it?"

I said nothing. The water dripped from my chin.

"Look at that glare." She tilted her head, studying me the way one studies a wounded animal, with idle amusement and no fear at all. "You hate me, don't you? Let me guess. You've finally realized that it was Lorenzo who personally took the knife to you. Who cut it out of you with his own gloved hands and gave it to me."

The room seemed to shrink. Somewhere down the corridor a soldier laughed at nothing, and the sound reached me thin and distant, as if through deep water.

"And don't tell me you thought showing up here would make Sterling and Everett feel guilty." She almost pitied me then, and that was the worst of it, the pity. "Let me save you the trouble, Serafina. They planned the whole thing with Lorenzo from the very start. The abduction. The road. The room they took you to. All of it, sanctioned. Everett gave the word himself."

My thumb pressed harder against the empty band of skin. Bone against bone. I felt the pulse there, wild and useless.

"They couldn't bear to watch me lose the ability to give the Family an heir. Not so young. Not their golden girl." She smiled, and it did not reach her eyes. "So naturally, you had to be the one to make the sacrifice. That's what the lesser twin is for. Surely you understood that. You've always understood that."

I stood frozen, and the words went into me the way a blade goes in slow, without heat, so that the pain arrives a moment late and then never leaves.

"Honestly," she went on, warming to it, "I should thank you, sis. Without your perfectly functional womb, my baby wouldn't have grown so strong. So healthy. He kicks now. Did you know that?" Her hand drifted to her belly, tender, obscene. "Every kick, you gave me. Isn't that something."

Tears blurred my vision until the sterile white of the room ran together like spilled paint. My world had already shattered once, back in that dark room where I woke stitched and empty. But this was worse. This was the slow, deliberate confirmation that there had never been a single hand I could have reached for in the dark. Every person I had ever trusted, every one who had ever kissed my forehead or called me daughter, had signed my name away in blood before I was old enough to know what a signature cost.

"How could you do this to me?" My voice cracked on it, raw. "Aren't you afraid of karma?"

Nadia let out a sharp laugh, and it came a half-beat too fast, the way it always did when something true grazed too close. Her fingers rose and brushed the hollow of her own throat, the one flinch her performance could never fully swallow. Then it was gone, smoothed over, and she reached behind her back and drew out a small glass vial of dark red liquid.

Before I could understand what she meant to do, she uncapped it and poured the whole of it down her legs, letting it run in thick crimson ribbons over her skin, over the pale silk, staining everything the color of a fresh wound.

"Karma?" She said the word like it belonged to children and fools. "Serafina, if Lorenzo didn't still need you as the vein he bleeds for me, do you truly believe he'd keep you breathing? You are a living tribute. Nothing more. A body kept useful."

She stepped back toward the door, admiring her own handiwork, the false blood pooling bright at her feet.

"Face it. You were born to kneel beneath me. Born to have everything taken and give thanks for the privilege." Her eyes found mine, and for one instant there was nothing behind them at all, nothing human, only the cold arithmetic of a woman who had always known which twin the Family would choose. "So do me one last favor, dear sister. Watch closely. Watch how far Lorenzo Falcone is willing to go for me."

Before I could react, Nadia dropped into the pooling red as though her bones had simply given out, and the sound that tore from her throat was surgical in its precision — a scream pitched to carry through every corridor of the Falcone back-room infirmary, past the soldiers stationed at the doors, past the men who knew better than to hear anything at all.

"Lorenzo! Help me!"

He came the way he always came, filling the doorway before the echo of her voice had died, and the room seemed to shrink around him. The associates near the wall stiffened and dropped their eyes. Even the sterile air changed weight. His face bled white as his gaze swept the scene, the crimson spreading across the tile, my sister crumpled at its center. His eyes found the blood first, and I watched the color drain out of him. "Nadia! What happened?!"

She curled her hands over her lower belly, her whole body folding into the performance, and the sobs came in waves timed to the pulse of his fear.

"Lorenzo… I only wanted to talk things through with my sister. To make peace between us, the way famiglia should. But she — she said that since I was lucky enough to carry a child, she'd see to it I never carried another one again. She tried to destroy me."

His head turned toward me. Slowly. There was no warmth left in that look, nothing of the man who had once slid a ring onto my finger in front of both bloodlines and called it forever. His voice came out honed to an edge. "Serafina. How could you?"

I said nothing. There was nothing that would land in a room already decided. He didn't wait for it. He bent and gathered Nadia against his chest as if she were something breakable and holy, and swept her toward the operating room at the heart of the infirmary — the room where the Family's Knife did his quiet work, where bodies were healed or unmade and no one asked which. Then he pivoted back and his hand closed around my wrist like a manacle, all that surgeon's control turned to iron.

"Get her to the blood bank. Now."

The moment we crossed the threshold, he was already issuing orders to the medical fixers who answered only to him. "She needs an emergency transfusion. Take twice the usual draw from Serafina. Immediately."

The head nurse hesitated. Her eyes flicked to my chart, then to the pallor of my skin, and something in her wavered — the last human reflex in a room built to have none. "Underboss… her oxygen is already dangerously low. If we take more, it could be fatal."

His answer did not rise. It didn't need to. Cold, absolute, the voice of a man whose word was law inside these walls. "I know her condition better than anyone in this house. Do it."

I laughed. It came out of me bitter and thin, barely a sound at all. So he wasn't even bothering to pretend anymore. All those months of the mask, the careful theater of a husband, and it fell away here on this tile as though it had never weighed a thing. I pressed my thumb hard against the bare band of skin where his ring used to sit, the phantom groove of everything they had taken from me, and I let the truth settle into my chest like a stone dropped into deep water.

He reached for the family consent form, the pact that gave the Family the right to open my veins whenever the golden princess needed filling. He signed without reading. And while his attention was fixed on Nadia's rising and falling chest, I slid a single page in among the rest — a severed pact, the document that ended the blood-bound union between us. I did not draw a breath watching him. His pen moved across the line without pause, without a flicker of recognition, his signature landing beside mine as carelessly as if he were initialing an invoice.

There. Done. He had cut me loose and never once looked down to see what his own hand had signed.

They drained what they wanted from me. I felt it leave — the cold climbing my arm, the room tilting soft at its edges, the fluorescent lights blurring into halos. When they had taken enough, more than enough, he did not spare me so much as a glance. He turned on his heel and strode back toward the operating room, and I was left in the chair like something emptied and set aside.

I made my weak, shaking legs carry me. One step, then another, my hand braced along the cold wall, following at a distance the way a soldier trails his Don without being summoned. By the time I reached the door and looked through the narrow glass, the scene inside knocked what little breath I had left clean out of my lungs.

Nadia was draped against him, unhurt, radiant, her slim fingers tracing lazy circles over his chest. She tipped her face up at him and let her lower lip push into a pout. "Lorenzo… how did you know I wasn't really hurt?"

He laughed — low, indulgent, the sound of a man entirely at ease — and tapped the tip of her nose with one finger. "Cara. I'm a surgeon. I've spent my life with real blood on my hands. Did you think I couldn't tell it from cherry syrup poured out on a floor?"

His voice dropped further, warm in a way it had never once been for me.

"Besides. This was Serafina's doing from the start. We were going to bleed her again in a few days regardless. Since she was already here tonight, it only made sense to take it fresh. It'll bring you back faster after the birth."

I stood frozen at the glass. Something colder than the blood loss moved through me, ice threading down into my hands, my feet, the hollow behind my ribs. Living tribute. That was all I had ever been to them. A vein they kept warm and walking so that when the princess needed filling, the supply was near at hand.

I turned to go. There was nothing left in that room for me, nothing that had ever been mine.

And as I turned, I found Nadia's eyes already waiting on me. She had known I was there. She had wanted me there. She smirked, slow and certain, and without letting her gaze drop from mine for even a moment, she lifted her chin and pressed her mouth to his.