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.

"Lorenzo… you always take such good care of me," she whispered, her lips grazing his, the red cord at her throat catching the low light. "Since my dear sister can't give you an heir, why don't I make it up to you? Let me give you a child instead. A true one. Blood of the Falcones."

Lorenzo went rigid, the breath stalling somewhere behind his ribs. "Nadia… you only just delivered a child. And you are her sister. We shouldn't."

But even as the words left him, his body leaned toward her hands like a man drawn to the one warmth in a cold house. The whole compound seemed to hold its breath around them, that fortress hush where family and syndicate were the same thing, where soldiers stood at doors and pretended not to hear what happened behind them.

"Lorenzo," Nadia murmured, her breath warm against the line of his jaw. "Take me. I know the truth. You've always wanted me. Haven't you."

He flinched, and for one fragile instant he looked like a man wrestling with the last thread of some vow he'd sworn to another. It lasted no longer than the flicker of a candle in a draft.

Then a low, shuddering exhale, and the thread snapped. His arms closed around her, his mouth crashing down onto hers in something feverish and starved, every year of buried wanting poured into a single greedy motion, raw and without restraint. There was no precision in him now, none of that surgeon's calm he wore like armor. Only appetite.

As their bodies pressed close, his fingers found the delicate red cord looped around Nadia's neck. Her childhood protection charm. His breath caught, and his whole reverence bent toward it. He lowered his head and kissed the thin red thread as though it were a saint's relic, as though it hurt him to touch it.

"Nadia. The day I nearly drowned, you were the one who pulled me out."

"From that moment, my life has belonged to you. Whatever you want. Whatever you need. I will give it. I will protect you. Always."

The room filled with broken sounds, soft and desperate and unmistakable, whispers and caught breath tangling in the dark.

I stood in the seam of the doorway, unseen, watching their bare bodies wind together, watching that feverish, insatiable hunger. And then, against every scrap of reason left in me, I laughed.

Silent tears slid down my face while I did it.

Because Nadia was terrified of water. She had never once dared go near a pool, a river, not even a bath drawn too full. She would scream if the sea so much as touched her ankles. And that so-called protection charm at her throat, the sacred cord he was kissing like a promise made flesh? She had never earned it. She had whined and sulked and thrown herself down on the marble of the compound until our mother tore it from my neck and knotted it around hers. It had been mine. My name had been sewn into that blessing before it was stolen, the way everything of mine had been stolen, quietly, and with the family's full consent.

He didn't even know whose life he was swearing away his own for.

I pressed my thumb hard against the naked band of skin on my left hand, that pale hollow where a ring used to sit before I understood I had never truly worn it, only carried it for her. The phantom mark of everything they had taken. My body. My blood. My betrothed. My name.

Then I wiped the tears from my cheeks with the back of my hand, and I took my leave without a sound.

I gathered everything I had come for. The severed pact, signed in his own hand and mine. The recording that held every damning word he had just breathed against her skin, every vow, every confession of a life owed. The photographs, fresh, taken minutes ago, of the two of them entwined in the half-dark.

Then I carried it all down the long corridor of the Family's back-room infirmary, past the shut doors and the men who kept them, and I placed it into the hands of the head nurse who ran Lorenzo's ward. She was one of the Family's own, bound by the same silence as the rest of us, but silence, I had learned, was a currency that could be spent in more than one direction.

She looked at the box. She looked at me. She said nothing, and neither did I. In that world, understanding passed without words.

I pulled out my phone and made a single call, my voice flat and even, steadier than I had any right to be. "Change of plans. Come to the infirmary. Now."

Everything was moving now, quiet as a blade sliding home. I found an empty bed in the far room where they bled me, where they had bled me so many times the mattress still carried the shape of my body. I lay down on it one last time. I let my thumb rest against that empty band of skin. And I closed my eyes.

Thirty minutes later.

Lorenzo stepped out of the operating room, rolling one shoulder to loosen it, the way he always did when the cutting was done. He had the look of a man who had put someone back together and felt himself absolved by it. Remembering the transfusion, remembering the vein they always used, he turned toward the donor ward to look in on the wife he thought of only when he needed something from her.

He found the bed empty.

His brow drew down. He reached for his phone to call me. Before his thumb could find the screen, the head nurse came toward him fast down the corridor, a small box clutched against her chest, her face drained of all its color.

"Don Falcone. Your bound bride. She went into shock from the blood loss. She stopped breathing." She pressed the box into his hands as though it burned her. "Before she lost consciousness, she made me swear to put this into your hands myself."