After I was reborn, I tore up my blood-ink invitation to the Vale inner circle with my own hands.

And turned down both my childhood sweethearts' passionate confessions.

Because in my last life, I chose one of them — Daphne Vale.

On the day of our blood-bound union, he ran off for Lydia Everett, and the shock killed the grandmother who'd raised me alone.

At my lowest point, my other blood-bound companion took my hand and said: "You still have me. I will never let you down."

He walked me through the darkness, but after our union, he turned cold.

I thought he regretted that we couldn't have children.

Then came a car accident. He left me dying on the pavement to go save Lydia, who had nothing worse than a scrape.

I died right there. And as my soul drifted, untethered, I finally learned the truth.

My entire life had been nothing but a love game between the three of them.

They'd already drawn up their wills, signing every holding and every front to Lydia Everett's name.

And my years of infertility? That was them too. To prove their devotion to Lydia, they'd bribed a doctor to take my uterus while I slept.

This time around, I was going to stay far away from all of them and live a life that was mine.

——

When I tore up the invitation, my handler in the Ashford house went pale.

"Vera Ashford, what are you doing?"

Four names from our territory had been offered seats within the Vale inner circle this year.

I was the only one who'd earned it on merit — a mind the elders valued more highly than a hundred soldiers, recognized after I broke every cipher they put in front of me.

Every old man in the network, not just my handler, had high hopes for me.

I kept my expression calm. "I don't want the Vale seat anymore. I've been taken into The Order of the Black Lily. They've agreed to send their own people to watch over my grandmother."

"Ah. I see. All right. I know the Ashford name carries more grief than gold these days, Vera. Train hard, build yourself a future, and make your Nonna proud."

I nodded. Before I even had time to grieve for everything that had happened in my last life, Daphne and Maeve Marlowe were already on the line, telling me to come downstairs.

The whole way down through the Ashford house, men stared and women whispered behind their hands.

Someone caught my heel on the stairs.

Called me a whore.

I had no idea what was going on. I got to my feet, limping.

At the turn of the corridor, I caught Lydia talking to my two blood-bound companions, her voice pitched just soft enough to carry.

"I did see Vera getting out of a Vale lieutenant's car in the middle of the night, but that doesn't necessarily mean anything. Maybe she really did earn her place on her own."

She touched her bottom lip with her ring finger, a single, almost reverent gesture, as if blessing the words.

"Stop defending her, Lydia. She won't even let anyone see her test results. She's obviously too guilty to let anyone find out."

"Exactly. You're just too kind, Lydia, that's why she keeps fooling you. A scheming woman like her is capable of anything."

After I'd entered The Order, I'd sworn a blood oath of silence. My records were sealed — every score, every file, every trace of who I'd been before. That is the Order's deeper code, and not even a Vale can break it.

I never imagined that silence would become the very thing Lydia used to frame me.

And my two blood-bound companions, who knew exactly how hard I'd worked for my grandmother's sake, still chose to believe every word Lydia laid in front of them.

I laughed bitterly to myself. Told myself it didn't matter.

Once I crossed onto the Order's compound, all of it would be classified ground no Family could touch.

After that, I could cut ties with them completely.

No more listening to words designed to wound.

No more living like a fool inside someone else's web of lies, only to end up dead and discarded on the pavement.

I walked up to the three of them as if I'd heard nothing. The corridor went quiet the way a room does when something dangerous steps into it, except the dangerous thing was only me, and they didn't know it yet.

"You wanted to see me?"

Daphne dropped the contempt of a moment ago and smiled, smooth as a man closing a sit-down in his own favor.

"Vera, this is good. We'll be moving in the same circles again. All those years of hard work finally paid off."

His thumb moved once along the inside of his signet ring. In the old life I never knew what that meant. In this one, I did.

Maeve was smiling too.

"We get to keep protecting you now! Four years isn't enough, though. We're talking a lifetime."

A few girls passing by the social club watched us with open envy.

I felt nothing.

In my previous life, all four of us had ended up in the same territory. Same circles. Same obligations sealed at the matriarch's table.

I'd worked myself to the bone, studying the Family's operations, throwing myself into every task the elders set before me, all for a better future. All to prove the Ashford name still meant something on the Seaboard.

But in the end, my seat in the Family council and the patronage I'd earned were quietly taken from me and handed to Lydia.

Word on the street spread that I'd bought my standing on my back, that I'd been sleeping with one of the old guard to secure my position.

I was isolated and frozen out for four straight years. No one sat with me at the Sunday table. No soldier acknowledged me in the halls.

Back then, these two had sworn up and down they'd stand by me. Protect me. Blood-bound, they'd called it.

It wasn't until after I died that I learned they were the ones behind all of it.

Through all those endless sleepless nights, all those hours crying until dawn, they'd been feeding my pain to their precious Lydia to make her smile.

When I said nothing, Lydia's voice turned sour.

"Vera is so lucky. Born into a Family bloodline, a pampered heiress, and two blood-bound companions who'd do anything for her."

"I could never be that lucky. Without Vera's patronage, I wouldn't even have a Family willing to shelter me." The moment those words left her mouth, both men's faces softened with concern. Her ring finger brushed her bottom lip, soft as a blessing.

"Don't say that, Lydia. You're beautiful and talented. You've got an amazing future ahead of you. Once you're established, I'll have my father set you up running one of our front operations. General manager of a Vale house, at minimum." Daphne ran her thumb along the inside of his signet ring as he said it.

"No, Lydia, come to the Marlowe organization instead. I'll give you a higher position, a bigger cut, whatever you want. It's yours."

The two of them fell over each other trying to one-up their offers for Lydia.

The bitterness was hard to swallow.

All these years of knowing each other, and they had never once made that kind of promise to me. Never once shown me that kind of favoritism.

Of course. Love that's performed can never compare to devotion that comes from the heart.

I was about to leave when Daphne noticed something was off.

He reached for my hand, a trace of guilt flickering across his face.

"Vera, don't overthink it. We're only good to Lydia because she's your friend."

Maeve ruffled my hair the way he used to when we were kids, back when the three of us ran wild through the estate gardens and no one had taught us yet what a blood debt was.

"Stop reading into things. Everything's settled now. Let's go for a drive. We got you a present."

I nodded. Didn't refuse.

I was leaving soon anyway.

I just wanted one last look at this territory where the three of us had grown up together. The streets the Families controlled, the old restaurants where our grandfathers had once broken bread, the waterfront where the boundary lines had been drawn before any of us were born.

In the garage, Daphne and Maeve both scrambled to get Lydia into their front passenger seat.

Lydia looked at me with that perfectly rehearsed expression of reluctance. Her fingers drifted to the hollow of her throat.

"I thought the front seat was only for Vera?"

"She'll be upset if I sit there, won't she?"

Daphne was faster. He guided Lydia into the passenger seat and buckled her in.

"She doesn't deser—" He caught himself. "She won't mind. She's got the best temper of anyone I know."

Maeve shot Daphne an annoyed glare. The knuckles of his right hand twitched toward his jaw, then he forced his palm flat against his thigh and held it there, the restraint visible.

He slammed his car door shut, visibly irritated.

It wasn't until the engines were about to start that either of them realized I still wasn't in a car.

They rolled down their windows and looked at each other.

Both wanted to explain. Neither could find a single good reason.

"It's fine. I'll drive myself."

The relief on both their faces was instant and simultaneous, though a flicker of confusion followed, as if my calm wasn't what they'd expected.

"Vera..."

I rolled my window up. I didn't want to hear another manufactured word.

But the scenery along the road still pulled old memories to the surface, one after another. The iron gates of the Vale estate. The corner where Maeve had bloodied a boy's nose for looking at me wrong when we were twelve. The old social club where the capos used to let us sit in the back booth and eat cannoli while they talked Family business in voices too low for children to hear.

The three of us were blood-bound companions who'd grown up side by side, raised across allied Families with the understanding that bonds formed at the matriarch's table were sacred.

For as long as I could remember, both the Vale and Marlowe households had competed to claim me as a future daughter-in-law. The Ashford bloodline was old, and old blood still carried weight on the Seaboard, even when the money and the soldiers were gone.

Then my parents died, gunned down in what the Families called an accident but no one truly believed was one, and the once-mighty Ashford Family shrank down to just me and my grandmother, holding on to each other with nothing else left.

An old woman and a young girl, holding together a crumbling household in a circle of wolves.

So I threw everything I had into learning the only currency that mattered in our world: knowledge. Codes, ledgers, the architecture of power. Desperate to shoulder the Family's burden before the last of our name was swallowed whole.

Lydia Everett came from nothing. No Family name, no bloodline, no standing. At the gatherings of the Five Families, nobody gave her the time of day.

When I found out she was an orphan too, I felt for her. I reached out first, paid her way, brought her under the Ashford roof, and told her we'd get through the hard times together.

I never imagined she'd take my kindness as charity.

That she'd resent me for everything I had.

That she'd use every trick she knew to wrap my two blood-bound companions around her finger.

And then, together with them, destroy my life.

While I was still lost in those thoughts, the cars rolled to a stop at the ridge.

What had happened on the drive up had left both of them uneasy. They fell over each other to open my door and carry my things.

"Lydia, look. This is the overlook we used to come to as kids. Maeve and I bought the whole hillside. From now on, it's ours. Private ground. No one sets foot here without our say."

Maeve nodded. "I already had soldiers plant your favorite yellow roses across the ridge. By this time next year, there'll be a whole sea of them."

"Then the four of us can come up here together, drive around, watch the stars."

Their faces were bright with plans for the future.

I stood staring at the land in silence.

This really had been our secret place when we were little. Before blood oaths and Family politics turned everything sharp. It held every happy memory the three of us shared.

But I had never liked yellow roses.

I was allergic to pollen. All of it.

While I stood there turning that over, fireworks burst open across the sky above us. Brilliant colors spelling out a name in fire. Lydia's, not mine.

Under that dreamlike canopy, Daphne produced a ring box lined in black velvet and held it out to her. Inside, on a bed of silk, sat a signet ring bearing the Vale crest. Not his own. A woman's ring, smaller, older, the gold worn smooth by generations of Vale brides.

"Lydia, this is the Family heirloom. My parents told me to give it to the future lady of the Vale house. I've wanted to give it to you for a long time. I just had to wait for the right moment."

"Be with me instead, Lydia. Don't you remember? When you nearly drowned as a kid, I jumped in after you without thinking. I'd give you my life, let alone some ring!"

The night had gone very still around us, the kind of quiet where even the soldiers at the tree line stopped shifting their weight. In my last life, this was exactly what had fooled me. The two of them, performing devotion so convincingly.

Back then I was naive enough to believe it. Blood-bound companions, a happy ending waiting for us. My grandmother and the Ashford name would finally have someone to lean on.

I didn't learn the truth until the day I died.

Devotion that deep can be faked.

I was about to turn and leave them to it.

Then Lydia spoke up. "Vera, why did you tell people I've been spreading whispers about you? Now everyone's attacking me..."

She held her phone up to my face. Her ring finger drifted to the curve of her bottom lip and touched it once, soft, almost reverent, the way a woman blesses a lie she knows has landed.

Under the Westbrook feed, hundreds of comments called me shameless, said I'd sold myself for a seat at the Vale table. The handful of voices defending me became, in Lydia's telling, proof that I'd sent them to bully her.

Maeve snatched the phone from her hand. He cracked the knuckles of his right hand against his jaw, once, twice, the sound loud in that hushed dark, and his voice came out shaking with rage.

"Vera, how could you do something like this? Fine, you've got no shame. But why blame Lydia for it?"

Daphne, the calmer of the two, didn't explode. But his thumb moved slow along the inside of his signet ring, and his eyes pinned me with the same accusation.

I swallowed the storm inside me. "I didn't do it. If you don't believe me, look into it yourselves."

Neither of them heard a word I said. They were already busy comforting Lydia.

"Don't worry, Lydia. I'll have our people scrub it by morning."

"Sweets always help. Come on, I'll take you for something."

One on each side, they flanked Lydia and walked away.

Neither of them looked back.

I let out a long breath and watched the ash drifting down where the fireworks had been. The Vale ring box sat on the stone wall where Daphne had set it down, forgotten, the worn gold catching the last of the light.

Compared to life and death, this much hurt was nothing.

At least I was still alive. I still had a brand-new life ahead of me.