"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.

I had no choice but to follow the three of them.

As I passed a thicket of old oaks, Maeve's voice carried through the dark, impatient and unchecked.

"Babe, how much longer do we have to keep up this act? I seriously can't take it anymore. Tommaso been spreading her legs all over the Territory. Who knows what she's caught."

"Tommaso pathetically stupid. Can't even tell a real alliance from a setup. No wonder some older man talked her into bed with a few pretty words. A woman like that doesn't deserve to stand beside the Vale name. The family heirloom bracelet, the real one, only you deserve to wear it, Ivy." Daphne ran his thumb slowly along the inside of his signet ring as he said it, the way he did when a decision had already been made and only the blood remained to be spilled.

Ivy gazed up at them with that wounded, fragile look of hers.

"Vera has done a lot of awful things, that's true. But she helped me once. How could I just abandon her? If you two don't do what I say, I'll never speak to either of you again!" Her ring finger drifted to her bottom lip, brushing it once, soft as a benediction over the lie.

At that, both of them, heirs who answered to no one, sons of the two most dangerous families on the Eastern Seaboard, fell over themselves apologizing to her.

They'd have trampled me into the dirt if it meant lifting her higher.

Over a decade of knowing each other, of growing up side by side, of bread broken at the same table and oaths sworn on the same saints, and none of it weighed as much as a few words from Lydia Everett.

I forced the tears back and turned away.

The night stretched endless around me as I walked toward the Ashford house, every step heavy with exhaustion. The streets were empty. Even the soldiers who used to patrol our block when I was a child were long gone, reassigned to families that still mattered.

By the time I reached the house, my twisted ankle had swollen beyond recognition.

Nonna's face crumpled when she saw it. She brought out liniment and knelt to rub it in herself, her hands shaking but sure, the way they'd always been.

I didn't want her worrying, so I told her about the invitation from The Order instead.

Her expression shifted from shock to pure joy.

"My Tommaso really made something of herself! Nonna's getting old. You're the only one left who can carry the Ashford name."

I nodded, blinking hard against the sting in my eyes.

"It's been so many years since this family had anything to celebrate. Nonna's going to throw you a proper feast. A real celebration!"

The smile on her face was identical to the one she'd worn the day she sent me off to my blood-bound union in the last life.

Back then, she'd believed I'd found a good man. She'd been so happy.

Then Daphne fled the altar, and the shock killed her right there in front of the gathered Families.

This time around, I would never let either of us walk that road again.

Nonna was too frail for the work, so I handled every detail of the feast myself. I booked the private back room at Ashford's, the old restaurant on Mulberry Street that still bore our name even though we hadn't owned it in years. The current owners let us have it for nothing. They remembered my grandfather, and what the Ashford name had once meant on this stretch of the Seaboard.

When my two blood-bound companions heard about the feast, they both showed up volunteering to help.

They even brought a strawberry cake, my favorite since I was little, as a peace offering.

"Vera, you haven't answered a single message in days. Are you still upset about what happened?"

"We weren't trying to blame you. We were worried you'd go down the wrong path. For people in our position, reputation matters." Daphne's thumb moved once over the inside of his ring, then went still.

I didn't forgive them. But I let them stay and help.

In our last life, they owed me more than they could ever repay.

No settling that ledger.

All I wanted in this life was to never see them again.

After my parents died, the Ashford family declined until no one bothered to pay respects at all. The old alliances dissolved. The seats at our table stayed empty.

Now that I'd finally done something worth celebrating, this was our chance to show the Five Families that the Ashfords still had an heir. That we were no longer a bloodline anyone could push around.

Nonna understood that. She treated this feast like the most important evening of her life, refusing to cut a single corner. Before she gave each instruction to the kitchen, she folded her hands over the worn silver crucifix at her neck, not in prayer but in purpose. This night had to be perfect.

The night of the feast, the back room filled with every name that mattered in the Territory.

Ivy glided in behind both Daphne and Maeve, wearing a gown that cost more than anything a girl with no family name should have been able to afford, perfectly at ease.

She took in the lavish room, the crystal, the white linen, the old Ashford crest mounted above the fireplace, and jealousy burned behind her eyes.

"Vera really does have all the luck."

"But so what if you were born into a bloodline and caught the eye of The Order? I can still make sure you spend the rest of your life wishing you were dead." Her ring finger touched her lip again, that single reverent press, blessing the thing she was about to set loose.

The words had barely left her lips when the screen at the front of the room lit up with my photos.

One after another. Every single one showing me naked in bed with a different man.

The room went very still. A glass was set down somewhere too carefully.

"Isn't that the Ashford heiress? Dio, she really gets around. Figures. No parents to raise her right."

"No wonder everyone says Vera spread her legs to get that invitation. Looks like it's true after all."