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

A few girls passing by 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.

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 Caruso name still meant something.

But in the end, my place in the inner circle and the patronage I'd earned were quietly taken from me and handed to Ivy.

Rumors 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 Family dinners. 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 Ivy to make her smile.

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

"Serafina 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 Serafina's patronage, I wouldn't have even been able to stay under the Families' protection." The moment those words left her mouth, both men's faces softened with concern.

"Don't say that, Ivy. 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. A general manager position, at minimum."

"No, Ivy, come to the Vitale organization instead. I'll give you a higher position, better cut, whatever you want. It's yours."

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

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 Domenico noticed something was off.

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

"Serafina, don't overthink it. We're only nice to Ivy because she's your friend."

Salvatore ruffled my hair the way he used to when we were kids, back when the three of us ran wild through the Compound's gardens and no one had taught us yet what blood debts were.

"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, Domenico and Salvatore both scrambled to get Ivy into their front passenger seat.

Ivy 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 Serafina?"

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

Domenico was faster. He guided Ivy 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."

Salvatore shot Domenico an annoyed glare.

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.

"Serafina..."

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 Falcone estate. The corner where Salvatore 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 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 Falcone and Vitale households had competed to claim me as a future daughter-in-law. The Caruso bloodline was old, and old blood still carried weight, 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-powerful Caruso 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.

Ivy Santoro 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 Caruso 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, we arrived.

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

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

Salvatore nodded. "I already had someone 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 my name.

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

"Maxie, this is the family heirloom. My parents told me to give it to the future lady of the Falcone 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, Maxie. 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!"

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 Caruso 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 refuse.

Then Ivy spoke up. "Maxie, why did you tell people I've been spreading rumors about you? Now everyone's attacking me..."

She held her phone up to my face. Her fingers fluttered to the hollow of her throat as she did it, lingering there with the practiced tremble of a woman begging to be believed.

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

Salvatore snatched the phone from her hand. His knuckles cracked once, pinky finger, slow and deliberate, before his voice came out shaking with rage.

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

Domenico, the calmer of the two, didn't explode. But 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, go look into it yourselves."

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

"Don't worry, Ivy. 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 Ivy 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 Falcone ring box sat on the stone wall where Domenico had set it down, forgotten.

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, Salvatore'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. Serafina's been spreading her legs all over the Territory. Who knows what she's caught."

"Serafina's 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 Falcone name. The family heirloom bracelet, the real one, only you deserve to wear it, Ivy."

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

"Serafina 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!"

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 Ivy Santoro.

I forced the tears back and turned away.

The night stretched endless around me as I walked toward the Caruso 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 Serafina's really made something of herself! Nonna's getting old. You're the only one left who can carry the Caruso 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 wedding in the last life.

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

Then Domenico fled the ceremony, and the shock killed her right there at the venue.

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 dining room at Caruso'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.

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.

"Serafina, 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."

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 Caruso 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 Carusos 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. She pressed her thumb against the worn silver crucifix at her neck as she oversaw the preparations, not in prayer but in purpose. This night had to be perfect.

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

Ivy glided in behind both Domenico and Salvatore, 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 Caruso crest mounted above the fireplace, and jealousy burned behind her eyes.

"Serafina 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."

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

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

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

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