The council began at eight.

Every Caruso captain in New York had already taken his seat in my grandfather's dining room. The men who ran the docks, the clubs, the union contracts, and the security routes all came in black suits, with their soldiers waiting outside the doors.

I sat on Don Angelo's left.

The chair on my right was empty.

Matteo was late.

My grandfather glanced at the empty chair once but said nothing. He had been calmer than I expected all evening, as if Matteo's absence did not surprise him. I thought he was giving Matteo room to come back from whatever madness Elena Voss had dragged him into.

Marco stood behind me, close enough that I could hear the slight shift of his jacket whenever his hand brushed the gun beneath it.

At the head of the table, Don Angelo rose with one hand resting on his silver cane.

The room quieted at once.

"I called you here tonight for two matters," he said. "The first concerns the future of this family."

No one moved.

My grandfather looked down the table at the men who had served him for decades.

"From this day forward, Vivian speaks with my authority. When I step down, she takes my seat. Anyone who questions her questions me."

A silence settled over the room.

Then Salvatore Russo stood first and lowered his head to me.

"Donna-in-waiting."

The others followed one by one.

Some did it willingly. Some did it because they had enough sense to know Don Angelo's decision was not an invitation to argue. Either way, they stood, and the room acknowledged me as heir.

Just as the last captain sat down, applause came from the doorway.

Everyone turned.

Matteo stood at the entrance in a black suit, one hand still raised from the last clap. His injured leg was hidden beneath the clean line of his trousers, though I could tell he was keeping most of his weight off it. Behind him were several men I did not recognize.

At first, I only thought he had come to challenge me in front of the family because of Elena.

Then I saw the two Caruso guards near the door lower their eyes instead of stopping him.

Something in the room shifted.

My grandfather noticed it too.

"You're late," Don Angelo said.

Matteo smiled faintly. "I had to prepare a gift."

A few captains exchanged looks.

My grandfather did not ask what he meant. He only tapped his cane once against the floor.

"Come here."

Matteo walked into the dining room.

No one stopped him. He had guarded this house for years, eaten at this table, and stood behind my chair through more councils than I could count. Even after last night, even after Elena, no one in that room expected him to turn a gun on the man who raised me.

He came to my side.

He did not look at me.

My grandfather gestured for both of us to stand.

I rose first. Matteo followed.

Don Angelo looked at the room again.

"The second matter concerns an old debt," he said. "Years ago, the Bellandi family stood with us when this city tried to break us. We believed their last heir died with them. Recently, I learned that was not true."

The room stirred.

I turned toward my grandfather.

He had not told me this.

Matteo's expression did not change, but his hand moved slightly at his side.

Don Angelo continued, "A boy survived. He grew up under another name, and tonight I intend to return to him what should never have been taken."

My grandfather turned toward Matteo.

"Matteo Greco is—"

The gunshot came from beside me.

It was so close that my ears rang.

For one second, I did not understand why my grandfather had stopped speaking.

Then blood spread across the front of his white shirt.

Don Angelo looked down at the wound, then back at Matteo. The disbelief in his eyes was worse than fear.

He had not expected it either.

Then he fell.

"Grandfather!"

I lunged forward, but Matteo caught my arm and pulled me back. Chairs scraped against the floor as the room erupted. Guns came out, men shouted, and Marco reached for his weapon.

Before he could draw, the men behind Matteo raised their guns.

Two of our own guards turned their weapons on the captains.

My stomach went cold.

Matteo had men inside my grandfather's house.

Marco froze with his hand under his jacket.

Matteo pressed the barrel of his gun to my temple.

"Everyone stay where you are."

His voice was steady.

That steadiness terrified me more than the gun.

I tried to pull away from him, but his grip tightened around my arm. My grandfather lay only a few feet away, blood spreading beneath him. His fingers moved once against the floor.

He was still alive.

"Let me go to him," I said.

Matteo did not move.

"Please."

He looked down at Don Angelo.

Then he fired again.

My grandfather's hand stopped moving.

The entire room went silent.

For a moment, I could not hear anything, not the captains, not Marco calling my name, not even my own breathing. I only saw my grandfather's body on the floor and Matteo's hand still wrapped around the gun.

The same hand that had once held mine in the dark.

The same hand that had pressed my palm over the V tattooed on his chest.

I turned my head and looked at him.

"Why?"

Matteo's eyes were red, but his face was calm.

"My name is Matteo Bellandi."

The room broke into shocked whispers.

Bellandi was a dead name, or so everyone had believed. The family had been wiped out fifteen years ago, their estate burned, their men slaughtered, their heir declared dead before he was old enough to know what had happened.

I stared at Matteo.

My grandfather had been about to say the same name.

He had been about to give it back to him.

Matteo looked over the captains with a coldness I had never seen in him before.

"The Caruso family thought they buried us all," he said. "They missed one."

Marco's face twisted with anger.

"You fool," he said. "Don Angelo was trying to restore your name."

Matteo's gun snapped toward him.

"Do not speak."

"He thought you were dead," Marco said, ignoring the weapon. "He spent years looking for that boy."

Matteo's jaw tightened.

"Convenient."

I found my voice through the pain burning in my throat.

"He was telling the room who you were. He was going to bring you back as Bellandi."

Matteo looked down at me.

For a second, something changed in his eyes. It was small, but I saw it. Doubt passed through him before he forced it away.

"He was going to use me," he said.

"No," I said. "He was going to claim you."

The words landed between us.

"No," I said. "He was going to claim you."

For the first time that night, Matteo did not answer.

His hand was still locked around my arm, but I felt the briefest change in his grip. Not mercy. Not regret. Just a crack, small enough that no one else would have noticed.

Then Elena's voice cut through the room.

"Matteo, don't listen to her."

She came in through the side door with two of his men around her, one hand pressed to the bandage at her waist. She had changed out of the bloodied dress from the Red Hook house, but she still looked pale enough to be useful.

The moment Matteo saw her, the crack in him closed.

I looked at my grandfather's body on the floor and felt something inside me go very quiet.

The captains were being dragged from the dining room. Marco was pinned against the wall with a gun under his jaw. My grandfather's blood was spreading over the wood, reaching the hem of my dress.

I had spent my whole life learning how to survive in rooms like this.

For the first time, I did not want to.

I bit down hard enough for blood to fill my mouth.

Matteo saw it immediately.

He caught my jaw and forced my face up. His fingers dug into my cheeks, and the look in his eyes was almost human for one second.

"If you die," he said, his voice low, "every Caruso left in this house dies slowly."

I tasted blood and laughed against his hand.

Then I lunged forward and sank my teeth into the side of his throat.

Matteo cursed and shoved me back, but not before I felt his skin break. Blood touched my mouth again, his this time.

"Matteo," I said, smiling through the taste of it, "I should have left you in that pit."

The words hit him harder than the bite.

His face went white with anger.

"You still think you get to hate me?" He grabbed my arm and threw me to the floor beside the table. "Your family burned mine alive. Your grandfather sat at the head of this house for fifteen years while Bellandi children were buried without names."

"He didn't do it."

"You don't know that."

"I know him."

Matteo's eyes turned colder.

"You knew me too."

For a moment, I had no answer.

Elena stepped closer before I could get up. Her heel came down on my right hand.

Pain shot up my arm so sharply that my vision blurred. She pressed harder, grinding the thin heel into the bandage over my old scar.

"You really do think everyone belongs to you," she said.

I looked up at her.

The soft nurse was gone. There was nothing helpless in her face now.

"You walk into a room, and men kneel. You give orders, and whole families bleed." She crouched, grabbing my hair hard enough to pull tears from my eyes. "Look around, Vivian. No one is coming to save you now."

She forced my face toward the dining room.

My grandfather lay near the head of the table. One of Matteo's men had already pulled the Caruso crest from the wall and thrown it onto the floor. Captains who had served my family for decades were being dragged out one by one, their hands tied, their faces bloodied. The house that had raised me was full of men who answered to Matteo Bellandi.

Elena leaned close to my ear.

"You should have let me leave with him."

Then I felt the knife.

Small, thin, easy to hide.

She drew it from inside her sleeve and drove it toward my stomach.

I caught her wrist with my left hand.

The blade stopped inches from me.

Elena's face twisted as she pushed harder.

"She tried to kill me," she shouted. "Matteo, she shot you, she locked me in that room, and she would have killed the baby if Marco hadn't checked the report first."

"You never had a baby," I hissed.

Her eyes flashed.

"No," she whispered, low enough that only I heard. "But you do."

My blood turned cold.

For the first time that night, real fear moved through me.

Elena smiled.

She had seen it.

Maybe in the clinic file. Maybe in the way I protected myself when I fell. Maybe because women like her survived by noticing the one wound you could not afford to show.

The knife pressed closer.

I heard my own voice before I knew I meant to speak.

"Matteo," I said. "Don't let her touch my child."

The room seemed to stop.

Matteo's eyes snapped to my stomach.

Elena's hand trembled.

I had not planned to tell him. I had not even known what I would do with the truth after everything that happened with Elena. It was early, fragile, something I had kept locked away because the first child I lost had nearly broken me in a quiet room above the Park Avenue clinic.

Now the secret lay between us on a blood-covered floor.

Matteo crossed the room and caught Elena's wrist.

For one breath, I thought he was going to pull the knife away.

He did.

Then he looked at me.

His eyes were red, wet at the edges, but what lived inside them was not tenderness. It was grief twisted into hatred, the kind of hatred that needed something innocent to punish because the guilty were too far away.

"You thought I would let a Caruso heir live?" he asked.

I stared at him.

"Matteo."

He drove the knife into me.

The pain was white and immediate.

I stopped fighting.

Elena screamed, but not for me.

A gunshot cracked from the hallway.

She fell back, clutching her arm, blood spreading between her fingers.

Marco was bleeding from his temple and one shoulder, but he was still standing. Behind him, several Caruso men pushed into the room, firing just enough to break the line around us.

"Vivian!" Marco shouted.

I could not move.

The room tilted.

Matteo turned, gun raised, but one of Marco's men tackled him from the side. The shot went into the ceiling. Plaster rained over the table.

Marco reached me first.

He looked at the blood on my dress, and for the first time in my life, I saw fear on his face.

"No," he said under his breath. "No, no, no."

"You'll regret this," Marco said.

Matteo's face tightened.

"One day, you'll learn what really happened to the Bellandis. And when that day comes, this will be the moment you come back to."

Marco did not wait for Matteo to answer. He lifted me into his arms and backed toward the service passage while his men kept their guns trained on the room.