The night before my wedding, a trending post from a local forum surfaced on my feed.

"Tomorrow's my wedding. I swapped my fiancée's vitamins with sleeping pills. Her foster sister will take her place at the altar. How do I stop feeling guilty?"

The comments were tearing him apart, but the poster didn't care.

"The one I love has always been her foster sister. If it weren't for the fact that she's the true Moretti blood heir and marrying her is the only way to secure the alliance, who'd want to marry that shrew?"

"She's head over heels for me anyway. Once it's a done deal, all I have to do is sweet-talk her a little, and she'll hand over every last cent of the dowry."

Someone asked what he'd do if his fiancée refused to let it go.

His reply was casual, almost bored.

"Then I'll let my girl take the hit for now. Marry the shrew, get the money. Once I've got control of the rackets, I'll bleed the Moretti fronts dry and toss the shrew into the gutter as an apology to my girl."

The comments exploded with outrage, calling him an ungrateful snake.

Then a familiar profile picture appeared in the likes.

"She stole everything that was supposed to be mine. Once I pull off the switch, not only will her fiancé be mine, her territory-backed dowry will be too!"

Her profile picture matched his. A pair of matching cartoon dolls, the exact same ones the counterfeit daughter kept displayed in her room.

I picked up the vitamins from my nightstand and swallowed them without hesitation.

What they didn't know was that they'd counted their chickens far too early.

——

The next morning, the sun was already high in the sky by the time I woke. I pressed a hand to my forehead and stumbled out of my room.

The compound was too quiet. The kind of quiet that only settled over the Moretti estate when something had already gone wrong. The hallway smelled of cold espresso and candle wax from the chapel preparations, but there was no music, no voices giving orders, no soldiers moving furniture for the reception.

I nearly walked straight into my mother.

Her eyes were still rimmed with tears. She froze for two full seconds when she saw me, then gasped. "Bianca Moretti! What are you doing here?"

My father rushed over at the sound of her voice. His gaze bounced between me and the wedding motorcade disappearing down the road beyond the iron gates. The signet ring on his right hand had stopped moving. "If you're here, then who just got into the Falcone procession?"

I blinked, the picture of confusion. "How is that possible?"

"Adriana gave me new vitamins yesterday. After I took them, I got so drowsy I slept straight through till now."

The festive atmosphere in the villa evaporated in an instant. Everyone exchanged uneasy glances. Two soldiers by the front entrance shifted their weight, hands drifting toward their waistbands before a look from my father held them still.

My mother was the first to react. Her expression turned to ice as she seized Rosalia Russo by the arm, the woman who had been quietly inching toward the door.

"I kept wondering why a former nanny was sobbing harder than the bride's own mother at the send-off. Now it makes sense. The one you sent away was the counterfeit daughter you gave birth to!"

Rosalia flinched and tried to pull back. Her eyes darted around the room, and when she spoke, the words came out in stammering fragments.

"Signora, what are you talking about?"

"The young miss overslept on her own. How is that my fault?"

My father turned to the household staff, his voice sharp as a blade. "What are you standing around for? Go drag that wretched girl Adriana back here. Now!"

The words had barely left his mouth when the house secretary came rushing in, pale-faced.

"Don Moretti, sir, the Falcone estate just sent word. The ceremony is already done."

My mother let out a cold laugh. "So they exchanged vows. So what? A sparrow doesn't become a phoenix just because you put it in a cage. A fake is still a fake."

She turned on her heel and led the entire entourage straight toward the Falcone compound. I caught the rosary folded tight in her palm, the beads nearly white against her knuckles.

I lowered my gaze and followed obediently behind my parents.

Inside, though, I was smiling.

The ceremony was the least of it.

When our two families had sealed the alliance pact, Damian Falcone had insisted on a traditional wedding. A family with a hundred years of heritage, he'd said. Old customs that had to be honored. A veiled bride. A guarded cathedral. No photographs until the covenant was spoken.

Now it all made sense. He'd been planning this from the start. The bride would be veiled the entire time, making it effortless for Adriana to slip in unnoticed.

And given the timing, the deed was almost certainly done by now. Far more than just vows had been exchanged.

Beside me, Rosalia could barely contain the smirk tugging at the corners of her mouth. Her tongue touched her lower lip, quick and wet, as if she were already rehearsing whatever excuse she'd offer next.

That only confirmed what I already knew. What was done was done.

When I was still an infant, Rosalia had deliberately swapped me with Adriana.

It wasn't until we were ten years old, when Adriana took a bad fall and a blood test revealed the truth, that the switch was finally exposed. She was no Moretti at all.

My parents had spent a fortune tracking me down and bringing me home.

After all, Adriana and her birth mother had lived under our roof for ten years. My parents were kind-hearted people, and they'd let them stay.

No one expected that kindness would breed such treachery.

Adriana had always believed it was my fault she'd lost her status as the Moretti Family's eldest daughter. That resentment had driven her to this. In our world, blood was everything. And she'd been told, at ten years old, that hers was the wrong kind. The hate had been growing ever since, quiet as a tumor, until it found a use.

Even after I'd caught them, they'd banked on the fact that the Morettis were one of the most powerful bloodlines in the city. They were certain I'd swallow my humiliation to protect the Family's reputation. Omertà worked both ways. You didn't air Family business, and you didn't let outsiders see the cracks. They were counting on that silence the way a man counts on a locked door.

While I turned all of this over in my mind, our group had already arrived at the door of the bridal suite in the east wing of the Falcone compound. The one Damian had sworn up and down he'd prepared just for me.

The wedding guests trailed behind us, craning their necks for a better look. Capos' wives. Associates. Connected men who'd flown in for the alliance ceremony. Every one of them a witness.

The door was kicked open. Inside, Damian scrambled off the bed in a state of undress, grabbing the suit jacket he'd tossed aside and throwing it over the woman beneath him.

His face darkened like a storm cloud. "What the hell are you doing? There's a limit to wedding-night pranks!"

My mother let out a cold laugh, strode forward, and ripped the jacket away from Adriana's half-hidden face.

"Wedding night? Open your eyes and take a good look. Which one of us is the bride?!"

Damian's hand trembled as he pointed at me, putting on a show of shock. "Adriana? What are you doing here?"

The moment the crowd got a clear look at Adriana's face, the room erupted.

"Isn't that the Moretti Family's false daughter? What is she doing in the Falcone heir's bed?"

My father's voice cut through the noise, dripping with contempt. The heavy signet ring on his right hand had stopped moving. "Apologies for the spectacle, everyone. The woman in that bed is the daughter of our former household retainer. We raised her in our home for over twenty years, and this is how she repays us. Stealing her sister's wedding out of sheer vanity and making a fool of herself for all to see."

Damian yanked the comforter up to cover Adriana's exposed body, his brow furrowed tight.

"Bianca! How long are you going to keep this up?!"

"You overslept and missed the ceremony. Adriana stepped in to save your Family's face."

"I had too much to drink and didn't realize it wasn't you. But what's done is done. The wedding night has already happened. No matter what, I have to take responsibility for Adriana now."

"You're both Moretti daughters anyway. It doesn't matter which one I marry. The arrangement between our Families won't be affected."

"I know you can't live without me. That's why you brought this whole crowd here, to force a switch."

"Don't worry. Even if I marry Adriana, I can guarantee that the Falcone succession will always belong to our children. Yours and mine."

"There. Satisfied?"

He smiled a fraction too early, before anyone in the room had agreed with a word he'd said.

My father's jaw clenched so hard the muscles in his cheek twitched. "Bianca is the Morettis' only daughter. You sleep with another woman on the night of your alliance marriage, and now you have the audacity to humiliate her like this?!"

My eyes stung. Tears pooled along my lower lashes, threatening to spill.

My mother pulled me into her arms, her hand trembling against my back. I could feel the rosary pressed tight inside her palm, the beads digging into my shoulder where she held me. My father stepped in front of us both, shielding us, and turned to me. "Bianca, don't you worry. Your father will make this right."

Whispers rippled through the crowd. Every pair of eyes fixed on the couple in the bed was filled with undisguised disdain. These were people who understood blood pacts. Who understood what it meant to dishonor one.

"Did I hear that correctly? The Morettis are one of the most respected Families in this city, and the Falcone heir wants their blood daughter to be his kept woman?"

"The true Moretti heiress is tall and striking. The false one is small and slight. How drunk would someone have to be to mix up his own bride?"

The mockery washed over Damian, and his frown deepened with displeasure. The look he gave me was the kind reserved for a hysterical woman throwing a tantrum over nothing.

"Bianca, this is a minor issue. I've already promised our children the succession. If you want to move into the Falcone estate later, I won't stop you."

"And yet you keep pushing it, dragging all these people here to watch the spectacle. You're being completely unreasonable!"

The sheer self-righteousness on his face was so absurd it startled a laugh out of me.

He'd trampled over me to stage a grand alliance ceremony with that fraud, and now he expected me to play the willing kept woman. He wanted my future children born in the shadows, illegitimate from their very first breath.

The nerve of that man.

The Falcone family had been formidable once, generations ago. Old blood, old territory, old respect. By now the name was nothing but gilded rot, a hollow shell dressed up in faded glory. If it hadn't been for the childhood betrothal tying them to the Morettis, if not for the Moretti family's tribute flow and protection routes keeping their rackets solvent, the Falcone name would have vanished from the city's inner circle long ago.

And yet Damian still had the audacity to want it all. Both women. Both fortunes.

What a joke.

My father laughed, the kind of laugh that came from pure, white-hot fury. The signet ring on his right hand stopped moving. "The Falcones have enjoyed a few good years and already forgotten who pulled them out of the gutter?"

Isabella Falcone hurried forward through the crowd, her expression tight with forced composure. Two of the Falcone soldiers near the door shifted on their feet but didn't follow her. They knew better than to step between two families at a moment like this.

"Now, now, let's not say things we don't mean," she said, her tone practiced and diplomatic. "There's so much to manage with a wedding. Damian has been running himself ragged for weeks. He simply lost his head for a moment."

She spread her hands in a conciliatory gesture. "It's all a misunderstanding. We'll sort it out."

Our family had always been cautious when it came to marriage alliances. A full month before the wedding, my parents had hired a private investigator to look into Damian.

The night before the ceremony, the investigator delivered a stack of photographs. Damian and Adriana. Together. Intimately.

I had been shocked. Furious. But more than anything, I couldn't believe it.

Then I stumbled across that viral post online.

The fog lifted. Damian wasn't just cheating. He was planning to ride the Moretti name to the top, and once he'd squeezed every last drop of value from us, he'd engineer our family's ruin.

I would never let that happen.

My mother let out a sharp, derisive laugh. The rosary was wound so tight around her fingers that her knuckles had gone white, but her voice didn't waver. "Mrs. Falcone, do you take us for fools?"

"Bianca has lived under the same roof as your son since she was ten years old. They've known each other for over a decade. You're telling me he was too tired to recognize his own bride?"

Adriana scrambled to throw on a robe and dropped to her knees in front of everyone, tears streaming down her face like rain on white petals. Her fingers drifted to the base of her throat.

"Mom, this is all my fault," she sobbed. "Bianca overslept, and I was terrified our family would be humiliated, so I put on the wedding dress myself. I was only trying to help."

She turned to look at me, her voice cracking with every word.

"Bianca, please. I was wrong. But it's done now. I've already married Damian. If you keep making a scene, you'll only drag the Moretti name through the mud. Even if you don't care about me, don't you care about the family that raised you?"

Her eyes were rimmed red, her expression the picture of wounded innocence, as if she were the one who'd been wronged. As if the filthy affair with her sister's fiancé had nothing to do with her.

And somehow, I was the one threatening the family's reputation by demanding justice.

That was when the private investigator I'd already contacted arrived. He walked straight to my father and handed him a stack of photographs. The room went quiet. Not the polite quiet of a pause in conversation. The quiet that settles over a back room when evidence hits the table.

"Don Moretti, I'm afraid this situation is more complicated than it appears."

My father opened the envelope. Inside were the same explicit photos I'd already seen.

Every single image showed them in some degrading position, shameless and brazen, without a shred of decency between them.

My father's face turned a deep, mottled red. He slammed the photographs down onto the bed.

"What does the Falcone family have to say for itself now?"

"Mrs. Falcone, if your son wanted the Moretti family's adopted daughter, he could have said so outright. There was no need to humiliate my daughter on her wedding day!"

"The alliance is over. The Morettis are pulling every cent out of Falcone holdings. Every front. Every route. Every dime of tribute support."

The moment those words left his mouth, the color drained from Isabella's face. One gloved hand twitched at her side, but she didn't reach for the fingers. Not yet.

Without Moretti capital, the Falcone operation would collapse entirely. Nothing would be left but a mountain of debt and territory they couldn't hold.

Isabella whipped around and slapped Damian hard across the face. "Look at what you've done!"

Then she jabbed a finger at Adriana. "Someone get this tramp out of my sight! Throw her out!"

Damian pressed a hand to his stinging cheek. His gaze cut toward me, vicious and seething, as though he wanted to tear me apart.

In his eyes, I wasn't the victim. I was the villain who'd ruined his wedding and turned his mother against him.

He pulled Adriana behind his back and squared his jaw, staring his mother down with open defiance.