Violetta POV

I closed my eyes and remembered the day everything splintered.

Serena, the adopted daughter of the Rossi family, had threatened to slit her wrists for the fiftieth time. She wanted my mother's place within the syndicate's hierarchy. She wanted my father in her bed.

My mother, Elena, was worn to a sliver. She drank the poisoned abortifacient to kill the child in her womb, a final capitulation to the madness that had seeped into the very walls of our home.

Gabriel had walked in with the veins in his eyes standing out like red thread. He had promised my mother that Serena was no more to him than a sister. He swore it would be the last time Serena interfered with our lives.

My mother had only smiled, a faint, bloodless motion of the lips. She had nodded, silently handing Gabriel over to the snake he so blindly protected.

Stung by her placid disinterest, Gabriel had wrenched their framed mafia marriage contract off the wall and smashed it against the hardwood floor until the glass was nothing but glittering dust.

He never returned to the safehouse after that day, casting us into a permanent exile.

In the first year of this abandonment, Gabriel officially moved Serena into the main Romano estate. He bought out billboards across the city to celebrate her new status as the presiding lady of the house. He sent a formal invitation to my mother, an embossed card nestled in a velvet-lined box. I watched my mother tear it to shreds and throw it in the trash without the slightest tremor in her hand.

When Gabriel heard about the torn invitation, he offered a slow, dismissive smirk. That night, he stood at the docks and lit the sky with my mother's favorite fireworks, publicly declaring Serena as his true queen for all the underworld to witness.

In the second year, Gabriel brought Bianca into the estate. He registered Serena's illegitimate daughter in the Family ledger as my older sister, an indelible mark of disgrace upon my bloodline. That night, a sound like a wounded animal echoed from the safehouse.

The estate soldiers whispered that my mother had at last gone mad.

Gabriel executed the guards who gossiped, but he stayed glued to Serena's side and officially claimed Bianca as his own flesh and blood.

Now, it was the fifth year. And Gabriel needed a sacrifice.

But before I could dwell further, a rough hand seized my arm.

Violetta POV

Hours later, a maid dragged me into the main living room of the estate.

Gabriel sat in his great leather chair, his face a mask of shadow and danger. Serena leaned against his chest, her posture a study in delicate sorrow. Her eyes were red. She was crying, her tears catching the light as she dabbed them delicately with a silk handkerchief.

She told Gabriel she did not want to force this marriage on me. She played the innocent victim flawlessly, her voice a fragile whisper that threatened to break with a guilt she did not feel. She whispered that Bianca did not know the cartel rules, and she was terrified Bianca would offend the Lucchese bosses and get killed.

Gabriel ignored Serena's performance. His dark eyes were locked on the window, staring at the distant safehouse across the frost-covered grounds. He was waiting for my mother to storm in and save me, desperate for any sign of life from the woman who had walled him out with silence.

When night fell and the safehouse door never opened, Gabriel's jaw clenched. The muscles in his neck strained against the starched linen of his collar. His fury boiled over into a stillness that was more menacing than any rage.

He ordered his men to cut the power and water to the safehouse. He wanted to freeze my mother out, to break her will through privation.

That night, the biting winter air seeped through the cracks of my window at the safehouse. My fingers turned numb as I opened my wooden drawer and dug out my mother's copy of the mafia marriage certificate. I tore the heavy vellum into tiny pieces and threw them out the window, watching them scatter like dead ashes into the snow.

I was trying to protect her. If there was no certificate, there was no proof. And without proof, Gabriel could not erase her. He could rage and scream and tear the house apart, but he could not make her disappear from the Family records. It was all I could give her—a name he could not unmake.