Chapter 1

After they gave me back my life, I tore the letter apart with my own two hands. Every crest, every gilded line from the Valente-arranged future they had planned for me, ripped down the middle and let to fall. And I turned my back on the passionate courting of the two young capos who had once made half the territory hold its breath.

Because in the life before this one, I had chosen one of them. Lorenzo. And he had run to Livia on the very day of our blood-bound union, left me kneeling at an altar that meant nothing, and shamed my Nonna so deeply that the old woman who had leaned on me her whole life simply stopped breathing from the rage of it.

In that ruin, when I had nothing left, the other one had taken my hand. Dominic, my childhood companion, the boy who had once dragged me out of the river when the water tried to keep me. "You still have me," he had said, low and certain, the way a man swears an oath he means to keep. "I will never let you down."

He walked me out of the dark. And then, once we were bound, he turned to cold marble. I told myself he grieved the children we never made, that the silence between us was only that.

Until the night of the accident, when he stepped over my body, over me bleeding out on the ground, and went to lift up Livia, who had nothing worse than a scratch on her arm.

I died there, ugly and alone. And while my soul drifted, lost and unmourned, I finally learned the truth of it. My whole life had been a long con between the three of them. They had already drawn up the will. Every coin, every deed, every last piece of what the Genovese name still held, signed over to Livia.

And the reason my womb had stayed empty through all those years was that they had bought the doctor and cut it out of me while I slept. A gift. Proof of their loyalty to her. Tribute paid in my flesh.

In this second life they handed back to me, I made one vow. I would put every one of them behind me, become a ghost they could not trace, and live a life that belonged to no one but me.

——

When my teacher saw me tearing the acceptance to pieces, the color left her face.

"Francesca, what are you doing?" she asked, half rising from her chair.

That season, only four students out of No. 1 Middle School had earned a place at Riverdale University, and I was the single one who had taken it at the very top of the city. It was not only her. Every instructor in that building had built quiet, hungry hopes on my name, the way people build on a bloodline they expect to rise.

I let the last shred drift from my fingers to the floor and kept my voice even, the way Nonna had taught me to speak when the room was watching. "I don't want Riverdale. I've already given my word to a special research network run under the National University's shield. They've promised me protection. And they've sworn they'll send their own medical people to watch over my grandmother, day and night."

Government men. A safehouse operation the Families could not buy, could not follow into. A door out of the world that had already killed me once.

Her shoulders eased, and something like understanding softened her mouth. "So that's how it is. Well. We all know your family's situation is a delicate one." She said it gently, the way people spoke of the Genovese now, the old blood gone thin, the last heir carrying it alone. "You must study hard from here on, fight to make something of your own future, and repay your grandmother for everything she gave up to raise you."

I closed my fist around the small worn signet resting at my throat, the last honest thing Nonna had ever put into my hands, and held it there until the edges bit into my skin.

"I intend to," I said. "Every bit of it."