Chapter 1

On the night they laid my father in the ground without the dignity of a proper burial, while I kept vigil beside what little they'd left me of him, they came for me.

A crew of button men stormed the wake, and the silence that a made man's death demanded shattered under their boots. They knocked over the urn that held my father's ashes, ground his memory into the floor, and put me before three strangers with a promise of worse if I didn't do as I was told. Eight hours. A camera. My body used as a lesson.

By the next day the footage had been pressed onto discs and passed hand to hand through every social club and back room in the territory.

My betrothed dissolved our arrangement without a moment's hesitation.

The people who had once demanded I show my face at every family function never sent word again.

Under the weight of the shame and the grief, my mother, already frail, passed away with the last of my father's ashes clutched to her chest.

In the middle of all that despair, Salvatore Vitale, the Don, my former betrothed's own uncle, knelt before me and offered me his name.

It felt like a drifting boat finally finding a harbor.

I agreed.

Six months into the marriage, I went into the city to collect a drunken Salvatore from a private room at the back of one of his clubs. Just as I reached the door, I heard voices. His, and another man's.

"Salvatore, weren't you too ruthless back then? A marriage and a place at the table, that's all it would've taken? Bianca's people have money, standing, everything. Why ruin Adriana down to the bone? Her father clawed and bled for the respect of this Family. Look at her now. Broken. Hollow."

"I had no choice," Salvatore said, his voice flat and cold. "If her honor wasn't destroyed, the family wouldn't have cast her out. Nico wouldn't have called off the betrothal. I can't shield Bianca forever. All I could do was clear the obstacles from her path."

——

"I had my men gather those discs back from every corner of the neighborhood. But it's been months. You've seen the way the men look at Adriana now. Like she's meat on the block."

"Stop collecting them."

There was a beat of silence. Then a hoarse, grief-torn voice, the sound of a man twisting the brim of his cap in his hands until it hurt him.

"Salvatore, are you even a man anymore? Have you watched it? My wife. Eight hours, three of those animals. In the end blood ran from her eyes. Was it worth it? For a woman like Bianca?"

"Enough." Salvatore's word landed like a hand going flat on a table. "I know she's hurting. Just wait. Once Bianca gives the Vitale bloodline its heir and things settle, this will pass. Words cut shallower than wounds. I'll say no more of it. Adriana told me she was coming to collect me. If she hears this—"

His voice, empty and soulless, chilled me to the bone. I pressed my hand to my mouth, my heart pounding, and stumbled back from the door.

But outside the club, it got worse.

A knot of drunken men recognized me.

"Hey, isn't this the girl from the disc? Matteo's daughter? Always carried herself like she was above us. Who knew she had it in her."

One of them caught me by the waist, his hand already dragging at my coat.

"Come on, be sociable. Name your price."

I fought him, but I was no match for a pack of them.

My coat tore. Their laughter rang around me, vile and mocking.

The horror I thought I had buried came rushing back.

And then—

"You bastards dare put your hands on my wife? You have a death wish?"

Salvatore's voice cut through the chaos like a blade.

His soldiers surged past him, and they beat the drunkards down into the gutter until their screams carried the length of the street.

I curled into a corner, trembling.

He had saved me again.

But this time, I felt no gratitude.

Only fear.