Chapter 1

Adriana's POV

My husband and I had been reincarnated twice, and not once had we ever been apart.

Yet, somehow, he hated me.

Lorenzo Moretti hated me with a kind of quiet, bone-deep fury that no soldier in the compound ever seemed to notice.

And I felt it every time he looked at me.

But I also knew him better than anyone ever had. I knew that under all that anger, under the ice a young Don wears like a second suit, Lorenzo had the softest damn heart.

He’d never admit it. He’d probably laugh in my face if I said it out loud.

But I saw it. I always saw it.

And honestly, if he didn’t have that kind of heart, how else could you explain what he did?

How could he have dropped the urn holding the ashes of Tessa Falcone, the woman he loved so deeply, just to shield me when a rival Family’s knives cornered me in that alley?

He died to save me.

Stabbed over and over, right there in front of me, while his enforcers were still three streets away.

And still, with his last breath, Lorenzo reached out, gathered Tessa’s ashes in his bloodied hand, and looked straight at me.

That smile. God, that smile.

Half cruel. Half gentle. All broken.

The kind of expression that wouldn't fade with time. One that would sink into your bones and stay there.

“Adriana,” Lorenzo said, voice barely holding on, “I don’t regret saving you. But I hope we never meet again in the next life.”

The old Don sent his men to collect the body. They didn’t let me see him. Not even once. Not even for a second.

No goodbye. No closure. Just a door shut in my face and the silence of a house in mourning.

They treated me like I had put the knife in him myself.

His father, Vittorio, looked at me like I was the reason his only son was cold on a slab.

And maybe in some twisted way, I was.

The old man looked ten years older than the last time I’d knelt at his table. His shoulders had caved, his hair had gone white, all of it the toll grief takes on a man who has buried enemies without blinking and could not bury his own blood without breaking. But Vittorio didn’t break. Not fully.

He just stood there, hollowed out, looking at me like I was a debt he’d sworn to and lived to regret.

He drew the reading glasses from his face and set them down, slow, deliberate, the way he did before he spoke a truth that could not be argued. “If your father hadn’t sworn that blood-oath to me on his deathbed,” he said, voice low and rough, “I would’ve never kept Lorenzo from taking Tessa to the chapel. Never. But I owed him. He was a boss, and he was my friend. And Lorenzo… Lorenzo kept pulling you out of the fire like it meant something. Like it was fate. But this, whatever this is between you two, ends now. It has to.”

Then came Rosaria, the matriarch.

God, the way she looked at me like I was poison in the wine.

She didn’t raise her voice or weep. Rosaria just stared at me with those sharp, tired eyes that had spent the whole night open. Eyes that had watched their son carried home under a sheet.

She had a spoon in her hand from the untouched sauce on the stove. She set it down flat on the counter, and the whole room seemed to understand a line had been crossed. “Adriana,” she said, her voice cold and measured, “if you have even a shred of conscience left, let my son go. Let him rest. Don’t follow him into the next life. Don’t make him suffer for you again!”

Then Rosaria folded her hands the way she did in the front pew every Sunday, and she said it.

“Please. Let him go. We’re begging you.”

——

And that? That’s what stuck. Not the blood. Not the funeral I wasn’t allowed to stand at.

Not even Lorenzo’s last words.

That one sentence, Let him go, burrowed into my head and stayed there for ten years.

So I didn’t go back to the family estate, didn’t show my face at another sit-down, and didn’t do anything except work.

I poured every damn part of me into the Seven Stars cipher, the untraceable ledger-and-communication net that half the Families swore was a ghost story.

Seven Stars. Something the old bosses said was a fantasy.

But I made it real.

When we finally cracked it and it finally held, I put my own name forward as the first to run the sequence, without hesitation.

Don Vitale, our Consigliere, looked at me like I’d lost my mind. He drew the old pocket watch from his vest and began polishing it with his thumb, the one habit he could never talk himself out of.

“Adriana,” he said carefully, “even if the sync holds, we don’t know what it does to a body over time. Things we can’t undo. You need to really think this through.”

I just smiled, shrugging off my coat like it was any other day. “It’s alright, Don Vitale. I just want to see if there’s still time to fix what I broke. To make something right.”

Then I turned, threw the switch, and didn’t look back.

What came next was pure agony. A shockwave ripped through me, like it was trying to force my soul through the eye of a needle. Then a blinding white light flashed so brightly it felt like it was burning my eyes.

And then I opened my eyes.

I was standing right outside the chapel at Saint Jude’s, the little stone church on the mountain where the Families carved their vows. Something smooth and cool rested in my palm, a fate stone the chaplains cut by hand for the blood-oath rite.

At that moment, I knew exactly what day it was. The day Rosaria had begged us to come back up the mountain and keep the pact.

“Adriana,” a voice snapped beside me, irritated, “what are you spacing out for? Carve the damn thing. I don’t have all day.”

I turned around.

Lorenzo.

He was alive, twenty-five again. His face was full of life. No scars. No death waiting behind his eyes.

My throat closed up so fast I didn’t even feel the tears until they hit my cheeks.

Lorenzo frowned. “Seriously? Crying over a carved, useless stone? What game are you playing now, huh? Did my mother drag me up here just so you could put on this whole lovesick act?”

I tried to speak, but the words caught in my throat.

I swallowed hard, bit the inside of my cheek, and forced myself to smile. “Can you go wait outside for a sec? I want to give you a surprise.”

Lorenzo narrowed his eyes at me, clearly suspicious, but didn’t argue. He just dropped the stone he’d already carved on the table and walked out, and even the two soldiers by the chapel door stepped aside without being told.

I picked it up, my fingers gently tracing the familiar letters cut into the smooth, flat stone. His name. Lorenzo Moretti.

And then, something hit me deep inside.

Loving him the way I did never brought either of us peace. We never found happiness. All we ended up with were empty spaces, wide, aching holes where our dreams used to live.

A young chaplain passing between the pews noticed me frozen in place.

“Signora Moretti,” he said softly, “if you don’t carve your name soon, you’ll miss the last car down the mountain.”

I blinked, nodded, and picked up the carving knife.

My hand trembled just a little as I carved the name:

Tessa Falcone.

Stroke by stroke, line by line, I traced every letter with care.

When I finished, I set the stone down and finally let out a breath. For the first time in years, it felt like I could actually breathe.

Saint Jude’s wasn’t just any chapel. Every Family that ever bound two names knew its reputation.

If the bond you carried up the mountain was true, heaven would guard it. But if what you brought was a cursed bond, it would turn against you. Every single time.