Chapter 3

"Three — two — one."

The lights blazed on. They wheeled me onto the stage.

The restraints kept me upright in the chair, spine straight.

Every head in the room turned.

The capos. The underbosses. The allied heads who had known me since I was a child sitting under my father's table playing with his cufflinks.

A murmur moved through the room.

【Is that the Moretti girl? Why is she just sitting there like a mannequin?】

【Three months in a cellar broke her.】

【Good. Heard she tried to poison the woman Eli brought under family protection.】

The whispers reached me, word for word.

Eli lifted his hand for silence. His expression was perfectly calibrated, a man doing something painful because it was necessary.

"Gentlemen. Thank you for coming."

"The only reason we are here today is to confess in the open. No closed doors. No whispers."

He gestured to me.

"My younger sister, Ava Moretti, acted out of jealousy and recklessness, causing serious harm to a innocent woman, Zara Cole."

"After three months of correction, she has confronted the consequences of her actions."

"She asked to come here today, in front of every head at this table, to apologize in person."

Murmurs moved around the room.

【Eli Moretti handling his own blood in the open — that's a don who means what he says.】

【She poisoned a civilian. Three months is light.】

【Make her apologize on her knees.】

Eli turned his back to the room and moved to stand in front of me, blocking half the frame.

"Stop this. Talk. Tell them what you did wrong."

I had nothing to give him. He pinched the soft skin under my arm, hard.

My body shifted with the pressure, my head dropping lower. Nothing more.

Zara stepped in, playing the peacemaker flawlessly.

"Eli, don't. She's clearly overwhelmed with remorse."

"It's fine. I forgive her."

She picked up a glass of red wine and pressed it into my broken arm's hand.

"Drink with me, Ava. We move forward together."

The glass tilted. Wine ran down the front of the white dress. My body didn't react.

Zara turned to the room with wounded eyes.

"She still can't look at me. I suppose she hasn't forgiven herself yet."

【Zara Cole is a saint. Ava doesn't deserve it.】

【Someone drag her out of that chair.】

The old capo near the back was no longer murmuring.

He was watching my hand. The way it had fallen. The angle of it.

He had seen enough bodies in his life to know what a hand looked like when no one was home inside it.

Sebastian took the floor and walked to center stage.

He stood over my wheelchair and looked down at me.

"Since Ava Moretti insists on silence, I have nothing more to protect."

He reached into his jacket and withdrew a small velvet box.

What was left of my soul surged with a single reflex of hope.

Our ring?

He opened the box. Inside was something new — a pink diamond, gleaming, unfamiliar.

Sebastian turned away from me.

In front of my corpse, in front of every head of every family in the city, he lowered himself onto one knee before Zara Cole.

The room went very still.

"Zara Cole."

"For three years, you've been the constant I held onto."

"Your honesty, your loyalty — you are everything I ever wanted beside me."

He rose. He turned back toward me, and his voice went cold.

"I, Sebastian Vane, formally dissolve my engagement to Ava Moretti."

"A woman this cowardly, this incapable of remorse, has no place in my family or in this world."

Every word landed somewhere in the place my soul used to live.

He proposed to another woman in front of my corpse.

He ground my name into the floor of my own family's hall and pressed his heel into it.

"Sebastian—" Zara's voice broke beautifully. "I—"

Sebastian reached into his other pocket and produced the plain silver band I had given him three years ago.

He tossed it sideways without looking.

It hit the rim of a waste bin at the edge of the room with a sharp metallic ring and dropped inside.

"From today, Zara is the only woman I stand beside."

He slipped the pink diamond onto her finger. She leaned up and kissed him.

The room erupted — applause from some, silence from others.

In every eye that turned toward me, the background was the same: a girl in a white dress, slumped in a wheelchair, wine-stained, motionless, head bowed.

Three years ago, Sebastian had knelt in the snow outside my apartment for three days and three nights to ask me to marry him.

His lips had gone pale from the cold. He had gripped my hands and sworn:

"Ava, this ring is my life. The moment you accept it, my life belongs to you."

Your life was cheap, Sebastian. Cheaper than I knew.

The moment Zara appeared, every last scrap of patience and love you had ever given me transferred to her.

I didn't change. You just stopped looking at me.

The ring in the waste bin.

That's where we ended up — you and me and every promise we ever made.

Rotting in the same place.