Chapter 4

No one knew if I was alive.

When Lorenzo finally burned half the city to bring me back, they all held me and wept.

And Sienna—this stranger—stood not far away.

"Don't worry about Sienna," Isabella had whispered, clutching my hand. "She's just a girl we took in for 'good luck' while you were gone. She has a heart condition, and she looks like you, but you're our only girl, Elena. You're our soul."

I bought it. God help me, I'd believed their every word.

From that, I treated Sienna like a sister. But slowly, the air in the house changed.

If Sienna tripped, Isabella would scream at me, "Did you push her, Elena?"

If Lorenzo cooked a rare family dinner, it was always the spicy Calabrian dishes Sienna loved, even though they tore my stomach apart.

Dominic's lab work shifted from my health to Sienna's "miracle cure."

Even Julian, during our few fights, would snap, "Why can't you be more like your sister? She's sweet. She actually knows how to talk to a man without looking like she's judging him."

A wave of suffocation hit me. I blinked. The memory faded.

But the Heartbreak Value was ticking closer to the end.

It hurts...so hurts. My stitches are coming undone, I can feel them ripping through me, one after another.

I grab for the wall. Miss. My legs give out. I'm on the floor and I don't even remember falling.

The room spun—everything tilted.

I curled into a ball on the cold floor, gasping, choking, air wouldn't come. The pain—so white, so bright—I could feel myself slipping. Flickering. Like a dying bulb.

"Mom..." I whispered into the dark. "Mom, please... it hurts..."

Footsteps. From down the hall. Getting closer.

Just as I was about to black out—

I saw mom, dad, and Julian rushed toward me.

I thought, for a second, they were coming to save me.

Mom reached me first. She looked down at the blood soaking through my nightgown, at the way I was trembling in the middle of my own mess.

Then her face twisted in a sneer of pure disappointment.

"For God's sake, Elena!" she barked, her voice like a whip.

"I am so sick of this! Do you really have to go this far? Just because we were in Sienna's room helping her with a panic attack, you have to tear your own stitches out?"

I looked up at her, hardly. My mouth filling with blood. "Mom... I fell..."

"You 'fell'?" Lorenzo spat, standing behind her with his arms crossed. "You've been in this life your whole life. You don't just fall. This — this is self-harm for attention.“

"It's pathetic. You're trying to guilt-trip us for saving your sister's life."

Julian looked at the blood on the floor and then looked away, as if the sight of me was an inconvenience.

"Get it together, Elena. You're making Sienna feel guilty, and she's the one with the weak heart. You're being a monster."

Isabella grabbed my arm and yanked me up, ignoring the way I gasped as my wounds tore further.

"I'm sedating you properly this time," she hissed, shoving me back onto the mattress. "I won't have you ruining your recovery—and our peace—with these little 'accidents' just to spite Sienna."

I lay there, staring at the ceiling as she prepped another needle.

I stopped whispering "Mom."

I stopped feeling the pain.

I looked at Isabella as the needle went in, and for the first time, I didn't see my mom.

I saw a dead woman walking.

"That's right," I whispered as my eyes started to close. "Keep her safe. Keep my heart beating in her chest... because when I leave, I'm taking everything with me."