Chapter 3

Half an hour before I died, the cell door opened.

It wasn't a guard with food. It was three men. Drunk. Reeking.

The way they looked at me made my skin crawl.

The one in front held up a badge.

"Heard this is the Don's son's leftovers? My boys have never had a rich girl in a wedding dress. Never been the first."

Mama stepped in front of me.

"You lay a hand on her and you're dead."

The man laughed.

"A whore headed for the brothels tomorrow? Who cares?"

"Besides, somebody paid us to come."

I felt it before he even said it.

Her.

The real daughter said to make it messy.

He reached for my collar.

I shoved him off. Another one grabbed my wrist and slammed me into the ground.

The tiara cracked against the stone wall. Pearls scattered everywhere.

His hand came down again.

Then Rosa came off the floor behind him and sank her teeth into his arm.

He screamed. Backhanded her across the room.

Gia grabbed a broken bowl and dragged it down another man's face.

Mama, Lily, even Nonna, old as she was — they all piled on top of them.

A dozen of us. Wooden pins. Shards of porcelain. Bare hands.

We went at those three men like animals.

Elena locked her arms around me and took a kick meant for me. Her forehead split open. She didn't let go.

"Rena, get behind me! Don't let them touch you!"

Nonna swung her cane into the leader's skull.

"There are Vale women still breathing in here! You don't get to put your hands on us!"

They thought a bunch of spoiled rich women wouldn't fight back.

They were wrong.

One of them got his throat opened up with a piece of porcelain. Blood everywhere. They backed out of the cell, cursing.

At the door, the leader spat on the floor.

"Playing the saint. You think the Vale men are coming to save you?"

"They're at home eating dinner with their real daughter."

The door locked behind them.

The cell went dead silent.

Elena tore a strip off her sleeve and covered my ripped collar.

Mama held me. Her hands were shaking so badly she couldn't close the fabric.

Nonna sat in the blood and looked around the room. Every one of us, cut and bruised. She said nothing for a long time.

We'd still had a thread of hope.

Maybe Papa and my brothers hadn't actually committed treason.

Maybe Dante would find a way to get us out.

Those three men killed the last of it.

If anyone could walk into the Pit and do that, the Vales were finished.

Nonna closed her eyes.

When she opened them, her face was calm in a way that scared me more than the men had.

"If they march us to the brothels at dawn, are you afraid?"

Nobody answered.

My little niece didn't know what a brothel was. She just hugged Rosa's leg and said she wanted to go home.

Rosa crouched down and kissed her forehead.

"Sweetheart. Mama's taking you somewhere with no bad people in it."

Mama took the gold pin out of her hair and handed it to Nonna.

The other wives started taking off their jewelry too.

Whoever could swallow gold did. Whoever could hang themselves did.

But there wasn't enough.

Nonna looked toward the back of the building. The well.

She said the Vale name could be ruined. The Vale house could be seized.

But no Vale woman would ever be passed around.

"We pick our own way out," Nonna said.

"The road's cold. But we go together, so it's not."

Mama nodded, crying.

The others nodded.

Then Lily ran across the room and threw herself at me.

"Auntie. I'm scared."

"I don't want to die."

She was six.

Yesterday she was still threatening to block my door on my wedding day and make Dante pay ten gold bars for the bride.

I held her and my throat felt like someone was cutting it.

I wanted to say don't be scared.

I couldn't get it out.

Because I was scared too.

I didn't want to die either.

I had my dress on. Mama had stitched twin flowers inside the collar. Nonna had sewn the red thread into my hem by hand.

Dante promised he'd come for me on the biggest white horse he owned.

He said after the wedding he'd take me south to see the rain, and north to see the snow.

We'd already picked names for our kids.

I never got a carriage. Not one.

In the end it was Rosa who carried Lily away. She pressed the little girl's face into her chest and started singing her an old lullaby.

I couldn't watch.

The pill Nonna gave me was still in my fist.

She said I was the daughter she'd raised for sixteen years. Maybe not Vale blood, but Vale bone. So nobody was allowed to touch me.

They didn't know.

The order outside that cell was fake.

The treason was fake.

The men going to prison was fake.

Only their dying was real.