Chapter 1

At the sit-down where they blessed the union, Lorenzo Falcone held the twin sons of his dead first love in his arms and asked me, in front of the whole famiglia, for my understanding.

"Adriana gave her life for these boys. I cannot let them grow without a mother. Serafina, are you not the gentlest soul in this house?"

Under the eyes of every capo present, I nodded, my face pale.

A year later, my hand resting gently on my pregnant belly, I watched Lorenzo Falcone's face change.

"Get rid of it. I gave Adriana my word we'd wait three years before any child of ours."

"You're still young. We'll have our own later."

But in the eight years that followed, I never carried again.

I raised those twins as though the blood in them were mine.

Until the evening I came home early to make ready for their birthday, and found Adriana, the woman I had mourned as dead, folded sweetly into Lorenzo's arms.

"All it took was Lorenzo switching out her medicine, and Serafina spent nine years a woman kept in this house without a name."

Their laughter carried through the rooms while Lorenzo stroked Adriana's belly.

"This is what she earns for stealing the union that was yours."

"Nine years of a honeymoon should settle the debt of faking your death. With her doing the raising, we had the years to travel, and now we're expecting our third."

By the tall windows, their shadows braided together in the moonlight.

I was shut out of the estate the whole night, shivering on the stone as I made a call.

"Help me renounce this union before the Family, and I'll agree to your terms."

——

When I stepped inside, the noisy talk cut off all at once. The way they looked at me made me feel like an outsider who had walked past the wrong door.

Lorenzo's expression froze for a second. "You're back? Good. Go make up the guest room."

"You see, Adriana's back too. There was an accident, years ago, and now the sisters are together again. She stays here."

The others were quick to fall in behind him.

"Sister, you took the union out from under her once. You won't begrudge her a roof now, will you?"

"Everyone always took Adriana for the true wife of this house. If you hadn't slipped in between, how would a girl from the orphanage ever have carried the Falcone name?"

Then their eyes settled on the ruined birthday cake in my hands.

"Look at that. She has the nerve to walk in with a smashed cake. What did anyone expect. Not real blood of this family anyway."

"Orphanage girl. No manners in her."

I held my breath, ready to answer. But Adriana suddenly knelt on the floor in front of me.

"Sister, I wronged you before. You have every right to hate me."

Her fingers pressed delicately to her collarbone, tapping once, too fast, against her own skin before the tears came.

"But now, I only want to be near the boys. Please. Just let me live."

She wept like some fragile flower, and Lorenzo's eyes filled with pain. "Serafina, hurry and get the guest room ready. The past is the past."

The past. Climbing the stairs, I turned those three words over and over in my head.

When we were girls, she starved me down to skin and bone.

Later, she stole my work and swore before everyone that I was the cheat. She even framed the woman who took me in from the orphanage, left her buried under a debt she'd never asked for. Could all of it truly be waved off as "the past"?

When I pushed open the door, my heart nearly stopped. The twins were tearing apart the photograph of the woman who had raised me.

"Matteo! Marco! Let go of that!"

I rushed toward them, and one of them stuck out a foot. I went down hard against the floor.

The photograph had already come apart, and still they stamped on the pieces.

"Bleh! You're not getting it back!"

"You're the old mommy! Time for the new mommy!"

They laughed as they stamped, and the little clay charm at my throat, the one I'd shaped with my own hands on a month-long pilgrimage in Beaufort, swung against my skin, mocking every foolish hope I'd ever hung on it.

Marco tipped his chin up, holding my eyes too long, and sprayed something rose-scented straight at my face.

My breath caught. My skin went hot and red.

Within a minute my throat was swelling shut. I couldn't breathe.

Curled on the floor, I saw Matteo holding my allergy medicine. I begged him. "Matteo, give Mommy the medicine. Please."

Matteo smirked, dangled the little vial in front of me, then flicked it away with two fingers, tossing it into the bathroom trash.