Chapter 1

I spent thirteen years beside Dominic Bellante. Ten as his wife.

His last order was to have my face cut.

I had been sitting by his bed for three nights when he finally opened his eyes. I leaned closer, thinking he wanted water.

“Ada,” he whispered.

My sister's name.

Then he looked at me, and the tenderness left him.

“Your father treated her like she was nothing. He wouldn't even pay the artist properly. That's why the portrait had that mark.”

A portrait. Thirteen years old. He'd kept it all that time.

“I lost years because of you, Clara.”

He told one of his men to make my face match the painted scar.

I begged the man to stop. Dominic watched, holding my sister's portrait against his chest.

When he died, his attorneys informed me I would be leaving the Bellante house. The family arrangements that were supposed to protect me had been changed. My father took me back under his roof and treated my presence as an embarrassment.

People called me the wife the Don sent home.

Ada came to visit with a hand resting on her pregnant belly.

“He gave me everything I needed,” she said. “You spent your life trying to earn what he wanted to give me.”

Her husband was one of Dominic's senior men. He'd known whose child she carried. There had been promises about inheritance, protection, a place at the center of the family.

I had no children. For years I'd been told it was stress. Now I understood the treatment Ada had encouraged me to take, the doctor my husband had chosen, the things they had never let me see.

When the fire broke out in the old guesthouse, neither of us reached the door. I had lunged at her; a lamp had fallen. Her screams stayed with me after the room disappeared.

I didn't get to call that justice. We died in a room full of things we'd done to each other.

Then I opened my eyes at twenty-four.

Two portraits lay drying on my father's dining table. One for each daughter, commissioned for the Bellante Foundation's charity gallery and the introductions that would follow it.

Ada and I looked almost alike. On her portrait, a dark line cut down one cheek.

The artist had gone to wash his brushes.

I picked up his pen.

On the back of the scarred portrait, where a name had not yet been entered, I wrote my own.