Chapter 1

Adriana's POV

I burned my name out of every ledger and whisper-network in the city, the same name that once carried the weight of a million loyal associates and three generations of Valente respect.

Almost instantly, the territory lit up with speculation, men wondering aloud whether the Valente daughter had turned rat or been taken.

Then Bianca Corsetti, a daughter of the family muscling into our operations, sent word to me directly.

[Why would you walk away out of nowhere? Have you lost your mind?]

Even so, I closed every door behind me and went alone into the country to see the world for what it was.

In my last life, Bianca and I had run the same rackets, moved the same secrets. People accused me of stealing her business and called me a cheap imitation doomed to fade. They branded me publicly, in whispered sit-downs, and to my face.

To prove my innocence, I laid out my ledgers, my contacts, the dates every arrangement was made. But they called it forgery and said I had staged the whole thing.

The endless whisper campaign, the mark it put on me, pushed me into something dark and hollow. So I ended up alone in a cramped safe house, opening my own wrists.

But then, I woke up.

To my shock, I was back on the very day Bianca and I had first moved those identical secrets.

——

My finger was literally hovering over the seal, the wax already soft. One second later, I would have pressed it down and sealed the fate I already knew.

As such, my body jolted like I'd been pulled from deep water. I yanked my hand away just in time, chest heaving as I gasped for breath.

Looking around the familiar room, at the ledgers, the coded notes, the arrangement I had drafted, I realized I had been reborn at the moment I first tried to move the family's business a new way.

After calming down, I locked the sealed papers away and immediately put out feelers on Bianca's dealings.

It didn't take long. Word of her latest move came back to me fast.

And this one was nothing like her usual work. Her old operations had been clumsy, poorly run, barely earning respect from anyone who mattered.

But this new one had the whole grapevine talking inside thirty minutes.

Every made man and street contact was singing the same praise.

[Move like that in a real war and no one touches her.]

[She's running Commission-level work off a nothing crew.]

[Dio, has anyone in this life ever carried herself like that?]

[That's my woman. Mine. Who the hell stole the woman meant for me?]

...and on and on.

The dark front, the bold play, the timing, the men she moved, the exact words she used, every single detail matched the arrangement I had just locked away.

If I didn't know that I'd drawn the idea from an old country score and burned countless sleepless nights writing every line of it, I might have believed I'd stolen from her.

But the truth was clear. Somehow, she had moved first.

And just like that, her name went from nothing to feared overnight.

In my past life, that exact move destroyed me.

I remembered feeling almost hopeful, thinking the Family would finally see my worth when I made it.

But when the word came back, the hope turned to dread. Everyone said I was the copycat. They even pointed to the original, which was Bianca's play.

When I looked into it, I found the same concept, the same angles, the same style. A 99.9 percent match.

But I swear. I never took a single thing from her.

I was instantly furious then. Desperate to prove I was the true architect of it, I laid out every ledger and every note I had.

But it didn't help.

Because Bianca laid out her own process too, and somehow, her dates ran earlier than mine.

Then came the whisper campaign.

[She built this 'proof' in advance just to drag Bianca down.]

[Honor the true blood. Say no to rats and thieves.]

[Adriana, get out of this thing of ours. You don't belong at the table.]

[She went digging for proof and buried herself with it.]

Even the Corsetti Consigliere and their capos put out word through every channel that they had taken nothing, that everything had been planned within their own house.

I, on the other hand, worked alone. No crew, no man to speak for me. Just me, handling every piece from the first arrangement to the last. So no one stood for me. Not even the man my family had betrothed me to.

In fact, Lorenzo Ferraro made his own announcement, telling anyone who'd listen that he was done with me. Said all my business was stitched together from other families, that I was a thief and a rat to the core.

And that was the final blow.

The whisper network came down on me harder than ever. Every sit-down closed its doors before I reached them. Every message that found me carried filth I couldn't stomach.

The weight crushed everything in me, and the allied houses cut me loose. So I barely held on.

Eventually, I started hurting myself, and soon I was sitting across from a doctor who called it something dark and permanent.

And one sunny afternoon, in a cramped little safe house, I decided to end it all.

But then, I opened my eyes, only to find myself back at the beginning, where none of that had happened yet.

But this time, I was going to find out the debt owed in blood behind all of it.