Chapter 1

My cousin was born without a womb and with a sealed canal. Medically speaking, she was intersex. But that never stopped her from spending nearly every night out with a different man on her arm, flaunting her supposed conquests like trophies pinned to her chest.

One day she leaned in close, a conspiratorial grin curling her mouth, and whispered, "You know, Francesca, there's more than one way to make a man happy."

I tried to talk sense into her. Warned her about the infections, the risks, the sheer recklessness of it. Honestly, she was begging for a disease. She only laughed it off.

Then she set her sights on a made man's son. The Armetta bloodline, the kind of name that came with an estate behind iron gates and enough soldiers to make a city hold its breath. Suddenly she wasn't so cocky. She came to me asking whether she should have surgery to "fix" herself, to make everything work the way a man of that rank would expect on the night the two houses were bound.

I warned her. Surgery carries risks. A woman's body isn't some instrument built to please a man. If she wanted to stand beside someone, she had to put her own health and dignity first.

But she wasn't interested in caution. She believed her tricks in bed, or whatever version of them she could manage, would be enough to keep him leashed.

On the night the alliance was sealed, no matter what she pulled from her twisted little playbook, he turned on her all the same. Said she disgusted him.

Word moved through the Families like wildfire. The Armettas cast her out like yesterday's garbage. The pact was broken before the vows had cooled. Her dream of marrying into a ruling bloodline? Dead in the water.

She lost everything. Her pride, her place at the table of people who mattered, the alliance itself.

Her dream of marrying into a ruling bloodline? Dead in the water.

And then she blamed me for all of it.

She poured gasoline over me and set me alight.

"You bitch! If you hadn't talked me out of the surgery, I wouldn't be a laughingstock in front of every Family in this city!"

When I opened my eyes again, I was back in that exam room. The very day she told me her secret.

——

"Seriously, Francesca, it's not the old country anymore," she giggled, twisting her waist like she was auditioning for something. "You really gotta stop thinking like a nun."

"There are so many ways I can make a man happy. Way more than just that one." She licked her lips, slow and deliberate.

"Last night my man and I went at it again. He was so wild. We went through eight rubbers. Strawberry."

She actually looked proud. Beaming. Glowing, as if she'd won something worth winning.

Meanwhile I sat there, trembling. Every word out of her mouth landed like a knife between my ribs, dredging up memories from the life I'd already lived. And died for.

I drew a long, shaky breath and forced myself calm. My hands clenched into fists beneath the table, but I smiled.

"Impressive," I said flatly.

She mistook the sarcasm for praise and lit up brighter. "Of course I'm impressive."

Then she leaned in, that soft smile sharpening into something else. "Anyway. You've been with Nico for what, two years? And you still haven't done it." She clicked her tongue. "Aren't you afraid someone else swoops in and takes him while you sit here playing the Virgin Mary?"

I didn't answer.

"Men don't care whether you're pure. What they care about is whether you can please them. Keep them happy and they never leave."

Of course she dragged Nico into it.

The "man" she claimed to have spent that wild night with? That was Nico Barone. My man.

In my last life, I didn't learn until after I was dead that she'd been seducing him behind my back. The two of them were already tangled in each other long before I understood it, right up to the night the marriage between us was meant to happen.

And even after she burned me alive, Nico still stood at her side. He put his name to a statement begging the court to go easy on her.

Watching her play at innocence now, wearing that twisted pride like jewelry, I nearly crushed my own fists under the table.

"Nico respects my choices," I said tightly. "That's why I love him."

For just a second something flickered across her face. Envy. It vanished fast, buried under the usual smirk.

"I don't get you," she scoffed. "You're perfectly healthy, and you treat your body like some priceless relic behind glass. What a waste."

She leaned closer, her voice like honey laced with poison. "But hey. If you're so set on staying pure, maybe take a few lessons from me."

I peeled off my gloves and nodded toward her half-buttoned blouse. "Aren't you worried your mother finds out?"

That wiped the smirk clean off her face. Her fingers froze mid-button. Her eyes narrowed, and I watched them fill, quick and practiced, while her other hand pressed into her own forearm hard enough to leave marks.

"She won't find out," she said sharply. "Not unless someone tells her. And you're not stupid enough to bite the hand that feeds you. Are you, Cousin?"

Back when both my parents were killed in a car crash during my studies, it was Donna Ashford who stepped in and covered everything. She made certain I finished my training and became what the Family needed.

But that generosity came with a debt.

Donna Ashford was no saint. She'd been the kept mistress of a powerful capo once, betting that giving him a son would lock her a seat among people who mattered. Life played a cruel joke on her instead. She gave birth to Alessia. Intersex, sterile, useless to every fantasy she'd built of climbing up through the bloodlines.

So she took the hush money, raised Alessia alone, and never let go of the dream of trading her daughter for a name that meant something.

When I became a physician, the kind who works below the surface where no legitimate clinic can ever know, she saw her opening.

She wanted me to operate. Clear the canal. Stitch in a false proof of purity. Make Alessia look like a blushing, untouched bride so some ruling son would never know the difference. And because the aftercare would go on and on, the hormones, the maintenance, the quiet visits, I'd be the perfect built-in solution kept close to the household.

What she didn't know was that her daughter had already been tearing herself apart.