Chapter 1

My mother asked me the name of the man I wanted to marry.

This time, I did not say Salvatore Falcone. I said his uncle. I said Lorenzo. The name fell into the study like a coin dropped onto marble, and the whole room seemed to hear it ring. My mother, Iris Blackwood, went still in her chair, her rosary suddenly forgotten in her lap. Her gaze cut to me, sharp and disbelieving, as though I had reached across the space between us and struck her clean across the face. Her lips pressed into a thin line, and her fingers rose to the small gold crucifix at her throat, closing around it the way a woman closes her hand around the last thing she trusts.

She had every reason to look at me that way. Everyone in our territory knew the story. Salvatore and I had been carved from the same childhood, promised to each other in a hundred quiet expectations, our names spoken together at every feast and every funeral. The Ricci girl and the Falcone heir. Since we were children barely tall enough to kiss the Don's ring, we had been treated as a foregone conclusion.

For ten years, I had chased him like a debt I owed only to myself. I had sworn to my father's face that I would take no other man. I had made a religion of that boy. But that was the old me. That girl no longer existed. She had died once already, and what came back in her place had learned things that could not be unlearned.

A bitter smile tugged at the corner of my mouth as the memories of my first life crept in, cold and precise, the way old smoke still clings to a room long after the fire is dead.

In that life, after Salvatore and I were bound before the saints and the whole Family, I came to a truth that hollowed me out from the inside.

He had never once laid a hand on me. Not in tenderness, not in obligation, not once in all those years under the same roof. At first I told myself it was some private wound, something a man of our world could not confess, and I wrapped excuse after excuse around it the way you'd bandage a bleeding thing you were afraid to look at. I told myself it did not matter. I told myself loyalty was its own kind of love.

Then came our golden anniversary, and I walked into a room in his house I had never been permitted to see. Locked. Hidden behind the study, behind a false wall a mistress of the house was never meant to find. Inside, the walls were papered floor to ceiling with photographs. My cousin's face. A hundred stolen images of my cousin, watched over like a private altar, like a shrine some men build to the only saint they ever truly prayed to.

That was the moment it all came clear. It was not that Salvatore Falcone was a cold man incapable of wanting. He simply had never wanted me. Every year of my devotion had been spent guarding a door that had someone else's name behind it.

Now, in this second life the good Lord or the devil had seen fit to grant me, I was finished throwing my years at a man who would never love me back. I would let the two of them have each other, once and for all, and I would not stand in the wreckage a second time.

But as I walked the length of the estate's great hall toward Lorenzo, toward the true power of the Falcone Family, Salvatore's face drained of every drop of color. And the boy who had never once looked at me lost control completely.

...

Three days after the blood-alliance was announced, after the whole city of families knew my name would be tied to the Falcones, I crossed paths with Salvatore again at a celebration under the saints, one of those glittering feasts where the syndicate wears its silk and pretends its hands are clean.

His friends found me before he did. Young made men and eager associates, the kind who laughed loudest when they thought the boss's boy was watching. They caught sight of me across the room, and of course they could not let it pass. They were already grinning, already sharpening their tongues, delighted to have a little sport at my expense while the wine ran free.

"Salvatore, look who it is." One of them lifted his glass in my direction, mouth curled. "Your little shadow followed you here again."

"Clara." Another leaned in, all false sweetness, letting the whole cluster of them hear it. "You're already promised, and yet here you are, still circling him like you can't help it. Shouldn't you let the poor man enjoy one last night of his own before you drag him to the altar?"

The laughter rippled outward. A soldier near the door shifted his weight and looked away, uncomfortable, the way men do when they sense a name being dragged where it shouldn't go. I felt the base of my ring finger and pressed my thumb hard against it, that old, secret gesture from a marriage that had ruined me once already. Steadying. Silent.

When Salvatore finally turned and saw me, the annoyance was written plain across his face, undisguised, as though I were a debt collector who had walked in on his good time.

"Clara," he said, and the word came out flat with contempt. His hand went to his collar, tugging at it, rolling his shoulders back as though the room had grown too tight around him. "Are you really this desperate to marry into a Falcone bed? You didn't even do me the courtesy of asking my blessing before you sealed this arrangement. And now the whole damn territory is talking about it, every capo and every gossiping wife from here to the old country. You've got some nerve, coming here on top of it."