Chapter 4

Salvatore's face contorted with rage, though beneath the fury there sat something almost pleased, a boy delighting in the wreckage he'd made of a room. He tugged at his shirt collar and rolled his shoulders, the way he always did when the ground beneath him began to shift.

"I knew it. You've been playing a part this whole time," he sneered, the words coming low and vicious. "Listen to me carefully. You don't breathe a word of this to anyone. Not to your father, not to mine, not to a single made man in either house. What I have with Adriana is no concern of yours. She's gentle. Fragile. Nothing like your poison and your little schemes." His voice dropped further still, thinning into something that pretended to be a warning but only revealed how afraid he was of losing her. "If you so much as touch her, don't imagine for one second I'll still stand before the family and go through with this union."

I couldn't help the laugh that escaped me, quiet and disbelieving in the corridor's hush. Here was the heir apparent to the Falcone name, too much a coward to say a single honest word to the elders who would one day place him in the underboss seat, and yet somehow, in the whole crooked ledger of this thing, I was the one written down as the villain.

I said nothing more. There was nothing left worth spending on him. I simply turned on my heel and walked into my apartment, the door closing behind me with a soft finality, the whole weight of both lifetimes settling onto my shoulders like wet stone.

The moment I crossed the threshold, my phone buzzed in my palm. A video. From Adriana.

I hesitated with my thumb hovering over it. Then I opened it anyway, because I already knew, and knowing is never the same as seeing.

There they were. Salvatore, standing close behind Adriana, his fingers working the clasp of a necklace at the nape of her neck with a tenderness he had never once shown me across two lives. The house that made the piece was unmistakable, the mark of it catching the light. And then the understanding arrived, cold and complete. The bracelet Salvatore had pressed into my hand not an hour ago, the one he'd offered as though it were a gift worth something, was the trinket thrown in free with the purchase of that very necklace.

The scraps from her table. That was what I had been given.

They stood so near that their throats nearly touched, breath sharing breath. Then the camera drew closer, and they kissed. The sound of it cut through the silence of my rooms, sharp and intrusive, landing somewhere beneath my ribs like the flat of a hand against my chest.

The message followed a heartbeat later.

[Clara, Salvatore's told you by now, hasn't he? After the ceremony for you, he's going to marry me. Legally. Before God and the family.]

[Just so we understand each other. Without a legal marriage, there are no inheritance rights, no claim to a single dollar of the laundered estate. I suppose that makes it my turn to become the richest woman in San Francisco.]

Adriana. She'd been reborn too.

It all fell into place then, the pieces sliding together with a sickening ease. In the life I'd already buried, Salvatore and Adriana had shared no thread between them, no history, nothing. Yet this time, mere days into it, they were already moving through the world as though they'd been lovers for years. Doing every small intimate thing that lovers do. Fastening necklaces. Whispering. Kissing where a camera could catch it and carry it to me.

It was as if they'd struck some silent understanding between them, the two of them reaching back across the dark to take up exactly where they'd left off, as though death had been nothing more than an inconvenient pause in the middle of their affair.

I lowered my gaze from the screen, and the memories of that other life came flooding in, unbidden and merciless. I thought of the day I first married into the Falcone household, when I'd still believed love was a debt that would one day be repaid.

Right after the union was sealed, it seemed the whole world tilted in their favor. Arrangements poured in from families that had once kept their distance. Pacts were struck. Rackets that had run cold suddenly ran hot, and the tribute flowed in from every corner of the territory.

The Falcone fortune swelled until it swallowed rivals whole, and before long they stood untouchable, the richest and most feared name in all of San Francisco. I pressed my thumb against the base of my ring finger and held it there, in the dark of my own apartment, remembering exactly what that fortune had cost me.