Chapter 5

The old capo of the Falcone Family was convinced I was the one bringing fortune to Salvatore. He said it the way old men in this life say such things, low and certain, over a glass of red that had been aged longer than I'd been alive, as if luck were a thing that could be married into a bloodline and kept.

Strangely enough, the Family seemed to warm to me more with each passing day. They treated me as though I were already one of their own, as though I had been born under the same saints, sworn to the same silences. The soldiers nodded when I passed the iron gates of the estate. The matriarchs kissed my cheeks at the long Sunday table and pressed rosaries into my palm. Even the enforcers who stood like statues along the marble corridors softened their eyes a fraction when they saw me, and in this world that fraction was everything.

Despite Salvatore's cold indifference, I honestly thought I was happy. In a house built on tribute and blood, I had found something that felt like belonging, and I mistook it for safety. That was until I found the photos.

One afternoon, my mother came into my room with news that changed the shape of the days ahead of me. Iris Blackwood carried herself like a woman who had spent a lifetime learning which secrets to hold behind her teeth, and she closed the heavy door behind her before she spoke, the way you close a door in a house where walls have ears and men have long memories.

"Lorenzo," she said. "Salvatore's uncle. He returns from the old country in five days."

I froze, caught off guard. Something cold slid down the length of my spine and settled at the base of it.

Lorenzo Falcone had never taken a bride in my past life. He had remained a figure spoken of in lowered voices, the true power the young ones feared, and I had never once imagined that a blood-alliance union between our houses could be arranged so quickly, or that the arrangement would ever point toward him.

I vaguely remembered Lorenzo. Fragments only. A tall shadow at the edge of a feast. A voice like cold water over stone. But one thing was clear even through the fog of another life. He had always been a good man to me, or as good as a man in his position could be, almost like an older brother watching over a girl too foolish to watch over herself. Marrying him now, being bound to him by oath and by name, felt as though it would bring me more peace than tying my fate to anyone else in this treacherous world.

I wasn't sure why. But the thought of him felt right, and in a house where so little was ever right, I let myself hold onto that.

The next morning I rose before the sun, before the enforcers changed their watch at the gates, and I worked away in the small studio the Family had given me on the upper floor. I had been sketching my dream wedding gown since my years studying design, back before I understood what my bloodline truly was, back when a girl could still believe her future belonged to her.

But every design I had drawn in that other life had to bend to Salvatore's tastes. He would not let me use a single line I loved. Every seam, every fall of silk, everything had to be shaped for him, arranged for his pleasure, the way everything in his orbit was arranged for him. I had learned to make myself small inside my own art the way I had learned to make myself small inside my own marriage.

But now?

Now I was free. I pressed my thumb against the base of my ring finger without meaning to, that old gesture left over from a marriage that had ruined me once already, and then I made myself stop. Free to design the gown I loved. The one I would actually want to wear, the one that would be mine, while I married a man who was not him.

A few days later I finished the final touches on the dress. The silk lay across the worktable like something living, pale and perfect, and I stood back to look at it and let myself breathe. Then I went down toward the breakroom off the main hall to pour myself a coffee, because even in a house like this one, a girl still needs the small mercies.

That was when I saw Adriana's post.

She had put it out where the whole world could see it, which was its own kind of message, its own quiet blade slid between my ribs. In the photograph she was wearing my wedding gown. But it was not the gown I had envisioned, not the one I had bent over for hours with a needle and a prayer. Someone had taken shears to it. The gown had been cut in half and butchered into a scrap of a skirt, the delicate work I had labored over reduced to something cheap and grinning. And worse than the ruin of the silk was the rest of it. She was pressed against Salvatore, grinding into him, their bodies fused close as they danced, her half-second smile aimed straight through the lens at me.

The caption sat beneath it, sweet as poison.

[Salvatore knew I needed a dress, so he had this one sent specially to me. Gosh, I feel so spoiled right now!]

I could hardly believe my eyes. My heart slammed once against my ribs and then began to pound in a hard, sick rhythm, and the coffee turned to ash in my mouth before I even tasted it. Anger shot through me, hot and total, burning away every careful thing I had built in that house. Without a second thought I set the cup down so hard it rang against the marble and I stormed toward the fifth-floor ballroom, furious, my heels striking the obsidian floor loud enough that a soldier in the corridor stepped back to let me pass without a word. Even the enforcers know when a storm is not theirs to stop.

The great doors of the ballroom stood open. And there they were. Adriana and Salvatore, dancing as though the whole treacherous world had dissolved around them and left only the two of them standing in the wreckage of my work. Their bodies were pressed tight, swaying with an intensity that made it feel like they were the only two people alive in that gilded, silent room. He had his hand low on the ruined silk. She had her smile ready, already turning toward the sound of my arrival, already too fast.

"This is my wedding gown!" I shouted, unable to hold the fury behind my teeth for even one breath longer. My voice cracked across the marble and the music seemed to stumble, the room going still around us the way a room goes still when everyone in it understands that something has just been broken open that cannot be closed again. "How dare you give it to her? And ruin it like this?"