The silk thread scraped across my palm, and the wounds that hadn't yet healed split open again — blood seeping fresh, slow and warm, pooling in the creases of my skin before it fell. In an instant it stained the clean pouch red, blooming through the pale fabric like a confession I hadn't meant to make. All those hours stitching through the night, the careful work of fingers that trembled not from cold but from something far worse, destroyed in a single moment. The mandarin ducks I had embroidered with such desperate precision were drowning now in the color of what I'd given.
The tears I'd been holding back finally fell, hot against my bruised cheeks, and I couldn't stop myself from looking up at them. Marcello, whose jaw was set like granite, and Enzo, whose broad shoulders filled the doorway as if even this room in the crumbling Valente compound wasn't large enough to contain his contempt. Both of them standing there, united in their disgust, while the silk pouch bled in my hands.
"If it were me being sent off in a subordinate marriage pact to the Cripple," I said, and my voice cracked on the word but I did not let it break, "would you two still react like this?"
"You're still picking fights over jealousy at a time like this!" Marcello's right fist clenched and unclenched at his side, that rehearsal of violence his body could never stop performing. "Don't think embroidering some pouch is going to win us over. We will never forgive what you did to Gianna."
Enzo's hand drifted toward the inside pocket of his jacket — the one that had been empty for months, the one where the photograph of me as a girl had once lived. The hand found nothing. It never did. But the reflex remained, an involuntary confession his body couldn't stop making. He opened his mouth to echo Marcello's words, his expression already sharpened into something righteous and cruel.
Halfway through, they both stopped.
They'd seen the character stitched on the pouch. Ravenna. The name embroidered in thread the color of old blood, surrounded by mandarin ducks swimming through water — the traditional symbol of union, of a bride going willingly to her husband. Their faces changed instantly, and the silence that dropped over the room was the kind I had come to associate with the moments before someone in this world got hurt.
"This pouch wasn't for us?" Marcello stepped closer, his voice dropping into something low and dangerous. The clenching of his fist quickened. "Mandarin ducks in the water — Serafina, what exactly are you playing at? Are you deliberately trying to humiliate Gianna?"
Enzo's lip curled. "When are you going to grow up? All you know how to do is stir up jealousy and make yourself a nuisance. You're completely useless!"
The words landed like blows, each one precise, each one aimed at the places where I was already broken.
They were the ones who promised to cherish me for life. Marcello, my brother, my blood — the boy who once carried me on his shoulders through the courtyard of this very compound, who swore on our father's grave that he would keep me safe. Enzo, whose alliance ring I had worn since I was sixteen, whose family had broken bread at our table, who had kissed my forehead on the night of our formal promise and whispered that nothing would ever come between us.
They were the ones now calling me useless and childish.
They were the ones who'd bungled the family's politics — Marcello outmaneuvered at every turn by rivals who smelled blood in the water, Enzo's Castellani connections crumbling because he was too proud to bend and too reckless to plan. Two men playing at being Dons in a world that ate pretenders alive, and between them they had driven both families to the edge of ruin.
They were the ones who pitied Gianna yet lacked the power to stand against Dominic Ravenna's empire.
And still they shoved every last bit of blame onto me.
As if the moment Gianna appeared, my very existence became a mistake. As if the trueborn daughter of Don Valente — the man whose blood ran through the foundations of this house, whose name had once made the Commission itself pay attention — could be reduced to nothing by a charity case with soft eyes and a gift for weeping on cue.
My right hand drifted to the thin scar along my left wrist. Not consciously. It never was. The scar was a reflex, a bruise I kept pressing to confirm it still hurt, to confirm I was still here, still standing, still capable of deciding that I would not bend.
Fine, then. I would leave.
Leave for good, and never come back.
I'd barely stepped into the courtyard — the air thick with the scent of roses that had grown wild and neglected since my father's assassination, the stone walkways cracked where no one had bothered to repair them — when Gianna sidled up to me. Triumph was written all over her face, though she wore it beneath a mask of gentle concern that might have fooled anyone who hadn't spent years learning the precise architecture of her performance. Her left hand rested delicately against her collarbone, fingers splayed like a woman catching her breath from emotion. The picture of innocence. The picture of a stolen life.
"Serafina," she murmured, and the sweetness in her voice was poisoned sugar, "so what if you're the trueborn daughter of the Valente family? Everything that's yours will be mine soon enough!"
The mask didn't slip. It never did when she was this confident. The fingers at her collarbone stayed perfectly splayed, perfectly still — the consummate performance of a woman who had already won and knew it.
Then she let out a sudden cry, sharp and theatrical, and tumbled into the overgrown rose bushes that lined the courtyard wall. The thorns caught her dress and scratched her arms, and the sound she made — that practiced, wounded-bird keen — carried across the compound like a siren.
