Anya POV
They dressed me in clean silk.
White. Virgin wool cashmere lined the collar. A Peter Pan neckline that covered the bruises blooming along my collarbone but couldn't hide the way my shoulders hunched inward to protect my shattered ribs. The dress was backless—they'd chosen it deliberately—and the raw welts wept clear fluid that soaked through the fabric in patches within the first hour.
Beneath the silk, my back was a ruin. Every breath stretched the torn skin. Every heartbeat pulsed against the swelling. The blood had begun to dry, a stiff crust that cracked and pulled when I moved.
The Underboss's mansion rose before us, an obsidian monolith against the black winter sky. Every step up the marble stairs sent a hot needle through my spine. One step. Breathe. Two steps. Don't fall. Three steps. The blood is seeping again, I can feel it sliding down my back, and if anyone sees—
My mother's fingers clamped around my arm. Right over the bruise from where she'd grabbed me at dinner. The pressure was precise, deliberate—her thumb digging into the tender muscle until I saw stars.
"Smile," she hissed into my ear. Her breath was hot and smelled of gin. "Cry in there, and you'll regret it when we get home."
I didn't answer. I didn't know how to smile anymore. My face had forgotten the mechanics of it.
The grand living room swallowed us whole.
The air was thick with cigar smoke and expensive perfume—a nauseating cocktail that coated my windpipe like grease. Crystal chandeliers threw fractured light across the crowd. Aunts dripped with heavy jewels. Cousins sipped champagne from flutes so thin the glass was nearly invisible. Syndicate associates clustered in dark corners, their laughter low and guttural, their eyes tracking every movement in the room.
My mother dragged me into the center.
The piano stopped mid-note. The low hum of chatter died in stages—first the women, then the men, then even the servers frozen in place with their silver trays. Every head turned. Eyes from every angle, pinning me in place like a butterfly to a board.
"Look at this liability."
Camilla's voice rang out, clear and theatrical, a performer commanding her stage. She pressed a manicured hand to her chest, fingers splayed, the picture of maternal suffering.
"She caused a massive scene at dinner tonight. Over a cat." She let the word hang in the air, her lips twisting into a grimace of disbelief. "A worthless, diseased stray animal. We give her everything—money, protection, a name that opens every door in this city—and she repays us with fake panic attacks and hysterical tears."
A murmur rippled through the crowd. Not shock. Not sympathy. Just the low, satisfied hum of people witnessing a scandal that wasn't theirs.
My uncle, the Underboss, frowned at me from his leather armchair. His cigar burned, a single red eye in the dim light. The smoke curled around his head like a warning halo.
"You're getting much too old for these childish games, Anya."
"She's useless," my father added.
He strode to the bar. His footsteps were heavy, deliberate. The room parted for him—bodies shifting aside, creating a path, because no one in their right mind stood between Carlo and his target.
He poured himself four fingers of whiskey. No ice. His knuckles were still red and raw from where the belt had rubbed against them.
"No talent for the family business. Too soft for enforcement. Too stupid for finance." He took a long swallow, his throat working. "And no Mafia heir will marry a girl who shakes at the first loud noise."
Laughter.
Not loud. Not open. A low, mocking ripple that moved through the room like a current. My cousins whispered behind their crystal glasses, their eyes glittering with amusement. My aunts shook their heads in practiced pity—the kind of pity that was indistinguishable from contempt.
I looked at their faces. Uncle Matteo, who had held me as a baby. Aunt Lucia, who had braided my hair at my First Communion. Cousin Marco, who had taught me to climb trees when I was six. They had all watched. They had all known. And they had done nothing.
The stone that settled in my chest was heavy enough to crack ribs.
They were supposed to protect me. They were family. But family didn't applaud when a father beat his daughter. Family didn't serve hors d'oeuvres while a mother tore apart her child's mind.
"I'm not sick."
My voice came out quiet. But it carried—cutting through the murmuring, the clinking glasses, the low pulse of classical music drifting from the hidden speakers.
Camilla's head snapped toward me. Her eyes narrowed, the pupils contracting to dark pinpoints. "Excuse me?"
I lifted my chin. The motion pulled at the welts on my back, fire blooming across my shoulder blades. But I held her gaze. For the first time in my life, I looked directly into those cold, calculating eyes and didn't flinch away.
"I'm not sick." The words came louder now, steadier. "I'm terrified of you. Both of you."
The silence that followed was absolute.
No one breathed. A champagne flute stopped halfway to someone's lips. A cigar burned forgotten in an ashtray. One of my younger cousins—twelve years old, wide-eyed, still innocent—clutched her mother's sleeve with white-knuckled fingers.
In our world, disrespecting a Capo in public wasn't an insult. It was a death wish.
"Do you really think your blood-soaked, abusive method is honorable?"
The word honorable landed like a slap. I saw my father's jaw tighten, a muscle jumping beneath his ear. A vein pulsed at his temple, thick and purple.
"You beat me until I bleed and call it discipline." My voice shook now, a tremor I couldn't control. "You kill innocent things and call it strength. You—"
Carlo's glass hit the marble floor and exploded.
Whiskey sprayed across white stone. Crystal shards scattered, glittering like ice under the chandelier light. A dark flush crept up his neck, staining his collar, spreading across his cheeks in mottled purple patches.
He lunged.
His fist came up, and I saw it coming—the same way I'd seen it coming a hundred times before. I didn't run. I didn't duck. I didn't even close my eyes. I just stood there, my battered body braced, my weight settled, waiting for the impact with the tired acceptance of someone who had stopped expecting rescue a long time ago.
"Not in my house, Carlo."
My uncle's voice cut through the chaos. He'd risen from his armchair with surprising speed for a man his size, and his hand clamped around my father's forearm. The two men locked eyes. Something passed between them—a silent negotiation, a reminder of hierarchy.
"No blood on my floors tonight."
Carlo's breath came in ragged heaves. His eyes, wild with fury, darted from his brother to me and back again. His fist trembled in the air, still raised, still ready. I could see the war behind his eyes—the primal need to hurt fighting against the cold calculation of a man who understood power.
After a long moment, he lowered his arm.
"You're a disgrace," he spat. The words came out wet, flecks of spit landing on my cheek. I didn't wipe them away.
Camilla had gone very still. The performance of maternal suffering had dropped away, and underneath it was something colder, sharper—the true face of a woman who had never loved anything that didn't serve her ambitions.
She pointed toward the front door. Her finger, wrapped in a two-carat diamond, didn't waver.
"If you walk out that door right now, Anya, you're stripped of this family name. You'll have nothing. You'll be nothing. The streets will swallow you whole, and no one will remember you existed."
I looked into her eyes.
And I saw it. Not hatred. Not anger. Something worse. Emptiness. A void where a mother's love should have been. She looked at me the way a gambler looks at a losing hand—with irritation, not grief. A defective asset. A bad investment. Something to be discarded before it dragged down the portfolio.
The truth settled into my bones with the weight of a stone sinking into dark water:
I was already nothing to them. I always had been.
I turned around.
The crowd parted for me the same way it had parted for my father—a path of bodies shifting aside, eyes down, breaths held. But this parting was different. This was the parting of people who didn't want to be contaminated by proximity to a falling star.
I walked toward the heavy oak doors. As I passed the entryway closet, I reached in and pulled out the first coat my fingers found—a thick wool overcoat, black, three sizes too big. Men's. It smelled of cigar smoke and cedar. I wrapped it around my battered body, pulling the collar up around my neck.
The doors swung open. The cold hit my face like a slap.
Behind me, I heard the deadbolt slide home with a dull, final thud.
It was the freest sound I'd ever heard.
But freedom, I would learn, was just another word for being hunted without a pack.
