"I agree to marry that man instead of Serafina. But on one condition. I want one billion and a letter of you announcing us breaking off as family."
I stood inside the family study, the room where every arrangement that had ever shaped the Moretti bloodline had been decided beneath the oil portrait of my grandfather and the faint, permanent smell of old leather and cold cigar ash. I tossed the agreement onto the table. The pages fanned once and settled against the green felt blotter, and the silence that followed pressed against every wall.
The moment I finished speaking, my father slammed his wine glass onto the floor in rage.
"One billion? Do you want to drain the Moretti Family dry?"
The glass shattered against the marble, letting its sharp shards slice into my ankle. I felt the sting distantly, the way you feel rain when you are already soaked through. It did not matter. Instead, I just let out a smile while looking up at my biological parents, the Don and his wife, seated across from me like a tribunal. Salvatore Moretti's jaw was set, the cords in his neck tight. Beside him, Elena smoothed a wrinkle that was not there on the sleeve of her silk blouse, her eyes already calculating how to reshape whatever came next into something she could live with.
"What? Is Serafina's life not worth that much?"
My father froze for a few seconds, staring at me with suspicion. His thumb came down once against the tabletop, a single muted tap, the gesture he always made before he started converting people into numbers.
"Why are you suddenly agreeing to this? Don't you love Dante the most?"
I let out a bitter laugh, which caused my ribs to throb with the effort. Three of them were still cracked beneath the wrapping Dr. Ricci had wound around my torso five days ago, and every breath reminded me that the body keeps its own accounts even when the heart tries to close the books.
Two weeks ago, it was my twenty-fifth birthday. Unfortunately, I had been kidnapped. The kidnapping was arranged by my so-called sister, Serafina Moretti.
The men she hired were not street-level thugs. They were professionals, the kind who knew how to work a body without leaving marks that would show in a casket and who understood that real terror is not about volume but about duration. They broke three of my ribs and whipped my back until it was raw and bleeding. I had always suffered from claustrophobia, so they locked me in a small, dark room for a full twenty-four hours, a windowless storage space beneath a warehouse on the docks where the Moretti shipping containers were stacked six high. The air tasted of rust and brine, and the walls were close enough that I could press both palms flat against opposite sides. Just when I was losing hope, Dante Falcone and his soldiers found me.
His eyes were filled with tears as he looked at my bloodied body. The Falcone heir, the man whose signet ring I had kissed a hundred times, dropped to his knees on the filthy concrete as though the sight of me had cut something vital behind his ribs.
"Bianca, please don't close your eyes. We're almost at the clinic. Just hold on a little longer."
I clung to his scent, sandalwood and gunmetal and the starch of his collar, comforting myself with it until we reached the emergency room at the family clinic on the north side. The moment I was on the bed, I fell into a deep sleep, the kind that is less rest than surrender. When I woke, my entire body trembled with pain as if my bones were being broken apart and pieced back together again, and the overhead light was a white blade that made my eyes water.
As I was about to call for help, I overheard Dante speaking with his aide just outside the door. The hallway was tile, and tile carries voices the way water carries ripples.
"The crew who originally took Miss Moretti have been caught," Nico DeLuca reported. I could picture him without seeing him, his stack of papers aligned edge to edge before he delivered information that could not be softened. "They confessed. It really was Miss Moretti who hired them to stage the whole thing."
Dante's face must have gone grim. He then sneered, his voice dripping with mockery as he said, "Serafina was right then."
Nico hesitated, then continued carefully, "But why did you hire someone to keep her locked up for another twenty-four hours? Miss Moretti looked seriously injured when we found her."
Dante's tone turned cold as ice. "She loves playing the victim so much. That's why I gave her a real lesson. The crew called Serafina for ransom money. She was so scared she came down with a fever."
"I already told those men to just rough her up a little, nothing serious. She's just too fragile."
Lying in my clinic bed, my scalp prickled and a chill swept through my entire body. So this was the truth. Serafina had already blamed everything on me, calling it my own scheme, and Dante believed her completely. The man who had wept over my broken body had been the one who ordered the extra twenty-four hours in the dark. He had paid for my terror and then knelt beside me as though he were my savior.
I pressed my thumbnail into the inside of my wrist until a pale crescent appeared, a habit I had learned in childhood when the panic needed somewhere to go that was not my face.
When I was eighteen years old, the Moretti Family finally brought me back home. I had spent my childhood outside the compound, raised by distant relations who never explained why a Don's blood daughter lived without the Don's name. That was when I learned about the arranged marriage between the Falcone and Moretti families. Everyone in London's underworld whispered that Dante and Serafina were childhood sweethearts, raised in each other's orbit at Sunday dinners and communion parties, and that he would definitely choose her when the alliance was formalized.
Surprisingly, Dante fell madly in love with me instead. He pursued me relentlessly, showed up at every family gathering with his attention fixed on me like a scope, while Serafina accused me of stealing everything that should have been hers. Yet Dante responded by looking at her coldly with a grim face.
"I only care about your sister. You're the one who has been enjoying everything all along. Bianca has suffered for years outside without saying a word, so why are you making such a fuss?"
Back then, he stood firmly by my side and gave me a sense of safety and love. Unfortunately, that love had now vanished. It had expired like a lie. Like a pact drawn up in disappearing ink, binding only until the signer chose not to remember.
Taking a deep breath, I pushed away my thoughts and asked calmly, "Have you decided yet?"
Salvatore and Elena exchanged looks. I knew what they were weighing. The Bellandi Family's reputation preceded them, carried north from Edinburgh in cautionary whispers traded at sit-downs and funeral receptions. Lorenzo Bellandi was not a man who made alliances lightly, and the rumors about what happened to those who displeased him varied only in the method, never in the outcome. After a long pause, they finally nodded before signing the agreement and pressing their fingerprints on it, the old way, ink and skin, because in this world a signature without a print was just a suggestion.
"Fine. In seven days, you'll receive the money to make the alliance ceremony happen. But you must not reveal anything about this marriage exchange."
I grabbed the agreement before turning to leave. However, my chest was aching as though my heart was being torn apart. Only then did I fully realize that they had never loved me. My father had tapped the table, done his arithmetic, and concluded that one billion was a price he could pay to keep Serafina safe from the Bellandi arrangement. My mother had smoothed her sleeve and let it happen. Neither of them had asked about my ribs, my back, or the twenty-four hours in the dark.
The only person my parents cared about was Serafina, their adopted daughter who was not even related to them by blood. Since that was the truth, I no longer wanted a family or love. I would give them exactly what they wanted, and then I would give them what they had earned.
After that, I pulled out my phone and called Sofia Conti. She picked up on the second ring, the way she always did when the caller was me.
"Find all the security footage that proves Serafina's involvement in my kidnapping."
After a brief pause, I added, "Also, spread the word about the new concession. Get Dante to invest through the Falcone front companies, then cut off access to the critical supply routes for both the Falcone and Moretti operations."
Within seven days, I would give them a gift that they would never forget. Sofia said nothing for a moment, and in that silence I heard her fingernail hover near the screen, not yet pressing, testing whether the truth on the other end was intact. Then she exhaled once and told me she understood.
I ended the call and gathered every photo of me and Dante from the drawer beside the study door, pictures from charity galas, from the private garden behind the Falcone estate, from the night he had put his signet ring in my palm and told me it would be mine one day. One by one, I tossed them onto the marble floor and set them on fire with the brass lighter that had belonged to my grandfather.
Watching the flames rise, I whispered coldly, "This time, we'll never meet again."
The fire ate through the last photograph, curling the edge of Dante's smile into black, and the smoke alarm in the hallway stayed silent because in a house like this, someone had disconnected it long ago.
