I had already explained everything, made my position clear to anyone in that house willing to listen. Now I stood in the narrow guest room on the second floor of the Moretti estate, folding the last of my clothes into a leather overnight bag that had seen better years. The room smelled of old wood polish and dust, as if the staff had stopped bothering to air it out the moment they learned who slept here. I pressed my thumbnail into the inside of my wrist, felt the familiar half-moon bite into skin, and told myself the next twenty-four hours were all that remained. One more night under the Moretti roof. Then Edinburgh. Then whatever hell the Bellandi name carried with it. At least it would be a hell I had chosen.
The door did not open. It slammed inward against the plaster hard enough to rattle the crucifix on the opposite wall.
Serafina walked in on heels that cracked against the hardwood like a judge's gavel. She wore a fitted black dress, gold earrings catching the overhead light, her chin tilted at the precise angle of someone who had already decided the conversation was won before it started. Her gaze swept the overnight bag, the bare hangers in the open wardrobe, the stripped bed, and her mouth curved into something that was not quite a smile. She looked at me with eyes full of defiance, the way someone looks at luggage they are glad to see packed.
She strode up to me, close enough that I could smell her perfume, something floral and expensive that clashed with the venom in her voice. "Bianca, do you really think you're so special just because you're our parents' biological daughter? They love me now."
The words landed the way she intended them to, each one placed like a card on a table during a rigged game. Her lower lashes fluttered once, a quick tremor that someone who did not know her tells might have mistaken for emotion. I knew better. That flutter meant the lie sitting behind the next sentence mattered to her more than the one she had just delivered.
"I've known all along," she continued, folding her arms and letting her weight settle onto one hip as though we were discussing something as trivial as dinner plans. "You're going to marry that lunatic for me. Isn't the bride price just one billion? After I marry Dante, there will be far more money. Plenty more."
She let the number hang in the stale air of the room. One billion. The figure Salvatore Moretti had negotiated for my hand, the sum the Bellandi outfit had agreed to funnel through clean channels in exchange for a blood-bound union that would open their shipping lanes through Moretti-controlled docks. I was the goods. The dowry was the receipt.
Her tone dripped with arrogance as she pressed on, and the floral perfume seemed to grow heavier with every sentence. "Dante's concession is going to generate more revenue than I could spend in ten lifetimes. The Moretti and Falcone families are far ahead in territory and connections. With us together, we'll be unstoppable."
She leaned closer. I could see the thin line of concealer beneath her left eye, the slight unevenness in her lipstick where she had reapplied it in a hurry. Her voice dropped to a vicious whisper, intimate and edged, the kind of voice reserved for confessionals and threats. "And you… you're just trading one hell for another. The Bellandi Family is cruel beyond words. Once you marry into their family, you might not even survive three days."
A pause. She tilted her head as though considering whether to say the rest.
"If you manage to live, you'll get the money. If you die… you'll leave it all behind, untouched."
Her cruel words echoed in my ears. They bounced off the bare walls, the empty hangers, the stripped mattress, the crucifix that no one in this house had prayed to on my behalf. Every syllable was designed to remind me that in the Moretti ledger I was an entry to be written off, a cost of doing business, a daughter whose only remaining value was the price tag someone else had stapled to her name. The anger I'd been holding back for so long, through the coma, through the hospital silence, through the nurses' whispered pity, through the moment I had watched my own parents choose the daughter they had purchased over the one they had made, finally exploded.
I raised my hand and slapped her hard across the face. The sharp sound rang through the room like a gunshot.
It was louder than I expected. It silenced the corridor outside. Somewhere down the hall a floorboard creaked as if one of the household staff had frozen mid-step, unwilling to be a witness. The imprint of my fingers bloomed pink across Serafina's cheekbone, vivid against the careful foundation she wore like armor, and I watched the shock crack through her composure the way a stone cracks a frozen pond.
A cold smile spread across my lips as I glared at her.
"Really? Then I hope you get exactly what you deserve."
Serafina's hand flew to her cheek. She stared at me, her manicured nails pressing into the reddening skin, and for the first time since she had walked through that door the superiority drained out of her face. What replaced it was not fear. It was outrage, the kind that comes from someone who has never once been made to feel consequence.
"You… you dare hit me? Bianca, how dare you hit me!"
I didn't waste a single breath on her. I swung again. Harder. The second slap connected with a crack that I felt all the way up to my shoulder, and this time blood welled instantly at the corner of her mouth. A thin crimson line slid down her chin, bright against her pale skin, and dripped onto the collar of her black dress like a seal on a letter I had been composing in silence for years.
At that moment, the sound of hurried footsteps echoed outside, heavy and careless, the stride of a man who expected doors to open before he reached them. The door burst inward for the second time. Dante Falcone filled the frame, broad-shouldered in a charcoal suit, his jaw locked and his dark eyes already scanning the room before his body had fully crossed the threshold. The signet ring on his right hand caught the light as his fingers curled. The second he saw Serafina's bloody mouth, his eyes filled with rage so intense it was almost murderous. His hand moved to the ring, rolling it over the knuckle once, twice, a tic I had learned to read the way sailors read a darkening sky.
"Bianca! Have you gone mad? Who gave you the right to hit her?"
He did not wait for an answer. He crossed the room in three strides, boots grinding grit into the hardwood, and pulled Serafina into his arms. She folded against his chest as though she had been rehearsing the collapse for hours, her bloodied lip pressed to the lapel of his jacket, her fingers clutching the fabric. He tilted her face upward and carefully wiped the blood from her lips with the pad of his thumb, and the tenderness in that gesture cut deeper than any slap.
Before I could speak, before I could explain, before I could do anything at all, his open palm struck my face with a loud crack. Pain exploded across my cheek, white-hot and instantaneous. My head jerked to the side, my vision swimming, and my mouth filled with the metallic taste of blood. The inside of my cheek had split against my teeth. I tasted iron and salt and something that might have been the last residue of whatever loyalty I had ever felt for the man standing in front of me.
I swallowed it down. Slowly, deliberately, I lifted my head and looked at him. His chest was heaving, his ring still catching the light, Serafina still curled against him like a wounded bird performing for an audience. I did not give him my anger. I gave him something worse.
I smiled. Cold. Finished.
"Dante, I hope you won't regret this."
My parents arrived right after him, Salvatore Moretti leading with his broad frame and Elena a half-step behind, her hand already reaching for the doorframe as though she needed its support. They crossed into the room and immediately rushed to my side. Not to protect me. Not to ask what had happened. Not to check the blood I could feel pooling against my gum line. They came to scold me like I was a stranger who had wandered uninvited into a house that no longer considered her family.
"Bianca, you ungrateful wretch! How could you hurt Serafina like this? What has she ever done to you?"
Elena's voice cracked on the last word, and her fingers moved to the front of her blouse, smoothing a wrinkle that was not there, pressing and pressing at the fabric as though she could iron out the scene before her into something more palatable to her conscience.
Serafina clung to Dante, crying pitifully, her shoulders shaking with sobs that came at perfectly timed intervals. Yet her trembling voice was laced with false kindness as she spoke, each word calibrated to land like a blade wrapped in silk. "Dante, Mum, Dad… please don't scold Bianca anymore. It's my fault. I shouldn't have upset her."
She drew a shuddering breath, pressed her face deeper into Dante's chest, and delivered the final line with the precision of someone who had practiced it in the mirror. "I'm leaving tomorrow. I won't trouble this family again. I just don't want her to keep being unhappy because of me…"
Her performance only added fuel to the fire. Salvatore's face hardened, his thumb tapping once against the outside of his thigh, the same gesture he used at the head of the dining table before reducing family to numbers. Dante's expression became even more grim. His rage was nearly uncontrollable, a muscle twitching in his jaw, his hand still curled at his side as though the first strike had not been enough.
Dante then shouted toward the doorway, a single sharp command, and two enforcers in black entered the room with the silent coordination of men who had been waiting on the other side of the wall. Their faces were blank. Their hands were gloved.
"Drag her outside. Hang her upside down from the tree in the yard," he ordered.
He paused. The room was so quiet I could hear Serafina's breathing, deliberate and theatrical, against his jacket. His tone cut me like a knife when he continued. "Let the sun warm her dark, filthy heart. The Falcone Family does not tolerate Sisters as vile as her."
The enforcers moved without hesitation, seizing me by the arms. Their grips were iron, indifferent, the grip of men who did not distinguish between a woman and a crate that needed moving.
"Dante! Let me go! You can't do this to me!"
But no one listened. Not the enforcers whose fingers dug into the soft flesh above my elbows. Not Salvatore, who watched from the doorway with an expression that might have been discomfort or might have been nothing at all. Not Elena, who had turned her face away entirely. They dragged me down the corridor, through the back entrance, and out into the courtyard where the old oak spread its branches over the flagstones like a hand waiting to close.
My struggles were meaningless against their strength. I kicked, twisted, threw my weight sideways, and they adjusted their grip without breaking stride as though they had done this a hundred times before for men who had displeased the Falcone heir.
The rough rope bit into my ankles as they tied me up, the hemp fibers scraping skin that was still tender from the hospital. With a hard yank, they hoisted me upside down from the thick lowest branch. The world inverted. Blood rushed to my head, making me dizzy and nauseous, the pressure building behind my eyes until the courtyard swam in blurred greens and grays.
The scorching midday sun beat down mercilessly on my body. My skin burned. My chest tightened. My breath came in ragged gasps that tasted of rope fiber and heated air and the distant smell of rosemary from the kitchen garden no one had ever let me tend. Through the haze of heat and pain, I tilted my head, the movement sending a wave of vertigo crashing through me, and caught sight of the living room window.
Inside, Dante was tenderly applying medicine to Serafina's wounds, dabbing at the split lip I had given her with a cotton pad as though it were a war injury. My parents sat beside her, speaking softly, comforting her, Elena's hand resting on Serafina's knee and Salvatore nodding along to whatever gentle fiction she was spinning. The three of them looked like a warm, happy family, framed by the window like a portrait commissioned to hang over a fireplace, and I was the shadow they had cut out of the canvas.
Tears streamed from my eyes, falling upward from my perspective, dropping down to the flagstones below. The hot sun dried them instantly, leaving no trace. No evidence. No record that I had broken at all. I clenched my teeth until my jaw ached and swore silently to myself.
Just one day. I only had to endure this for one day. When I got free, I would make every single one of them pay for what they had done to me.
I pressed my thumbnail into the inside of my wrist, felt the crescent form even through the numbness spreading down my arms, and held it there like a brand. A promise. A receipt of my own.
Meanwhile, the sunlight grew hotter and hotter. My vision blurred. The courtyard, the oak, the rope, the window with its happy family portrait, all of it spun wildly around me, faster and faster, until the edges dissolved and the center followed.
Finally, everything went black.
