Because soon, we would no longer be bound to one another at all. Soon the pact that chained me to the Falcone name would be nothing but ash and signatures.
Without Lorenzo's protection draped over me like borrowed armor, the others in that room wasted no breath. The insults came quick and low, the way soldiers speak when they know the Underboss has already turned his back on a woman. Hands found my shoulders, my arms, and shoved me toward the door as though I were something spoiled and reeking, a thing to be carried out with the rest of the refuse. No one met my eyes. In the world of the Families, that is its own kind of sentence. When they stop looking at you, you have already ceased to exist.
I staggered into the back-room washroom off the infirmary corridor, the tile cold beneath my shoes, and caught the edge of the marble sink before my knees could betray me. The mirror threw back a woman I barely recognized. Pale. Hollow at the temples where they had bled me too many times. My thumb found the naked band of skin on my left hand where a wedding ring used to sit, and I pressed down hard, as if I could summon back a promise that had never been real. The phantom weight of it was the only thing that had ever made me feel safe. Now even that was a lie I had let them tell me.
I turned the tap and began to wash the shame from my face, and just as the water ran warm the door creaked open behind me.
Nadia stepped inside.
She did not rush. She let the door fall shut and stood with her arms crossed, her shoulders loose, her chin lifted at exactly the angle the cameras loved. Every trace of the trembling, weeping girl who had knelt for the Family's soldiers minutes ago had drained away. That performance had served its purpose and been folded neatly and put away. What remained was something colder. In her place stood a woman who had already won and knew it, who wore victory the way our mother wore her pearls.
"My dear sister." Her voice curled soft as smoke. "How does it feel to be hated by everyone all over again? Pretty familiar, isn't it?"
I said nothing. The water dripped from my chin.
"Look at that glare." She tilted her head, studying me the way one studies a wounded animal, with idle amusement and no fear at all. "You hate me, don't you? Let me guess. You've finally realized that it was Lorenzo who personally took the knife to you. Who cut it out of you with his own gloved hands and gave it to me."
The room seemed to shrink. Somewhere down the corridor a soldier laughed at nothing, and the sound reached me thin and distant, as if through deep water.
"And don't tell me you thought showing up here would make Sterling and Everett feel guilty." She almost pitied me then, and that was the worst of it, the pity. "Let me save you the trouble, Serafina. They planned the whole thing with Lorenzo from the very start. The abduction. The road. The room they took you to. All of it, sanctioned. Everett gave the word himself."
My thumb pressed harder against the empty band of skin. Bone against bone. I felt the pulse there, wild and useless.
"They couldn't bear to watch me lose the ability to give the Family an heir. Not so young. Not their golden girl." She smiled, and it did not reach her eyes. "So naturally, you had to be the one to make the sacrifice. That's what the lesser twin is for. Surely you understood that. You've always understood that."
I stood frozen, and the words went into me the way a blade goes in slow, without heat, so that the pain arrives a moment late and then never leaves.
"Honestly," she went on, warming to it, "I should thank you, sis. Without your perfectly functional womb, my baby wouldn't have grown so strong. So healthy. He kicks now. Did you know that?" Her hand drifted to her belly, tender, obscene. "Every kick, you gave me. Isn't that something."
Tears blurred my vision until the sterile white of the room ran together like spilled paint. My world had already shattered once, back in that dark room where I woke stitched and empty. But this was worse. This was the slow, deliberate confirmation that there had never been a single hand I could have reached for in the dark. Every person I had ever trusted, every one who had ever kissed my forehead or called me daughter, had signed my name away in blood before I was old enough to know what a signature cost.
"How could you do this to me?" My voice cracked on it, raw. "Aren't you afraid of karma?"
Nadia let out a sharp laugh, and it came a half-beat too fast, the way it always did when something true grazed too close. Her fingers rose and brushed the hollow of her own throat, the one flinch her performance could never fully swallow. Then it was gone, smoothed over, and she reached behind her back and drew out a small glass vial of dark red liquid.
Before I could understand what she meant to do, she uncapped it and poured the whole of it down her legs, letting it run in thick crimson ribbons over her skin, over the pale silk, staining everything the color of a fresh wound.
"Karma?" She said the word like it belonged to children and fools. "Serafina, if Lorenzo didn't still need you as the vein he bleeds for me, do you truly believe he'd keep you breathing? You are a living tribute. Nothing more. A body kept useful."
She stepped back toward the door, admiring her own handiwork, the false blood pooling bright at her feet.
"Face it. You were born to kneel beneath me. Born to have everything taken and give thanks for the privilege." Her eyes found mine, and for one instant there was nothing behind them at all, nothing human, only the cold arithmetic of a woman who had always known which twin the Family would choose. "So do me one last favor, dear sister. Watch closely. Watch how far Lorenzo Falcone is willing to go for me."
