"We get to keep protecting you now! Four years isn't enough, though. We're talking a lifetime."
A few girls passing by the social club watched us with open envy.
I felt nothing.
In my previous life, all four of us had ended up in the same territory. Same circles. Same obligations sealed at the matriarch's table.
I'd worked myself to the bone, studying the Family's operations, throwing myself into every task the elders set before me, all for a better future. All to prove the Ashford name still meant something on the Seaboard.
But in the end, my seat in the Family council and the patronage I'd earned were quietly taken from me and handed to Lydia.
Word on the street spread that I'd bought my standing on my back, that I'd been sleeping with one of the old guard to secure my position.
I was isolated and frozen out for four straight years. No one sat with me at the Sunday table. No soldier acknowledged me in the halls.
Back then, these two had sworn up and down they'd stand by me. Protect me. Blood-bound, they'd called it.
It wasn't until after I died that I learned they were the ones behind all of it.
Through all those endless sleepless nights, all those hours crying until dawn, they'd been feeding my pain to their precious Lydia to make her smile.
When I said nothing, Lydia's voice turned sour.
"Vera is so lucky. Born into a Family bloodline, a pampered heiress, and two blood-bound companions who'd do anything for her."
"I could never be that lucky. Without Vera's patronage, I wouldn't even have a Family willing to shelter me." The moment those words left her mouth, both men's faces softened with concern. Her ring finger brushed her bottom lip, soft as a blessing.
"Don't say that, Lydia. You're beautiful and talented. You've got an amazing future ahead of you. Once you're established, I'll have my father set you up running one of our front operations. General manager of a Vale house, at minimum." Daphne ran her thumb along the inside of his signet ring as he said it.
"No, Lydia, come to the Marlowe organization instead. I'll give you a higher position, a bigger cut, whatever you want. It's yours."
The two of them fell over each other trying to one-up their offers for Lydia.
The bitterness was hard to swallow.
All these years of knowing each other, and they had never once made that kind of promise to me. Never once shown me that kind of favoritism.
Of course. Love that's performed can never compare to devotion that comes from the heart.
I was about to leave when Daphne noticed something was off.
He reached for my hand, a trace of guilt flickering across his face.
"Vera, don't overthink it. We're only good to Lydia because she's your friend."
Maeve ruffled my hair the way he used to when we were kids, back when the three of us ran wild through the estate gardens and no one had taught us yet what a blood debt was.
"Stop reading into things. Everything's settled now. Let's go for a drive. We got you a present."
I nodded. Didn't refuse.
I was leaving soon anyway.
I just wanted one last look at this territory where the three of us had grown up together. The streets the Families controlled, the old restaurants where our grandfathers had once broken bread, the waterfront where the boundary lines had been drawn before any of us were born.
In the garage, Daphne and Maeve both scrambled to get Lydia into their front passenger seat.
Lydia looked at me with that perfectly rehearsed expression of reluctance. Her fingers drifted to the hollow of her throat.
"I thought the front seat was only for Vera?"
"She'll be upset if I sit there, won't she?"
Daphne was faster. He guided Lydia into the passenger seat and buckled her in.
"She doesn't deser—" He caught himself. "She won't mind. She's got the best temper of anyone I know."
Maeve shot Daphne an annoyed glare. The knuckles of his right hand twitched toward his jaw, then he forced his palm flat against his thigh and held it there, the restraint visible.
He slammed his car door shut, visibly irritated.
It wasn't until the engines were about to start that either of them realized I still wasn't in a car.
They rolled down their windows and looked at each other.
Both wanted to explain. Neither could find a single good reason.
"It's fine. I'll drive myself."
The relief on both their faces was instant and simultaneous, though a flicker of confusion followed, as if my calm wasn't what they'd expected.
"Vera..."
I rolled my window up. I didn't want to hear another manufactured word.
But the scenery along the road still pulled old memories to the surface, one after another. The iron gates of the Vale estate. The corner where Maeve had bloodied a boy's nose for looking at me wrong when we were twelve. The old social club where the capos used to let us sit in the back booth and eat cannoli while they talked Family business in voices too low for children to hear.
The three of us were blood-bound companions who'd grown up side by side, raised across allied Families with the understanding that bonds formed at the matriarch's table were sacred.
For as long as I could remember, both the Vale and Marlowe households had competed to claim me as a future daughter-in-law. The Ashford bloodline was old, and old blood still carried weight on the Seaboard, even when the money and the soldiers were gone.
Then my parents died, gunned down in what the Families called an accident but no one truly believed was one, and the once-mighty Ashford Family shrank down to just me and my grandmother, holding on to each other with nothing else left.
