At least I was still alive. And this time, I had a life worth defending.
I wanted to drive home, but the memory surfaced like a slap: Salvatore had taken my bag. He'd slung it over his shoulder without asking, the way he always did, as though carrying my things entitled him to carry my fate. I had no choice but to follow the three figures ahead of me along the gravel path that wound through the estate gardens.
They stopped near a hedge of overgrown boxwood, half-hidden by shadow. I heard Salvatore's voice before I saw him, low and grating with impatience.
"Rosalia, baby, how long are we supposed to keep up this act? I can't stomach it anymore. Seraphina's out here playing games nobody asked her to play. Who knows what kind of filth she's dragged herself through?"
Giancarlo's voice slid in next, smooth as polished marble and just as cold. "Seraphina can't tell a real heirloom from a forgery. She couldn't tell loyalty from a lie. Is it any wonder some old man whispered a few pretty words and she ended up in his bed? A woman like that, carrying the Genovese name?" He let out a breath that was almost a laugh. "She was never fit to stand beside the Valenti Family. Rosalia, the ring from my mother's vault was always meant for you. You're the only one worthy of wearing it."
Rosalia looked between them, her dark eyes glistening with practiced vulnerability. "Seraphina has done terrible things, I know. But she was kind to me once. She took me in when I had nothing. How can I just abandon her?" Her voice trembled at the edges, delicate as spun glass. "If you two won't do as I ask, if you won't at least keep up appearances for my sake, then I have nothing left to say to either of you. Ever."
The effect was instantaneous. Two heirs of the most powerful crime families in Riviera City fell over themselves to apologize to a girl with no blood, no name, no territory. They tripped over each other's words, eager to grind me into the dirt if it meant lifting her an inch higher.
More than ten years. I had known them for more than ten years. And all of it, every shared meal, every whispered secret, every childhood oath sworn on summer nights, amounted to less than a few soft words from Rosalia Ferraro.
I pressed my knuckles against my mouth to keep the sound inside. Then I turned and walked away.
The night stretched endlessly around me. The streets of Riviera City were empty at that hour, the old brownstones and shuttered storefronts standing like tombstones in the dark. I walked the entire way home on a swollen ankle, each step a small act of penance for the fool I had been in my first life.
By the time I crossed the threshold of the Genovese estate, the ankle had ballooned to something grotesque, the skin taut and shining under the hallway light. Nonna Elisabetta took one look at it and her face crumpled. She disappeared into the kitchen and returned with a bottle of old liniment, the kind that smelled of camphor and rosemary, and she knelt on the floor to rub it into my skin with hands that had once commanded the respect of every Don in the city.
I could not let her carry my pain on top of her own. So I told her about the invitation.
I told her that I had been accepted into La Rete.
The bottle nearly slipped from her fingers. She looked up at me, and for a moment the years fell away from her face. The grief, the decline, the slow erosion of everything the Genovese name had once meant vanished behind a light I had not seen in her eyes since I was a child.
"My Seraphina." Her voice broke on the second syllable. "My girl is truly something. I am old, cara mia. I have been old for a long time. You are the only one left who can raise this Family from its knees."
I nodded. Tears burned behind my eyes, but I held them.
"After so many years." She cupped my face in her weathered hands. "After so many years of silence, the Genovese Family finally has something to celebrate. We will hold a proper feast. A gathering. We will invite everyone, and they will see that this Family still stands."
Her smile was radiant. It was the exact same smile she had worn the day she sent me to the blood-bound union ceremony in my previous life, the day she believed I was entering an alliance that would restore our honor. She had been so full of joy, so certain that Giancarlo Valenti would protect what was left of her world.
And then he never came. He abandoned the ceremony. He shattered the oath in front of every Family in Riviera City. And the shock of that public dishonor, the sheer, annihilating weight of it, stopped Nonna Elisabetta's heart where she stood.
She died on the floor of the chapel, surrounded by white flowers and the whispers of people who had already begun to forget her name.
Not again. Not in this life. I would burn the entire city to the ground before I let that happen again.
Nonna was old, and her body was fragile even if her spirit was iron. I took every detail of the feast upon myself. The venue, the guest list, the catering, the security. I handled it all.
Two days before the gathering, Giancarlo and Salvatore appeared at the estate gates. They came bearing gifts, as though a box of imported chocolate truffles, the kind I had loved as a child, could serve as absolution. They said they wanted to help with the preparations.
"Seraphina." Giancarlo's voice carried the careful warmth of a man who had rehearsed his contrition. "You haven't returned a single one of my messages. Are you still upset about what happened that night?"
Salvatore stood beside him, arms crossed, jaw tight. "We weren't trying to come down on you. We were looking out for you. In our world, reputation is everything. A woman's honor is the Family's honor. We just didn't want you making mistakes you couldn't take back."
I did not forgive them. I would never forgive them. But I allowed them to stay and help, because their presence served a purpose. They owed me debts from a lifetime they could not remember, debts written in blood and silence and years of cruelty that no apology could erase. There was no settling those accounts. All I wanted from this life was to never owe them anything again.
Since my parents' assassination, the Genovese Family had withered. The old alliances dried up. The phone stopped ringing. No one visited, no one paid tribute, no one so much as sent a card at Christmas. We had become ghosts in our own territory, and ghosts were easy to ignore, easy to rob, easy to destroy.
But an invitation to La Rete changed the calculus entirely. It announced to every Family, every crew, every ambitious soldier in Riviera City that the Genovese bloodline had produced something rare. A mind sharp enough to attract the attention of the most powerful shadow syndicate in the country. It meant the Genovese had a successor. It meant we were no longer prey.
Nonna understood this better than anyone. She treated the feast with the gravity of a war council, scrutinizing every detail, every name on the guest list, every arrangement of flowers and crystal. Nothing could be left to chance.
The night of the gathering arrived.
The grand hall of the Genovese estate had not been opened in years, but Nonna and I had restored it to its former glory. Crystal chandeliers threw fractured light across white linen tablecloths. Silver candelabras lined the center of the long table. The scent of fresh gardenias and aged wine hung in the air like a benediction. Riviera City's elite filled the room: capos, consiglieres, old-guard dons with silver hair and heavy rings, their wives draped in black silk and diamonds.
Rosalia entered behind Giancarlo and Salvatore.
She wore a gown that must have cost more than anything a girl from the slums had any right to own. Midnight blue, cut low, designed to make men forget she had no family crest to speak of. She paused just inside the entrance and let her gaze sweep the hall, taking in the chandeliers, the silver, the gathered power of a dozen families.
Envy flickered across her features, quick as a knife drawn and sheathed.
"Seraphina is so lucky," she murmured, her voice barely above a breath.
Then something harder settled into her expression. Something I recognized from the life before, though I had been too blind to see it then.
"But what does noble blood and a sharp mind matter in the end?" The words were almost inaudible, spoken to no one, meant for herself alone. "I still have ways to make you wish you were dead."
The lights in the hall dimmed.
Every screen mounted along the walls of the grand hall flickered to life simultaneously. The conversations died. Glasses paused halfway to lips. A hundred pairs of eyes turned upward.
The images were photographs. One after another, projected in merciless high definition across every surface. Each one showed me, or something designed to look exactly like me, naked, tangled in bedsheets with different men. Strangers. Faces I had never seen. Bodies I had never touched. The fabrications were seamless.
The silence lasted three seconds. Then the whispers began, spreading through the room like poison through a vein.
"Isn't that the Genovese girl? The eldest daughter?"
"Dio mio. And she's supposed to be the one restoring the Family's honor?"
"What do you expect? No mother, no father, no one to teach her rispetto. A girl raised without discipline ends up exactly like this."
"They said she slept her way into La Rete's good graces. Looks like the rumors were true."
