After I was given a second life, I tore up the offer from the Lombardi Syndicate with my own two hands. And I turned away the burning vows of the two heirs every house in the territory called princes.
All because, the first time around, I chose one of them. Lorenzo. The man who ran to Bianca on the day of our blood-bound union, leaving my grandmother, who had nothing left in the world but me, to die of the rage it put in her chest.
In the wreckage of it, the other one I'd been promised to since the cradle took my hand and said, "You still have me. I'll never let you down."
He pulled me out of the dark. Then went cold the moment the union was sealed. I told myself he grieved that we'd never given the Family an heir.
Until the night the cars came apart on the wet road, and he stepped over me where I lay dying to carry Bianca out, who hadn't taken more than a scratch.
I died there in the open, and while my soul drifted, lost and with nowhere to go, I learned the truth of it. My whole life had been a game three people played between themselves. They'd already drawn up the papers, signed every dollar and every deed over to Bianca.
And the reason no child ever came, year after year, was that they had paid the surgeon to cut the children out of me before they could be born. A loyalty offering. Proof, laid at Bianca's feet.
In this life, I decided to keep clear of all of them and live as my own.
——
When my Don's woman in the schoolhouse, the one who'd taught me my letters, saw me tear the Syndicate's offer to pieces, the color left her face.
"Adriana, what are you doing?" she asked.
That season, four out of our house had drawn offers from the Lombardi people. I was the only one taken in at the top of the whole territory, first among everyone. It wasn't only her. Every elder in that schoolhouse had set their hopes on my back.
I said it plainly. "I'm not going to the Lombardi Syndicate. I've given my word to a special crew inside the national organization. They've promised me their own people, doctors under Family protection, to sit at my grandmother's bedside."
"So that's how it is. Well. We all know your house carries a hard burden." She pressed her hands together a moment. "You study what they put in front of you. Earn your place. Pay back what your grandmother poured into raising you."
I nodded. I had no time to bleed over what was already behind me.
Lorenzo and Salvatore were on the phone in a hurry, telling me to come down. The whole way through the building I felt eyes cut at me, fingers turned my way and lowered behind hands. Someone put a foot out as I came down the stairs.
"Bitch," I spat.
Dazed, I dragged myself back up onto my feet, my ankle gone wrong under me.
Turning the corner, I caught Bianca mid-sentence with the two boys I'd grown up beside.
"It's true, I saw Adriana getting out of a Lombardi captain's car in the dead of night. But that doesn't mean a thing. Maybe Adriana really did earn her place on her own merit." Bianca kept her voice soft, low, all sorrow.
"Bianca, stop covering for her. She won't even put her standing out where people can see it. She's hiding something, that's why she keeps it buried."
"That's right, Bianca. You only get fooled because you're too good-hearted. A woman with a mind that crooked is capable of anything."
When the crew took me in, I'd put my name to an oath of silence. Omertà. My standing, my numbers, all of it sealed.
And here it was, turned into the very thing Bianca used to stain my name and feed the word on the street. The two I'd known since we were children, who'd watched me grind myself down to the bone for my grandmother, chose to believe her instead.
I smiled, bitter at the edge of it, and told myself it didn't matter.
Once I was brought in for good, every trace of who I'd been would go into the ground. The trail wiped clean. By then I could cut the cord between us for good. No more standing here swallowing words meant to wound. No more living the fool inside their lies, walking blind toward another miserable death.
I let none of it show on my face and stepped in front of the three of them. "What is it you want from me?"
Lorenzo wiped the sneer off and looked at me with a smile that came too easy. "Adriana. This is good news. We'll all be under the same roof again. Every year you poured into this, it wasn't wasted after all." His thumb dragged slow across his knuckles, and the smile held even as his eyes went flat.
Salvatore smiled too.
