An old woman and a young girl, propping up a fallen house in a room full of jackals. So I learned fast, wanting to shoulder the family's debts and its name as soon as I could.
Bianca had come from nothing too, taken in by no one, respected by no one in the circles we moved through. When I learned she was an orphan like me, I felt pity for her and went out of my way to bring her close, bankrolling her place at the table, telling her we'd claw our way through the hard years together.
I never imagined she'd treat my kindness as a handout to be resented. She envied everything I had. She used every trick she knew to turn the heads of the two heirs I'd been promised to, and together the three of them buried my life.
While I was lost in it, the car reached the place they'd brought me.
What had happened in the garage still sat uneasy on the two of them. Both came around to open my door and lift my bag, eager to smooth it over.
Lorenzo said, bright with excitement, "Adriana, look. This is the park we ran wild in as kids. Salvatore and I bought the whole stretch of it together. This is going to be our private ground from now on. Nobody comes here but us."
Salvatore nodded. "I had men plant your favorite tulips through the whole field. By this time next year there'll be nothing here but a sea of them."
"Then the four of us can ride out here, smell the flowers," Lorenzo went on.
Their faces were full of longing for some future they'd already painted.
I stared at the land a long time and said nothing. It was true, this had been the three of us once, the ground that held our easy years. But I had never liked tulips. I was allergic to every kind of pollen there was.
While I was still thinking, fireworks broke open above my head, great bursts of them. The brilliant colors spelled out my name across the dark.
In the middle of that dream of a scene, Lorenzo drew out a ring and held it toward me. "Adriana, this is the Valente signet, the union ring. My parents told me to put it on the hand of the woman who'd one day stand at the head of the family. I've wanted to give it to you for years. I only got the chance tonight."
Salvatore cut in, irritated. "Adriana, will you have me instead? Have you forgotten the day you went under the water as a child, that I went in after you and nearly didn't come back? I'd put my life in your hands. A ring is nothing next to that."
In my last life I was taken in by the depth of feeling between these two. Back then I believed, like a fool, that betrothal by blood meant a clean ending was waiting for us. That Grandmother and the Genovese name could lean on them and stand.
I didn't learn the truth until the day I died. That devotion, too, could be performed.
Just as I opened my mouth to refuse them both, Bianca spoke up out of nowhere. "Adriana, why did you tell everyone I'd been spreading filth about you, staining your name on the street? Now the whole circle is turning on me."
She held her phone up in front of me.
Beneath the syndicate's own boards, hundreds of comments. That I had no shame. That I'd slept my way into a made position. The few voices that had spoken for me were twisted, in Bianca's telling, into proof I'd been hounding her all along.
Salvatore snatched the phone from her hand, his right hand already curling into a fist, the knuckles going white. "Adriana, how could you do something like this? It's bad enough you can't keep yourself in line, but why drag Bianca down with you?"
Lorenzo, the cooler of the two, didn't catch fire the same way. But he looked at me with a question already settled behind his eyes.
I pressed my surging emotions down. "I didn't. If you don't believe me, look into it yourself."
Neither of them was listening. They were too busy soothing her.
"Don't be afraid, Bianca. I'll have it scrubbed off the boards tonight, I'll make a call."
"A little something sweet will help. Let me take you out, get you chocolate cake."
The two of them held her up between them, one on either side. Not one of them looked back at me.
Bianca's eyes flicked down, her lower lip trembling right on cue, and for a single unguarded instant, before the mask slid home, I saw the calculation flash clean across her face.
I took a deep breath and looked, without feeling, at the ash drifting down where the fireworks had been. Held up against death, a grievance like this was nothing at all.
