Chapter 1

On the seventh anniversary of my blood-alliance union, a courier from the Family clinic pressed a folded report into my hand. It confirmed I was carrying a child.

Just as I was about to bring the joy to my husband, a car took the corner too fast and put me on the pavement.

The clinic's doctor called Salvatore more than twenty times. He never answered a single one. In the end I endured the pain alone and signed the surgical consent with my own trembling hand.

When I woke again, the doctor looked at me with an open displeasure no bribe had smoothed over.

"Signora Lombardi, our registry lists you as unmarried. Why did you lie about having a husband?"

"Do you understand that because the help came too late, the child in your womb has already..."

I sat frozen on the clinic bed, unable to decide which piece of news cut deeper.

Trembling, I laid a hand over my abdomen. The child, only ten weeks come into being, was gone. Silently. Completely.

My eyes burned red as I stared at the doctor, disbelieving.

"I have been married for seven years. How could I possibly be listed as unmarried? Your registry is wrong."

My protest died the moment they laid the stamped Family record in front of me.

Staring at the seal pressed into the paper, my vision shook.

I walked out of the clinic stiff as a corpse, carrying a miscarriage report in one hand and, in the other, a registry entry that swore I had never been anyone's wife.

The very next breath, I saw my husband stepping out of the registry hall, arm in arm with my younger sister, gone from us for seven years.

His arm was around her shoulders, the closeness between them impossible to mistake. The fresh marriage record in their hands stabbed into my eyes.

At that moment, my heart sank to the very bottom.

The wind carried their voices to me.

"Salvatore, if Serafina learns we've registered the union, she'll surely lay blame on us. After all, she's been your wife these seven years."

Salvatore answered without hesitation. "I have never counted her as my wife. In my eyes, you are the only one who matters. What we hold is the true pact."

"If it troubles you, I can have her removed."

As the truth laid itself bare, a deafening roar filled my ears.

Seven years of devotion, spent on nothing. It was time for me to leave.

——

I stood rooted where I was as the documents slipped from my fingers and scattered across the ground.

At some point, Vittoria's eyes found mine. There was an unmistakable pride in them, as though she'd marked my presence long before I understood I was standing there at all.

"Salvatore, I truly never expected you to say such a thing," she said softly. Her hand rose and pressed flat against her chest, as if her heart were failing her, though the fingers pressed a half-beat too soon, before any grief could have reached them. "I thought you no longer cared for me. Seven years ago, at the wedding before the assembled bosses, I wasn't ready, so I fled. I never imagined you would still love me so deeply."

Overcome, Vittoria began to weep. Salvatore gently wiped the tears from her cheeks, his eyes filled with a tenderness I had never once seen turned toward me.

"My wife was always meant to be you," he said gravely. "Even when you left me seven years ago, I never blamed you. Not for a single moment."

Then Salvatore lowered his head and kissed Vittoria, deep and unhurried, in front of the men still lingering by the hall doors.

My breathing turned ragged, a sour, suffocating pain spreading through my whole body.

But Vittoria was still not satisfied. She narrowed her eyes, glanced toward me, and lowered her voice.

"Salvatore, you needn't say this only because of my illness. You and my sister have stood together seven years. You must love her. I'll manage on my own..."

Salvatore seized her hand at once, his expression earnest.

"I have never loved her," he said, without the faintest hesitation. "It was only that her face carries something of yours. I kept her at my side so I could look at her and long for you."

In an instant the world spun. The dizziness drove me back a staggering step.

Through the haze, I seemed to see Salvatore smiling at me gently, the way he once had.

We had grown up in the same circle of families, bound as children in name.

But in his eyes there had only ever been one person. My younger sister, Vittoria.

He and my brothers all doted on the sweet, coaxing Vittoria. I was forever the silent shadow standing at their backs.

No one knew that even a shadow aches for sunlight.

Or that I had loved Salvatore in secret for years.

Salvatore had first been promised to me.

But as we grew, his bond with my sister only deepened, and no one ever spoke of my betrothal again.

So the alliance meant for me quietly became hers.

I thought my life would simply go on that way, until the day of their wedding.

The hall had been dressed without limit, everything shaped to my sister's taste: the most lavish, the most costly, the very finest. The heads of every allied Family were seated to witness it ratified.

Yet that day, Salvatore waited from dawn into the dark.

Vittoria never came.

Even after the officiant abandoned the room, she still did not come.

Only then did Salvatore finally break.

That night he drank himself senseless in the back room of one of the Family's clubs.

When I found him, he looked at me as though seeing me for the first time.

He told me everything.

He said he had long known Vittoria might run from the ceremony. But he'd believed that if he treated her well enough, she would come to understand his sincerity.

It was not until he was left standing before the whole Cosa Nostra that he understood at last: her heart was never a thing he could warm.

I stayed and listened to him the whole night through.

The next morning, when Salvatore woke, he asked me to take her place at his side.

I knew, perhaps, that he was only wounded, a man grasping for any safe harbor.

But I wanted his love far too badly.

So I blindfolded my own heart and accepted.

Across seven years, Salvatore's manner toward me shifted. From cold and indifferent to careful and gentle.

I thought my sincerity had finally moved him.

Now I understood.

I had been nothing but Vittoria's stand-in.

Every gentle touch, every tender word, every murmured vow of love, he had been thinking of Vittoria the whole time.

And I was still that same shadow in the dark.

Nothing had ever changed.

I thought that was already the deepest pain a person could hold.

But the next moment, my brothers' voices reached my ears.

"Congratulations. You've waited long enough to finally see daylight."

My eldest brother, Matteo, grinned wide and gave Salvatore's shoulder a light shove, amusement dancing in his eyes.

My second brother, Gennaro, laughed harder still. "I'll have a fine gift ready for the union. But first, we've got to handle Serafina."

"She's not the biddable kind. If she learns Salvatore and Vittoria are being wed, she'll turn up and make a scene. Ugly business. You know how she gets. Sometimes she's nothing but a shrew."

The irritation in Gennaro's voice was plain.

In an instant, they all broke into laughter.

The same brothers who once cursed Vittoria into the ground for running from that wedding had become her devoted guardians once more.

They had forgotten everything I'd done for them since we were children. Forgotten that when Vittoria vanished, it was I who stayed at their side.

In their eyes, so long as Vittoria came home, I was nothing but a disposable stand-in. A thing to be cast off at any moment.

I existed only to fill the empty hours of their boredom.

Once I understood that, I sank down numbly, the way I always had as a child when I was hurt, and wrapped my arms tight around myself. My thumb found the cheap thorn-flower ring on my finger and turned it, around and around.

Before long, a familiar hand reached out in front of me and gathered the scattered reports up from the ground.