Chapter 3

Instinctively, I killed the screen and looked at him, calm as still water over a drowned thing.

"Nothing. Just a friend."

Salvatore's brow drew tight. He wanted more, I could see it in the slow turn of the signet ring between his thumb and finger. But at that moment Vittoria's cry of pain came from the corridor behind him, and his expression changed in the space of a breath.

"Serafina, why did you push Vittoria?" he demanded. "Do you understand she was nearly put under the wheels of that car?"

On hearing his words, my chest tightened as if I couldn't breathe.

After a moment, I took a deep breath and intoned coldly. "Believe it or not, I didn't push Vittoria. If I had, why is it me lying here in this clinic, stitched together, after it was over?"

The mockery on my face was unmistakable.

Salvatore's gaze fell on the wounds mapped across my body, and something like concern flickered through it, gone before it could take root.

He reached out, as if to touch my cheek.

"Serafina, you've loved lying since you were a child. If Salvatore hadn't shoved you clear back then, the one broken open on that bed would be Vittoria."

Matteo's sharp voice cut in from the doorway.

He crossed the room and pulled Salvatore aside by the arm, then fixed me with a hard look. I heard the knuckles of his right hand crack, one by one, the way they always did before he did something a man carries the rest of his life.

"Salvatore, Serafina has always been good at playing the wounded lamb. Don't let her work you. Vittoria is sick, and still my sister competes for eyes on her like this. It's shameful. Vittoria would never lie. It was Serafina who pushed her."

He looked at me with undisguised disgust. With a few words, he passed sentence on me the way the men in our blood pass sentence at the Sunday table, where a family's shame is decided and no one appeals it.

Vittoria had been gone seven years, and for those seven years Matteo had been kind to me.

It made me believe I had finally become a sister he could love.

But one car in the street stripped it all away and set me back down in the truth.

My brothers had never truly loved me. Neither had Salvatore.

The clinic nurse standing near the door couldn't hold her tongue.

"You're the Lombardi family? How can you treat her like this?"

"She was the worst hurt of anyone in that accident. And she's just lost the child she was carrying."

Before she could finish, Gennaro pushed through the door, panic all over the eldest son's face.

"Salvatore. Matteo. Come, now. Vittoria's taken a turn. She's collapsed."

Salvatore's head turned back toward me on reflex.

Matteo caught his wrist.

"There's no reason to waste a thought on Serafina. She called this down on her own head."

Gennaro shoved the two of them toward the hall, then turned back and looked at me with open scorn.

"Serafina, you tried to feed Vittoria to that car so Salvatore would stay bound to you. I never knew you had this in your blood. If anything happens to Vittoria, there is nowhere in this territory I won't find you."

I lay rigid on the clinic bed, taking pain multiplied by the cruelty of the Family and of the man I loved, until every last one of them was gone from the doorway.

...

From that day until they cut me loose from the clinic, Salvatore and my brothers never came again.

It was as if they had wiped my existence clean off the books, the way the Family erases a name from the registry.

Yet the moment I opened my phone, there were their faces, lit up and shining.

While I fought alone through the pain behind those locked white doors, they had taken Vittoria away on a trip.

The photographs were from the Maldives, a place I had always wanted to see. Gold light lay across their faces and made their smiles blinding.

The caption read: [Seven years later, the family is whole again. May our little sister stay beside us always.]

I tried with everything left in me to hold the tears back. They came down anyway.

Whether it was blood or love, I was never the one they chose.