Anya's POV

The golden poison coated the back of my throat like swallowed glass.

My chest seized. Air caught in my lungs, trapped behind the swelling that I could feel closing my airway, millimeter by millimeter.

Across the table, my father erupted from his chair with a roar. He ripped his sidearm from its shoulder holster and slammed the butt of the weapon against the polished wood-once, twice, three times-each impact rattling the silverware.

"You defy the Boss in her own house?!"

I ignored him. My eyes locked onto my mother.

"Did you-" my voice came out as a rasp, my throat already constricting "-did you boil Aurelia into the rice water?"

My mother straightened her spine. Chin lifted. Posture immaculate.

"No. I don't have time for such games."

But her eyes twitched left. Just a flicker. The tell of a liar who had never needed to learn how to lie well because no one had ever dared question her.

I pulled out my phone. The kitchen had security cameras. If I could pull up the footage-

My father snatched the device from my trembling hands before the app could load.

He hurled it onto the marble floor and brought his heavy boot down. The screen spiderwebbed with a sound like cracking ice. He ground his heel into the shattered glass.

"You're cut off," he spat. "No phone. No protection. No Family resources. Not until you learn respect."

He turned his back and stormed out of the dining hall, his Soldiers falling into formation behind him like shadows chained to his heels.

I didn't watch him leave.

My throat was closing. It felt like thick cotton being shoved down my windpipe, inch by inch, suffocating and dry and relentless.

I bolted from my chair. Ran.

Down the long hallway. Past the portraits of dead Dons. Into the reinforced bathroom. I collapsed to my knees in front of the toilet and gagged, trying desperately to purge whatever poison remained in my system.

Outside the door-the click of heels.

My mother's voice. Low. Casual. She was on the phone.

I pressed my burning forehead against the cold porcelain and strained to hear.

"I ground the narcotic into powder and boiled it into the rice water." A pause. "She needs to break, Elena. The weakness must be purged."

Elena. Her Capo. The woman she called her best friend.

The voice on speakerphone crackled back: "My soldiers were cured of worse in the cellar. Lock her in. She'll thank you when she's strong enough to lead."

My mother murmured agreement.

Then I heard it-the heavy metal deadbolt sliding into place on the outside of the bathroom door.

Click.

She'd locked me in.

The same psychological tactic they used on traitors in the underground cells. Isolation. Darkness. The slow suffocation of hope.

I coughed. Blood splattered across the white porcelain-bright red, visceral, steaming slightly in the cold bathroom air.

My skin was on fire.

Angry welts erupted along my arms and neck. Red. Swollen. Each one a burning island of agony. I clawed at my skin, and my fingernails came away wet.

Crawling to the door, I pounded my palms against the heavy wood. The impacts were weak, pathetic sounds-a dying animal scratching at the walls of its cage.

"Unlock the door." My voice was nothing now. A wheeze. A whisper. "Call the underground medic. Please. Please."

Her voice came through the door. Terrifyingly calm. Utterly steady.

"The laws of survival dictate that the weak must suffer to become strong. You will stay in there until you stop fighting me."

Her heels clicked away.

Fainter. Fainter. Gone.

Tears burned at the corners of my eyes. Dark spots bloomed in my vision like ink spreading through water. My lungs screamed for oxygen that couldn't squeeze past my swollen throat.

I collapsed onto the cold tile floor. My cheek pressed against the hard, unforgiving surface. The weight of darkness pulled at the edges of my consciousness.

I sank into it.

A crash jolted me back.

The bathroom door burst open with explosive force. Wood splinters sprayed across the tile. Through the haze, I saw Nonna Rosa standing in the doorway-frail, trembling, her arthritic hands white-knuckled around a heavy iron fire poker.

She dropped the metal rod. It clanged against the floor.

And then she screamed.

The sound was raw. Animal. A grandmother looking at the broken body of her granddaughter, lying in a pool of her own blood, swollen beyond recognition.

She crumpled to her knees beside me. Her weathered hands-the same hands that had braided my hair when I was five, that had taught me to hold a knife, that had never once fed me poison-touched my burning skin.

Tears streamed down her wrinkled face.

She turned toward the empty hallway where my mother had abandoned me. Her voice rose, cracked, shattered-

"You murder your own blood, Vittoria! May hell take you for what you've done!"

Anya's POV

Fluorescent lights burned through my eyelids before I could open them.

The Family's secure medical wing. I knew the ceiling tiles by heart. I'd memorized every crack, every water stain, during the dozen times I'd woken up in this exact bed.

My mother stood over me.

Arms crossed. Face sculpted into an emotionless mask. Not a hair out of place. The Donna, untouched by the chaos she'd created.

"Nonna Rosa collapsed from a severe cardiac episode," she informed me, her voice as flat as a coroner's report. "The shock of finding you triggered a heart palpitation."

She paused, waiting for my reaction. I gave her nothing.

"Your father has relocated to a safehouse to manage the fallout. The Soldiers are talking. The Capos are asking questions." Her eyes narrowed. "If you weren't so weak, none of this would have happened."

I turned my head on the pillow. My gaze landed on a small metal tray beside her hand.

Clear capsules. Packed tight with golden Aurelia powder. They'd been left there deliberately. A test. An offering. A threat.

The antiseptic smell of the clinic dragged me backward. Seven years old. The first time I'd been poisoned. My mother carrying me barefoot through freezing snow to this exact wing, tears streaming down her face, her voice breaking as she begged the surgeons to save me.

The next day, she'd stirred Aurelia into my milk.

"It's the only way to make you a true heir," she'd said. And she'd said it again at ten. And thirteen. And sixteen. And nineteen. Every hospitalization followed by the same ritual: tears, promises, betrayal.

Twenty years.

Something inside me-something I hadn't known was still alive-finally went cold.

She would never stop.

As long as I had value as her pawn, as long as my body belonged to the Family, she would keep poisoning me until the day it killed me.

The only way out was to annihilate my own value.

I pushed myself up on my elbows. My atrophied muscles shook. The IV tube tugged at the back of my hand.

I reached out, took the capsules from the metal tray, and swallowed them dry.

I looked up at her. Blank. Unreadable.

"Is there more?"

My mother's eyes widened. Shock. Then a twisted, profoundly proud smile spread across her face.

A feverish light entered her eyes. She crossed to a locked medical cabinet and produced a massive industrial plastic bag. Hundreds of golden capsules. Loose raw powder. Our Family's entire clinic stash.

She set it on the bed before me like a trophy.

I ripped the plastic open.

I grabbed a fistful of capsules and shoved them into my mouth. Swallowed. Grabbed more. The dry plastic casings scraped against my ruined throat. I choked and kept going. My body screamed-veins flooding with boiling oil, every nerve ending firing white-hot agony.

My mother pulled out her phone, her back half-turned to me. I heard her dialing. Heard the Capo's voice crackle through.

"It worked, Elena," she said, triumph leaking through her professional calm. "She's finally consuming the product willingly. My daughter is finally becoming a true Rossi-"

While she bragged, I reached deep into the bag. My fingers closed around raw powder.

"More."

My voice was wet. Broken. My mother spun around, still smiling, and I shoved the bitter poison past my lips. Chewed the gritty chemical substance. Swallowed it down in massive, undeniably lethal doses.

My stomach convulsed.

I lurched sideways and vomited.

A horrific mixture of golden narcotic and dark arterial blood splattered across the pristine white floor. It glowed under the fluorescent lights. Beautiful and obscene.

My mother's phone clattered to the floor.

She screamed.

Not the controlled, commanding voice of the Donna. A raw, terrified shriek that tore through the medical wing like tearing silk.

She lunged at me, grabbing my shoulders, trying to claw the half-chewed drugs from my mouth with her bare fingers.

"Stop! Anya, stop!"

Her fingernails scraped against my teeth. I shoved her hands away and grabbed another fistful of powder. Shoved it past my bloody lips. Kept consuming. Felt my organs dissolving. Welcomed the sensation of life draining out of me.

Freedom.

My vision collapsed to a pinprick. I fell backward onto the mattress, my body folding like wet paper, twitching in a spreading sea of my own dark blood and scattered golden powder.

The heavy doors burst open. Underground doctors rushed in, shoving my screaming mother aside.

The lead surgeon pressed his gloved hands against my ruined abdomen. His face went ghostly pale.

"The stomach lining has been burned through completely," he barked. "The tissue is liquefied-blood and fluid-nothing left to suture. We have to remove the stomach entirely, right now, or she dies on this table."