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.

"We can keep you under our protection, but four years isn't enough. A thing like this takes a lifetime!"

A few young women passing the social club glanced at me with envy in their eyes. There was no ripple in my heart.

In my last life, the four of us answered to the same house. To earn my place at the table, I worked harder than any soldier under the Lombardi banner, took every job, sat at every meeting. And in the end, my share of the take and my made position were quietly handed off, traded away for Bianca.

There was word on the street, too, that I'd earned my standing on my back, that I'd given myself to the men above me to climb. For four whole years I was frozen out, cut from every room, made to eat alone.

Back then, both of them swore they would stand at my shoulder and keep me safe. I didn't learn until I was dead that they were the ones who set the whole thing in motion. Through countless nights of turning over in the dark, I cried until the windows went grey. They used my suffering to put a smile on their beloved Bianca's face.

Seeing that I had gone quiet, Bianca spoke up, the sweetness in her voice gone thin and sour.

"Adriana has all the luck. Born to a name everyone still bows to, born beautiful, with two men who'd burn the city down for her. I never got a life like that. If Adriana hadn't taken me in, I'd have nothing, no roof, no name, nothing."

The words landed exactly where she'd aimed them. The two of them ached for her at once. "Bianca, don't talk like that. You're beautiful. You're worth more than this. There's a future waiting for you, a bright one. When the time comes I'll have my father put you over one of our front operations, a clean office, your own people under you."

"No, Bianca, come to me instead. I'll give you a higher place, a better cut. Whatever you want, it's yours."

The two of them went back and forth over her like dogs over a bone. I couldn't help but feeling sad.

After all the years we'd known each other, neither of them had ever made me a promise like that, never put me first the way they were putting her first now. It was true, then. Affection you put on for show could never stand against the kind that runs in the blood.

When I turned to go, Lorenzo caught the change in me. He took my hand, guilt sitting heavy behind his smile. "Adriana, don't read into it. We're good to Bianca because she's your friend. That's all."

Salvatore ruffled my hair like I was a child. "Don't think so hard about it. The hard part's over, you've passed. Come out for a drive with us. We put something together for you."

I nodded and didn't argue. I was leaving this place soon anyway. I wanted one last look at the city where we'd grown up together.

When we reached the garage, Lorenzo and Salvatore both rushed to put Bianca in the passenger seat.

Bianca looked at me, the picture of reluctance. "Isn't that seat only ever Adriana's? If I sit there, she'll be upset."

Lorenzo pressed her down into the seat before she could finish. "She doesn't deserve it. She won't mind. She's got the best temper of anyone."

Salvatore shot him a hard look, the irritation plain on his face, and slammed the car door.

It wasn't until the engine turned over that the two of them realized I hadn't gotten in. The windows came down. They looked at each other, fumbling for an explanation, and finding none that would hold.

So I said it for them. "It's fine. I'll take my own car."

Hearing that, they both let out a breath of relief, though something in how easily I'd said it caught them off guard.

"Adriana." Lorenzo started to call after me.

I rolled the window up before he could finish, unwilling to sit through another one of their lies. But the streets we passed still pulled the old memories loose, one after another.

The three of us had grown up side by side, the way children of allied houses do, promised to one another before any of us could choose. From the time we were small, both of them chased after me, both of them swore they wanted me. Then my parents were taken in an accident, and the whole great Genovese name came down to just my grandmother and me, the two of us holding the line alone.

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.