Nia POV

I remained tethered to Leo's anger, a ghost caught in his slipstream as he took the stairs of my old apartment building two at a time.

He waved a hand before his face, trying to bat away the cloud of dust motes his own fury had disturbed.

"Stop hiding, Nia!" Leo barked into the empty living room.

A phantom smile touched my lips at the sheer folly of his command.

I remembered the bitter night he had forced me out of his home five years ago; he had chosen Serena over me, just as he always did.

And now he was here, demanding I take the fall for yet another one of Serena's fatal mistakes.

*He did not know that Serena had made certain he would never find out the truth. She had intercepted the police report before it reached his desk. She had paid off the Family trackers to report that I was "still alive, still refusing to return." Every breadcrumb that might have led him to my grave, she had swept clean. For five years, Leo Falcone had been looking for a ghost while the woman beside him knew exactly where I was buried. *

"Serena is already under the FBI radar," Leo said, pacing the floorboards which groaned under his weight like a ship's hull.

He looked toward the closed bedroom door.

"Show yourself before she ends up in a federal supermax."

I looked down at my own translucent hands.

I could never appear to him, even if I wanted to.

His patience finally snapping, Leo raised his leg and drove his heel into the bedroom door. The cheap wood splintered with a sound like cracking bone.

The room held nothing but a bare mattress and a broken dresser.

He let out a string of harsh, guttural curses in his native Italian.

He slammed the door shut behind him and descended the stairs once more.

Back in the bodega, Leo yanked the shop door open again, making the little bell scream on its hinge.

He pointed a long, trembling finger at the owner. "Tell me where she actually went."

The owner's face was a mask of weary resignation. "I told you the truth. Her murder was on the local news. It was a bloody mess."

A flicker of something unreadable—not shock, but the dawning horror of a truth he had refused to see—passed through Leo's eyes. The line of his jaw went slack.

His phone buzzed in his pocket, a harsh, mechanical sound that sliced through the charged air.

He pulled it out and stared at the screen.

I drifted over his shoulder to read the incoming text from Serena:

"Nia hates me, Leo. She will never help us. I am ready to turn myself in and go to prison."

Leo's features hardened into a familiar granite mask, erasing the momentary vulnerability.

His thumbs moved over the screen with a furious precision:

"Nia has no right to refuse a direct order from her Don. I will drag her back to take the punishment."

He shoved the phone back into his pocket and glared at the owner. "You are spreading police fabrications."

"Death is not a joke, Mr. Falcone," the owner insisted, his voice barely a whisper.

Leo stepped closer, his shadow falling over the old man, the air growing thick and heavy. "Three days. Or Chloe loses her sanctuary."

He did not wait for a response.

He spun on his heel and strode out onto the sun-bleached sidewalk.

I felt a strange pull, an invisible current that bound me to him, and was dragged along as he climbed into his waiting black SUV.

The vehicle cut a swath through the city, a black shark moving through glittering shoals, until it reached his penthouse.

The private elevator doors opened directly into a sprawling living room walled with glass.

Serena was on him the moment he stepped out.

She wore a slip of crimson silk that clung to her form, her face a carefully constructed sculpture of anxiety.

"Did you find her?" she asked, her fingers closing around his arm.

Leo shook his head.

He seemed dislocated, his gaze fixed on a point somewhere beyond the panoramic view of the city.

"The man downstairs said she might actually be dead."

Serena's eyes widened.

She took a half-step back, her hand flying to her mouth in a gesture of rehearsed horror.

"She is faking it, Leo." Serena closed the distance again, resting her hands flat on his chest.

"She is holding a grudge from five years ago. She is lying to punish us."

Leo looked down at her, his expression unreadable.

"Let us just drop it," Serena whispered, her lips curving into a smile of exquisite tragedy. "I will turn myself in to the Commission and the Feds tomorrow."

*I watched her performance from the shadows of the foyer, and if I had still possessed a beating heart, it would have been pounding with rage. She knew. She had always known. Every tear, every trembling lip, every offer of noble sacrifice—it was all a stage play performed on my grave. And Leo, the great Don, could not see the dirt beneath her fingernails. But I could. And soon, so would he. *

Nia POV

The only sound in the penthouse was the low, electric hum of the climate control system, a noise like a wire being drawn tighter and tighter around the silence.

Leo stared down at Serena, his chest rising and falling with slow, deliberate breaths.

"You are right," he finally said, his voice cleaving the tension.

He reached up, his large hands engulfing hers.

"She is just hiding in the shadows, playing games."

He disentangled himself from her grasp and crossed the vast expanse of marble to a mahogany liquor cabinet.

He poured two fingers of amber liquid into a crystal glass, the sound of the bottle neck clinking against the rim unnaturally sharp.

"I will tear this city apart to find her," Leo declared, his voice ringing with the cold iron of command.

He swallowed the liquor in one smooth motion.

"And I will make sure you are cleared of all syndicate charges."

Serena smiled, her eyes welling with artfully summoned tears.

"Thank you, Leo. I knew you wouldn't let them take me."

Leo set the empty glass down on the counter.

The sharp clink echoed in the large room.

"This is the last time I protect you, Serena."

Serena froze.

The moisture in her eyes seemed to evaporate as the words left his lips.

Leo kept his back to her, the line of his shoulders a rigid wall.

"Once Nia takes the fall and is released from federal custody, we are done."

Drifting in the shadows of the foyer, a place I had followed him to as if chained by a memory, I felt a jolt of something that was not quite surprise, but a profound dislocation. I tried to reach out, to feel the air he displaced, but my fingers met only a cold, dead static.

The Don of the Falcone Family had never severed ties with his obsession.

I remembered the violent arguments, the bitter accusations that had left hairline fractures in the plaster of our old home, each one ending with his choice of her over me.

He had sacrificed my freedom and my life just to keep her standing, yet here he was, walking away.

"I need to return to my true Family," Leo said quietly.

He turned around to face her, his face a blank canvas.

"I need to return to my wife."

Serena stood rigid, her knuckles turning white as she gripped the silk of her dress.

"A sickening dread has settled in my chest since I left her apartment," Leo confessed, the raw, unvarnished tone of his voice a thing I had not heard in years.

He looked down at his own hands, as if expecting to see them stained.

"I forced her into a cage for you five years ago. Today, I used her sister's life as a bargaining chip. I look at these hands, and though they are clean, I can smell the rot."

"You are abandoning me?" Serena asked, her voice trembling with disbelief.

Leo avoided her gaze. The muscle in his jaw knotted, a violent, twitching pulse beneath the skin.

"I don't know what is happening in my head right now."

He walked past her, heading toward the front door without a glance in her direction.

"I will fix your mess one last time. Then I am going to track Nia down."

He grabbed his keys from the console table, his shoulders set with a grim resolve.

He walked out of the penthouse, the heavy door clicking shut behind him with the clean finality of a guillotine.

I stayed for a moment, watching Serena.

The instant he was gone, the carefully constructed mask of her face dissolved. The elegant lines of her mouth twisted, her jaw working silently. The muscles around her eyes twitched, revealing a scaffolding of pure venom beneath the beautiful facade.

Her breathing turned ragged.

"Nia," she hissed to the empty room.

The name, spoken with such concentrated hatred, seemed to lower the temperature of the air.

"You had everything," she spat, her voice a guttural whisper aimed at no one and everyone. "The name. The ring. His devotion before I took it. I grew up in a rat-infested tenement while you were raised in a brownstone with a garden. And still—still—he could not stop saying your name in his sleep." She snatched Leo's empty crystal glass from the counter and hurled it against the wall, where it exploded into a thousand glittering shards. "You should have stayed dead the first time I tried to bury you." *

*The glass fragments skittered across the marble. And I understood, with a cold clarity that settled over me like a second shroud, that Serena had not merely taken advantage of my absence. She had orchestrated it. She had been trying to erase me long before that alley, long before those thirteen stab wounds. The only question was how deep her betrayal truly went—and whether Leo would ever be brave enough to see it. *