The Genovese Daughter's VendettaChapter 1
After my second life began, I tore the Blood Invitation from the Valenti territory with my own hands. And I rejected the passionate declarations of the two most dangerous heirs in Riviera City.
Because I had chosen one of them before. Giancarlo. In my first life, I had chosen Giancarlo Valenti.
And on the night of our Blood-Bound Union, the night the old alliances were supposed to be sealed in sacred oath before every Boss and Caporegime in the city, he fled. He abandoned me at the altar for Rosalia Ferraro, a street orphan I had pulled from the gutter and given the shelter of my family's name. My Nonna Elisabetta, the last true Matriarch of the Genovese line, the woman who had raised me after my parents were gunned down in a rival hit, collapsed at the ceremony table. The shock stopped her heart. She died with the Genovese name on her lips and dishonor in her eyes.
I was left with nothing.
Then another came. Salvatore Monreale, the hot-blooded Enforcer-heir of the brutal Monreale Family, took my hand in the wreckage of that night and said to me, "You still have me. I will never betray you."
He walked me through the darkness. He married me in a quiet ceremony with no witnesses and no celebration. I thought, perhaps, that this was enough. That loyalty, even cold loyalty, could be enough.
But he was ice after the wedding. Distant. Cruel in his silence. I told myself he regretted the union. I told myself the absence of an heir weighed on him, that the empty nursery in the Monreale estate was the wound between us.
Until the night of the ambush.
A car bomb meant for both of us detonated on the Via Oscura. I was thrown into the wreckage, my ribs shattered, my blood pooling on the cobblestones. Rosalia had been in the trailing car. She suffered a scratch on her forearm. Nothing more.
Salvatore stepped over my dying body to reach her.
I bled out on the street, and as my soul drifted, untethered and howling, I learned the truth. My entire life had been a game. A cruel, coordinated performance staged by three players who had written their scripts long before I ever learned the rules. Giancarlo. Salvatore. Rosalia. They had already drafted their wills, every cent of their combined empires left to her. Every territory. Every safe house. Every laundered dollar.