"Seraphina." His voice dropped, low and deliberate. "This is the Valenti heirloom ring. My father and mother entrusted it to me with one instruction: place it on the hand of the woman who will stand beside the head of the Valenti Family." He held it out to me, his gaze steady and sure. "I have wanted to give this to you for a long time. I was only waiting for the right moment."
Salvatore's jaw tightened. He stepped forward, cutting between us with the blunt force that defined everything about him. "Seraphina, forget the ring. Be with me." His voice was rough, almost angry, as though tenderness was a language he had never been taught. "Have you forgotten what happened at the river when we were children? You fell in. The current took you. I jumped in after you without a second thought. I nearly drowned pulling you out." He struck his own chest with an open palm. "I would give you my life. What is a ring compared to that?"
In my previous life, I had believed them. Both of them. Their devotion had seemed so deep, so absolute, that I let myself trust it the way a child trusts the ground beneath her feet. I had thought: these are the men who were promised to me in blood. Nonna will be safe. The Genovese name will endure. We are oath-bound since youth, and oaths do not break.
I did not learn the truth until the day I died. That devotion could be performed. That a blood oath could be spoken with a lying tongue. That the men who swore to protect me had rehearsed their affection the way actors rehearse lines, and the woman who had coached them stood smiling in the wings.
I opened my mouth to refuse them both.
Rosalia spoke first.
"Seraphina." Her voice was small, trembling, perfectly calibrated. "Why did you tell people I was spreading dirty rumors about you? Now everyone is attacking me online." She held her phone out, the screen's blue light catching the tears she had summoned to the corners of her eyes.
I looked at the screen. Beneath a post on the academy's official forum, hundreds of comments had metastasized like a tumor. They called me shameless. They said I had spread my legs to secure my place at the academy. The few voices that had risen in my defense, Rosalia had screenshot and reframed, presenting them as proof that I had organized a coordinated attack against her.