"The Genovese Family is truly finished. They let their sole heir become some man's kept woman. A puttana parading in silk."
I had endured such ridicule twice before, in the life I'd already lived. The first time was at my blood-bound union ceremony.
Giancarlo had walked out in front of every Boss, every Caporegime, every wife and widow in Riviera City. He abandoned the alliance for Rosalia, a street orphan with no blood, no name, no standing. The dishonor struck my Nonna like a bullet to the chest. She collapsed at the altar where the oaths should have been sworn, and she never rose again. The Genovese name became a punchline whispered in every social club and back room from the waterfront to the old quarter.
The second time was my funeral. Before my body was cold in the ground, before the last handful of earth had settled over my coffin, Salvatore Monreale dropped to one knee in front of my open grave and proposed to Rosalia. He turned my death into a spectacle. My entire existence into a joke told over glasses of Barolo at someone else's feast.
The memory of that life surged through me like ice water, and I turned to my Nonna in a panic. Her breathing had gone shallow and ragged, her thin chest rising and falling too fast. Her eyes, still sharp even at her age, had gone red and glassy as she stared at the photographs splayed across the floor in front of her.
"My Seraphina." Her voice cracked like old wood. "She would never do such a thing."
Her color was wrong. The pallor beneath her olive skin had turned to ash. My heart seized in my chest, and I dropped to my knees beside the gathered crowd, begging anyone, everyone, to help me get her to a hospital. But the onlookers pulled back as though I carried a plague. They averted their eyes, tucked their hands into their pockets, stepped behind one another. No one wanted to be seen touching the granddaughter of a dying Family, a woman branded by scandal. As if dishonor were a disease that spread through skin.
It was the two blood-promised who finally stepped forward from the crowd.