"Don't make excuses for her, Rosalia." A girl from our year stepped closer, her voice dripping with righteous contempt. "She won't even let anyone see her scores. If she had nothing to hide, why the secrecy? She's guilty. She knows it, and she doesn't want anyone else to find out."
Another voice chimed in, sharper. "You're too kind to her, Rosalia. You always have been. A woman like Seraphina, with that scheming mind? She'd sell her own blood to get ahead. Don't let her use you."
I stood in the shadow of the corridor and listened to the architecture of my own destruction.
After joining La Rete, I had signed an oath of Omertà. Total silence regarding my scores, my ranking, my identity within the network. It was the first condition of entry, non-negotiable, sealed in blood-ink on vellum paper in a room with no windows. I could not reveal my results to anyone. Not my teacher. Not my Nonna. Not a single soul in Riviera City.
And Rosalia had turned that silence into a weapon.
She had taken my inability to speak and filled the void with her own narrative. Whispered it into every willing ear. Seraphina Genovese, the orphan heir of a dying Family, spreading her legs for powerful men to secure a future she couldn't earn on her own.
And my two childhood companions, the boys who had grown up beside me, who had watched me study by candlelight in Nonna's kitchen until my eyes bled, who knew better than anyone on this earth how hard I had fought for every scrap of knowledge and every point on those examinations, they stood there and nodded along. They chose Rosalia's poison over a lifetime of truth.
I swallowed the bitterness. It tasted like old copper. Like blood on the back of my tongue.
It doesn't matter, I told myself. None of this matters anymore.
Once I officially entered La Rete, every trace of my identity would be buried. My name, my lineage, my location, all of it would vanish behind layers of protection that even the Five Families couldn't penetrate. I would become a ghost. And ghosts did not waste their time on the living.
No more listening to these poisoned words. No more living like a fool inside a cage built from lies and false loyalty. No more walking blind toward a death I never saw coming.
I stepped out of the shadows and walked directly toward the three of them. My ankle screamed. I did not limp.