Chapter 3

I picked up the scissors from beside the fireplace and cut the photograph in half. The blades sliced through Bianca's smiling face and Enzo's hand as he adjusted her veil.

"Sofia, that's enough," Enzo warned, his voice low.

I didn't stop. I took the album apart and fed it into the fire page by page.

Bianca screamed and threw herself at me.

"Don't! Tomorrow is my father's memorial. I promised I would put that photo on his grave so he would know I have a family now!"

She grabbed the album, then deliberately let herself topple toward the shattered glass in the frame. Enzo shoved me aside without a moment's thought and caught her in his arms.

My lower back struck the edge of the table, and my right hand landed among the shards.

A sharp pain exploded through my palm, and blood quickly soaked my dress sleeve. Enzo looked back at me, his pupils contracting.

But then Bianca let out a sob, and he still bent to check her arm first.

"I'm fine," Bianca said through her tears. "Look at Sofia. She's bleeding so much."

I braced my uninjured hand on the table and forced myself upright. But my detachment seemed to infuriate Enzo.

"She only wanted to fulfill her father's last wish, and you can't even apologize?

"You lost your mother too. You should understand that better than anyone. If she were alive, she would think you went too far tonight."

I was the one my mother could not stop worrying about at the end. Enzo had knelt by her hospital bed and promised to make me happy. Now he had put her veil on another woman, and he was using her name to force me to be generous about it.

Enzo lifted Bianca and gave an order to the guard at the door. "Send the doctor to the guest room. Make sure the glass didn't cut her."

He paused for a beat as he passed me.

"Have someone look at your hand too."

Then he carried Bianca upstairs.

I looked down at the blood, and something Bianca had said came back to me. She had said her father's convoy was ambushed before it reached the old bridge. To hide the leak, the official report had always placed the attack after the convoy cleared the bridge. She had not been in that convoy. How did she know where it really happened?

I took out my phone, sent the question to Dante Marino, my father's head of security, and called a car to the clinic myself.

The doctor removed three pieces of glass from my palm and put in eleven stitches.

My father messaged me on the way back. His consigliere had gone to the De Luca headquarters in person with the original dissolution papers, the compensation terms, and the port handover list. The De Luca family's consigliere had signed for the original, and Don Vittorio kept a copy. At noon the next day, the two dons would formally negotiate. Until then, the Moretti family had frozen Enzo's access to every port.

I watched the lights slide backward past the window, and for the first time I didn't cry.

Back in the empty bedroom, I opened the safe and took out the veil Bianca had worn.

"Mom, the man you chose for me is gone."

I put the veil in my suitcase.

"What's left of him, I don't want."