Chapter 2

My sister Alessia.

When she was born, the delivery room stayed silent. No crying. No struggle. Just a small, still thing that made the nurses exchange glances and my mother call for a priest.

Not a priest, as it turned out. A specialist. The kind of man who dealt in problems that didn't appear on medical charts.

I remember him walking through our front door—a thin man in a thin coat, carrying something that smelled like old churches. He barely glanced at the bassinet. Instead, his eyes found me across the room and stayed there, unblinking, like I was the only thing in the house worth his attention.

Your daughters' fates are tangled, he'd said. This one—he pointed at me—she's feeding on the younger one's life force. Draining her. If they remain under the same roof, the baby won't see twenty-five.

After that, my parents looked at me differently. Like I was something that had wandered in from the cold and refused to leave.

I tried. God, I tried to make them want to keep me.

I brought my favorite toys to Alessia's nursery—hand-me-downs, the only things I owned—and set them at the foot of her crib. Her room was a catalogue spread. Shelves of pristine dolls, custom dresses hanging in neat rows, a mobile above her bed that probably cost more than my entire wardrobe.

When I leaned over to touch her cheek, she smiled. The kind of smile that made my chest ache with hope. Maybe this time. Maybe she'll love me back.

Then she swept her arm across the shelf beside her. Blocks crashed to the floor. Her face crumpled, and the wail that followed brought my mother running.

The slap came before the questions.

My ear rang for hours afterward. I remember touching my lip and looking at the blood on my fingertips with something like scientific detachment. So this is how it works now.

They sent me to my grandmother's farm upstate the following week.

For twenty years, no one called.

Then, two years ago, my parents reached out. Wanted me back. Said they'd been thinking about family, about second chances, about making things right.

I'd wanted it to be true so badly I'd ignored every instinct that said otherwise.

Now I sat at my desk, scrolling through files a colleague had sent me. Alessia's portfolio. Her "body of work."

My coffee went cold while I clicked through image after image.

Every single design was mine.

Not similar. Not inspired by. Mine. Pieces I'd sketched in notebooks that never left my apartment. Concepts I'd developed in my private time, waiting for the day I'd have enough capital to launch my own line. Work no one should have seen.

And every one of them had been published under Alessia Lucchese's name.

I closed the files. Deleted the email. Wiped my browser history. Then I sat very still and let the cold fact settle into my bones.

I'd died once. Walked into traffic, too hollowed out by the weight of being called a thief to notice the light had changed. The impact had felt like falling through ice.

But I was back. And this time, I was paying attention.

I couldn't use a computer for the new designs. Whatever Alessia had access to, whatever method she'd found to see through my eyes, I wasn't going to make it easy.

I pulled out paper instead. Blank. Clean. Something I could control.