Chapter 1

As soon as I paid the remaining balance on my burial plot, a photo from Isabella appeared on my phone.

She stood at the burial plot beneath the old oak tree, the one I had wanted, cradling her dog’s silver urn against her chest.

My parents flanked her like bodyguards. Behind them, my brother was speaking to a sculptor beside three slabs of imported Italian marble.

Isabella followed the photo with a voice message.

“Adriana, Caesar is already dead. Please don’t make me fight you for the place where I bury him too.”

Her voice trembled beautifully.

Anyone else might have believed she was the one being bullied.

I deleted the message and blocked her.

Then I left Saint Michael’s Cemetery and returned to the hospital.

Dr. Bennett was waiting in his office with my latest scans pulled up on the screen.

“How long do I have?”

Dr. Bennett removed his glasses.

“A week at most. Possibly less.”

I nodded as if he had told me the weather.

Dr. Bennett slid a folder across the desk.

“Where is your family? They need to understand how serious this is.”

A bitter smile touched my lips.

I had told them about my diagnosis again and again.

They had never believed me.

To them, terminal cancer was just another lie I had invented to compete with Isabella for their love.

Mother had accused me of using a forged report to punish her.

Luca said anyone could download a cancer diagnosis and change the name.

Father had not bothered to read it at all.

The Morettis trusted Isabella’s tears more than an oncologist’s diagnosis.

A knock interrupted us. A hospital administrator stepped inside, holding a document.

“Miss Moretti, I’m sorry, but the Moretti family office withdrew authorization for your private palliative care. That includes the nursing service that was supposed to begin tonight.”

I looked up.

“Withdrawn by whom?”

“The Moretti family office. Don Moretti is listed as the guarantor.”

For a moment, I said nothing.

My father was probably punishing me for trying to take Caesar’s burial plot.

He truly believed I had forged the diagnosis, and saw no reason to waste family money on another performance.

“I understand,” I said quietly.

I returned to the two-bedroom Tribeca condo where I had lived for the past year.

It belonged to one of the Morettis’ real-estate companies and came with a doorman, marble counters, and a view of the Hudson.

It had everything except the feeling of home.

My father had moved me there after Isabella said she could no longer breathe beneath the same roof as me.

But it hadn’t always been this way.

There was a time when Mother and Father were terrified of losing me.

When I was twelve, I collapsed with a fever at a children’s home funded by the Moretti Foundation.

Mother happened to be visiting that afternoon and noticed the crescent-shaped birthmark behind my ear.

The mark matched the one in every missing-person notice the Morettis had quietly circulated for twelve years.

A DNA test confirmed what she already knew.

I was Adriana Moretti, the daughter of New York’s most feared Don.

The child who had vanished from her crib.

My mother stayed beside my hospital bed for two nights. When the results came back, she held me so tightly I could barely breathe.

She said she had never stopped looking for me.

She promised to spend the rest of her life making up for every year we had lost.

And for a while, she kept that promise.

Father added my name to the Moretti family trust and introduced me as his daughter to every capo in New York.

Luca moved into the bedroom across from mine because I was afraid to sleep alone.

Mother sat beside me through every nightmare until I stopped waking up convinced I was back at the children’s home.

They loved me. I knew they did.

Then Isabella began to fall apart.

Isabella had been adopted a year after I disappeared. By the time I returned, she had already spent eleven years calling my parents Mama and Papa and treating my brother as her own.

When I came home, she stopped eating.When she finally collapsed, the doctors found a note beneath her pillow.

Now that Adriana is home, none of you need me anymore.

My mother cried for three days.

Luca asked me not to appear at family dinners until she felt safer.

Father reminded me that Isabella was still their daughter and that my return did not make her less of one.

Even my mother asked me to be patient.

Give Isabella time to understand that I wasn’t there to replace her.

At first, those requests seemed temporary.

So I agreed.

But every time Isabella cried, I was asked to give up something else.

Eventually, they stopped asking. They simply expected me to step aside.

I waited ten years for the family who had once loved me to choose me again.

Now, I had seven days left.

And still, they hadn’t chosen me.

That evening, I called a funeral home

Arranging my own death was easier than I expected.

Direct cremation. No wake. No church service. A plain ivory urn. One photograph for the cemetery records and no obituary.

For the headstone, I chose only my name.

No beloved daughter. No cherished sister.

The funeral director paused over the final section.

“Who should we contact to receive your remains?”

I stared at the blank line.

The Morettis buried every member of the family with priests, roses, and armed men standing at the cemetery gates.

But no one would come for me.

“Send them directly to Saint Michael’s,” I said. “The burial has already been paid for.”

“We’ll need a signed final-disposition directive.”

“Send it to me.”

The document arrived minutes later.

It authorized the funeral home to cremate me and transfer my ashes directly to the cemetery without waiting for my family’s permission.

I signed my name at the bottom.

Adriana Moretti.

For the first time in my life, I alone had decided where I belonged.