LOGINElena Marchetti dies at twenty-six. A hand closes around her throat. Freezing harbor water fills her lungs. The man who should've saved her stands on the dock, just a few seconds too late. Then she wakes up. Sixteen again. Same house, same family, same future waiting to kill her all over. The Marchettis run one of the city's most dangerous crime families, and their power comes from an old leather ledger , a book that records every debt, marriage, and death like it's already decided. Elena's name is inside it. So is the day she dies. She's got ten years now to change that. The ledger belongs to Vittoria Marchetti, the matriarch who ordered Elena's death the first time and believes she's protecting the family by controlling its future. Her nephew Renzo, the one who actually did the killing, is already circling, waiting for another chance. Then there's Matteo — the son who should've inherited everything, until one mistake cost him his father's trust and his belief he's worth saving. He doesn't know Elena remembers his hands on her while she died, her name breaking in his voice as the water took her. She's carried that memory in a sixteen-year-old's body for months. He doesn't trust her. But something about her makes him want to try anyway. Elena has one real choice: trust the man who let her die once, or walk the same road and see if it kills her twice. Every move she makes to save herself puts someone else in danger instead. She's done letting others write her ending. She's going to rewrite it herself -- even if it means burning down everything her family has ever believed in.
View MoreFather Alessio's archive gives us nothing new. We spend three hours going through the same old registers we already checked before, and by the time the light through the small windows turns gray with afternoon, my eyes ache and my hands are covered in dust."There's nothing else here," Father Alessio says finally, closing the last box. "I've shown you everything this church has on the Vane family. If Sal's right about them favoring churches, you'll need to look somewhere else.""Somewhere else where," Matteo asks, frustration creeping into his voice.Father Alessio thinks a long moment. "There are two other old churches in this city that came before mine.St. Agnes, where you're meeting her tomorrow night." He pauses. "And Our Lady of Sorrows, out near the old quarter, closer to where the first families settled here, long before the docks even existed."Isabella, who came with us despite Dante telling her to rest, looks up from the register she's paging through. "That's a two-hour rid
Sal's eyes are open when we walk into his hospital room the next morning, pale and thin against the white pillows, but alive.Awake. Watching the door like he already knew we were coming before we ever knocked."You look terrible," I say, my voice breaking with relief the second I see him sitting up on his own, without the tubes and machines crowding quite so close as they did three nights ago."You should see the other guy," he rasps, and it's such a strange, ordinary joke coming from a man who nearly bled out on his own study floor that I laugh despite everything, a wet, shaky sound that's half a sob.Matteo pulls two chairs close to the bed, and I sit, taking Sal's hand carefully, mindful of the IV line still running from his arm."How are you feeling," I ask."Old," Sal says. "Older than yesterday, anyway. The doctors keep telling me I'm lucky.I keep telling them luck had very little to do with it, considering Isabella's the one who pulled me through the worst of it, sitting righ
We find her two streets over, standing perfectly still outside a shuttered bookshop, like she's been waiting for us the entire time and knew exactly which street we'd choose to walk down."Don't run," Matteo says quietly, gripping my hand tighter than before."If she wanted to hurt us, she'd have done it already, back there in the fog, when neither of us was looking.""That's not exactly comforting, Matteo.""It's not meant to be. It's meant to be true."We walk toward her slowly, our footsteps loud against the wet cobblestones in the early morning quiet.Up close, she's younger than I expected from a distance — maybe thirty, with sharp gray eyes that seem to catch and hold what little light the morning offers, and a stillness about her that makes the fog itself feel colder for standing so near it."You've been following us," Matteo says, stopping a few feet away."I've been waiting for you," she corrects, her voice calm, unhurried, like she has all the time in the world and has simpl
I don't tell anyone. Not right away.The dining hall is still full of shaken relatives when I slide the page into my sleeve, my hands trembling so badly I nearly drop it twice before it's finally hidden against my skin.Police officers move through the wreckage taking statements.A nurse fusses over Isabella's sling, insisting she needs to sit down, needs to rest, needs to stop arguing about it.Nobody notices me at all. Nobody's looking for a scrap of paper when there's a matriarch being led out in handcuffs and a confessed murderer walking calmly beside her, hands out in front of him like he's finally set something down after carrying it far too long.I don't breathe easy until Matteo and I are alone in the hallway outside, the noise of everything falling apart fading behind the closed door."Elena." He catches my arm, and something in my face must give me away completely, because his whole expression shifts from relief to alarm in an instant."You've gone pale. What is it?"I pull
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