THE AUDITION

The invitation comes on cream paper, my name written out in handwriting so perfect it looks printed. Mrs. Marchetti requests your company for tea, Thursday at four.

My mother nearly cries when she reads it over my shoulder.

"Do you understand what this means?" she says, pressing both hands to her chest like she's holding her own heart in.

"Vittoria Marchetti doesn't invite just anyone. She's looking at you, Elena."

I understand exactly what it means. Better than my mother ever will, because I've already sat through this exact tea once before, in a life she doesn't remember either of us having lived. I know which chair Vittoria will offer me.

I know the tea will be too strong, poured from a pot older than my grandmother, and that she'll watch how I take it—sugar or none, cream or none—like a woman reading tea leaves instead of drinking them.

I know, too, that this isn't really about tea. This is an audition. And I'm the only person in that room who understands I've already failed it once.

"Elena, are you listening to me?" My mother's voice cuts through my thoughts. "This is important. You need to make a good impression."

"I know, Mama."

"Vittoria Marchetti is not someone you can afford to disappoint.

She's the most powerful woman in this city. If she likes you, everything changes. If she doesn't—"

She stops herself. Doesn't finish the sentence. She doesn't have to. I already know how that story ends.

"I'll make a good impression," I say, and I mean it. Just not the way she thinks I do.

---

Thursday arrives faster than I want it to.

I stand in front of my mirror for a long time, trying to decide what to wear. Something that says I'm trying without looking like I'm trying. Something that says I belong in that room without looking like I'm already planning to burn it down.

I choose blue. Not because I think it will help—nothing helps with Vittoria, not really—but because blue is the color I wore to my own wedding, and some petty, aching part of me wants to walk into her house already dressed like the woman she's going to help kill.

My mother comes in while I'm pinning my hair back. She stands behind me, meeting my eyes in the mirror.

"You look beautiful," she says. "Like a proper young lady."

"Thank you, Mama."

She hesitates. I can see her working up to something.

"Elena," she says carefully, "I know this isn't what you wanted. I know you had dreams. But this family—the Marchettis—they can give you things we never could. Security. Protection. A future."

I turn to face her. "Is that what you tell yourself? That you're giving me a future?"

Her face goes pale. "What's that supposed to mean?"

"Nothing." I soften my voice. "I'm just nervous. That's all."

She relaxes, but I can see the doubt still lingering in her eyes.

"Just be yourself," she says. "Be polite. Be grateful. And whatever you do, don't say anything that could be taken the wrong way."

I smile. "I won't."

I don't tell her that I've already said a hundred things that could be taken the wrong way.

That I've been saying them since the moment I woke up in this life. That I'm not planning to stop.

---

The Marchetti house looms in front of me as the car pulls up the long gravel drive.

I've been here before. A hundred times. A thousand. I know every stone on this path, every window in that cold, beautiful house.

I know which rooms are safe and which ones are traps. I know that the parlor where Vittoria is waiting for me is the same room where, in another life, I sat and smiled and drank tea while she decided whether to keep me alive.

The car stops. The driver opens my door. I step out into the cool afternoon air and feel the weight of that house settle on my shoulders like something I can't shake off.

I walk up the steps. The front door opens before I can knock.

Vittoria's maid stands there, her face carefully blank. "Miss Rossi. Mrs. Marchetti is waiting for you in the parlor."

I follow her through the house. The hallway is the same. The same paintings on the walls, the same marble floors, the same smell of lemon polish and old money.

I remember running through these halls as a child, before I understood what they really were. Before I understood that this house doesn't give anything without taking something in return.

The maid stops at the parlor door and gestures for me to enter.

I take a breath. Then I walk in.

---

The parlor hasn't changed at all. Same tall windows looking out over gardens too perfectly trimmed to feel like anything real grows there. Same portrait of Vittoria's late husband over the fireplace, painted young and handsome and looking nothing like the stories I've heard about the man underneath.

Vittoria herself sits already waiting, spine straight, hands folded, a smile arranged on her face like furniture.

"Elena." She says my name the way you'd taste something to check if it's still good. "Sit. You must be parched, coming all this way."

I sit. I let her pour.

"I hear wonderful things," she says, settling back into her chair with the easy comfort of a woman who has never once had to worry about which chair is safe to sit in. "Your mother says you've become quite thoughtful lately. Quiet. Watchful, even."

There it is. Already, three sentences in, and she's testing the water for cracks.

"I suppose I've been thinking about my future," I say, and I mean it more honestly than she could possibly know.

"A wise habit for a young woman in your position." She lifts her cup, the china so thin I can see the shape of her fingers through it. "Family like ours—the future isn't something you wait around for. It gets decided.

Arranged. Someone has to hold the whole shape of it in mind, or things fall apart very quickly."

"Sounds like a heavy thing to carry," I say. "Deciding everyone's future for them."

Something flickers behind her eyes—not quite surprise, more like the mild interest of a woman noticing a chess piece move somewhere she hadn't expected. She sets her cup down without a sound.

"You'd be surprised how light it feels," she says, "once you accept it's necessary."

"Necessary for who?"

She studies me. "For everyone. That's the thing about a family like this, Elena. We don't get the luxury of being selfish. Every choice we make has to serve the greater good."

"And who decides what that greater good is?"

She smiles. It's the kind of smile that makes you feel like you've just walked into a trap you didn't see coming.

"That's usually what the tea is for," she says. "To figure out who has the right to decide."

I feel my stomach drop. She's telling me exactly what this is. An evaluation. A test. A chance for her to decide if I'm worth keeping or if I'm just another loose end waiting to be tied off.

"I see," I say. "And what do you usually decide?"

She pours herself another cup. "That depends on the girl."

---

We talk for another twenty minutes about nothing that matters—her garden, a wedding coming up in the spring, whether I prefer the city or the coast.

But underneath every single sentence, I can feel her doing what she's always done. Weighing me.

Measuring how much of me is still soft enough to shape, and how much has already hardened into something she'll need to handle more carefully.

I give her softness where I can afford to. I let her see a sixteen-year-old girl a little dazzled by being invited into a room like this one. I laugh at the right moments.

I ask about her garden with what I hope looks like real interest, and mostly it is, because even monsters can grow good roses.

But somewhere near the end, she sets her cup down again and looks at me directly, no performance left in it at all.

"You remind me of someone," she says. "I can't place who."

My whole body goes still, the careful kind of still I've spent a decade learning.

"I get that a lot," I say. "Common face, I suppose."

"No." She studies me the way you'd study a page you'd read before but couldn't quite remember the ending of. "Not common. Familiar. There's a difference."

I don't answer that. I've learned, in my first life, that silence is sometimes the only safe response to Vittoria Marchetti—that anything you say can be turned, gently and pleasantly, into a rope she'll use later.

She lets it go. For now. She smiles again, that same arranged smile, and pours me a second cup I don't ask for and don't want.

"Tell me about yourself, Elena," she says. "What do you want out of life?"

I think about the water. The hands around my throat. The feeling of dying alone in the dark.

"I want to be safe," I say. "I want to be able to make my own choices."

She tilts her head. "And what do you think those choices would be, if you were free to make them?"

I meet her eyes. "I think I'd like to find out."

She holds my gaze for a long moment. I can see her working through it, trying to decide if I'm a threat or just a girl with too much ambition.

"Interesting," she says finally. "You're more complicated than I expected."

"Thank you. I think."

"It's not a compliment," she says, but her voice is almost warm. "Or an insult. Just an observation."

I set my cup down. "I should probably go. My mother worries."

"Of course." She stands. "It was a pleasure meeting you, Elena. I hope we'll see more of you."

She says it like she already knows we will. Like she already knows I'm not going to escape this house, no matter how hard I try.

---

I leave that parlor an hour later with my hands steady and my stomach in knots, having learned exactly one useful thing: she hasn't recognized me yet, not really, but some old animal part of her has noticed the shape of me anyway.

Vittoria doesn't believe in ghosts. But she believes in patterns, and I'm apparently starting to look like one she half-remembers.

I'm halfway down the gravel drive when a voice stops me.

"Elena."

I turn. Dante is walking toward me, sleeves rolled, grinning like he's just been given a gift.

"You survived tea with my mother," he says. "Not everyone does."

"Barely," I say, and I mean it two different ways at once.

He falls into step beside me toward the front gate, hands in his pockets, entirely too comfortable for a boy who has no idea what his family's whole history looks like from the inside.

This is the version of Dante before any of it touched him yet. Before a wedding.

Before a wife he let get quietly erased because looking away was easier than looking straight at what his family actually was.

"You're not what I expected," he says. "From the Rossi girl, I mean. Everyone talks about you like you're this shy little thing."

"Maybe I am."

"No." He glances sideways at me, something almost thoughtful crossing his easy grin for half a second. "You've got sharper eyes than that."

I don't know what to do with the ache that puts in my chest. In another life, this same boy married me and then spent years not asking the questions that might have saved me, because asking questions was uncomfortable and Dante had never once had to be uncomfortable about anything in his whole charmed life.

I don't hate him for it. Not exactly. I just know, standing here at the gate with him smiling at me like I'm something new and interesting, that I can never again let myself be someone he gets to look away from.

"I should go," I say. "My mother worries."

"Sure." He steps back, easy as ever, already halfway to forgetting this conversation the moment it ends. "See you around, Elena."

I watch him walk back toward the house, whistling something under his breath, not a single shadow on him yet.

Not you, I think, walking away down the long gravel drive with the harbor wind picking up around me. Never you again. I already know exactly how that story ends.

---

I'm almost at the gate when I see him.

Matteo.

He's standing in the garden, half-hidden behind a hedge, watching me the way he watched me that first night we met.

His face is unreadable, but something in his eyes catches my attention. It looks like recognition. Not of my face. Of something deeper.

I stop walking.

"Hello," I say.

He steps out from behind the hedge. His hands are in his pockets. His face is still.

"You're Elena," he says. It's not a question.

"I know. We've met."

"I know we have." He takes a step closer. "I just wanted to say it again."

Something in my chest shifts. I can't name it. I'm not sure I want to.

"Why?" I ask.

He doesn't answer right away. He looks at me the way you'd look at something you can't quite understand. "I don't know. You're just... different."

"Different good or different bad?"

"Different interesting."

I feel a pull in my chest. The same pull I've been trying to ignore since the moment I woke up in this life.

The same pull I felt in my first life, when I watched him carry me through the water and never got to tell him how it felt to be held by someone who cared.

"That's dangerous," I say. "Being interesting. Especially in this house."

"Is that a warning?"

"Yes."

He steps closer. "What if I don't want to be safe?"

I look up at him. "What do you want?"

He's quiet for a long moment. "I don't know yet. But I'm starting to think it's you."

---

I don't know what to say to that. I don't know what to feel. So I do what I've always done when I don't know what to do.

I walk away.

But I look back, once, before I turn the corner.

He's still standing there, watching me go. His hands are out of his pockets now. His face is unreadable.

But his eyes are different. They look like someone who's just found something he didn't know he was looking for.

I turn the corner and keep walking. But I feel his gaze on me the whole way.

---

That night, I lie in my bed with the rabbit sheets and stare at the ceiling.

I think about Vittoria, and how close I came to giving myself away. I think about Dante, and how easy it would be to let him keep thinking I'm just a pretty girl from a good family.

But mostly, I think about Matteo.

He said he wanted me. He said I was different interesting.

I don't know if that's a good thing or a bad thing. All I know is that I feel it too.

And I know that nothing in this house—nothing in this life—is going to be simple.