Chapter 1

Five years after my death, I saw Damian again during the Moretti family's final trial. He wore a wedding ring, and Cecilia stood beside him. She was the woman who had stepped over my body, stolen credit for saving him, and taken the place that should have been mine.

The iron doors of the underground trial chamber slammed shut behind me. Cold white lights flickered on overhead, one after another, revealing every face around the long table. They all looked much older than they had five years ago.

So did Damian. At eighteen, he had been a nameless kid from the old district with an injured shoulder, a lousy temper, and not enough money in his pocket for a decent meal. Now he stood straight in a perfectly cut black suit, with the most powerful members of the Moretti family behind him.

He had completed ninety-nine family trials in five years. This was the last one, the final test he had to pass before officially taking control of the Moretti family.

And I was the first question this trial had for him. Someone recognized me before anyone else did.

"Evelyn Vale?"

A man's voice shot up. His chair scraped harshly across the floor.

"Didn't she die five years ago?"

Another man understood almost at once and gave a scornful laugh.

"No wonder the final trial brought us back to the old safe house. She was the one most to blame for that fire. Of course they dragged her out for this."

"She was an orphan the family took in, and she actually thought that made her a Moretti. First she clung to Damian. Then she found out he had no name and no money, so she sold us out instead."

"She got all those children killed, too."

The accusations came one after another, just like they had five years ago. I stood at the end of the long table and glanced down at my black dress.

I looked exactly as I had before the fire. The hem wasn't burned. My right hand showed no scars. Even the pitifully cheap silver ring was still on my finger.

I couldn't help smiling. Apparently, once you were dead, even a trial could erase the ugliest part of your ending. Cecilia edged half a step closer to Damian.

She wore a pearl-white dress, her hair pinned back. She still looked as soft and polished as I remembered.

"Damian."

She caught his sleeve with a gentle hand.

"I know this is only a trial, but seeing her brings back everything from five years ago."

Damian didn't answer right away. He had been watching me ever since I appeared, his expression unreadable.

There was no joy in his eyes, no nostalgia. Only the distant, searching look of a stranger, and it left an empty ache in my chest. After the fire five years ago, he had lain unconscious, gravely injured.

When he woke, large pieces of his memory of me were missing. The doctors said the trauma had made his mind protect itself. He forgot the years we'd grown up together in the old safe house. He forgot the first time I stitched a wound for him. He forgot climbing through my window in a rainstorm because another man had looked at me for too long.

He even forgot what he'd said while sliding that silver ring onto my finger. Later, the Moretti family found him. Cecilia stayed beside his hospital bed and told him I had despised him for being poor, sold the old safe house's location to a rival family, and set the fire to destroy a past I refused to admit was mine.

She told him she had run into the fire and saved him. So five years went by, and I became the traitor in the grave that everyone spat on.

She became the wife of the Moretti heir. A mechanical voice suddenly rang through the center of the chamber. The first round of the trial had begun.

There were no complicated rules, only one condition: every answer would be checked by a lie detector. The first question was for Cecilia.

"Have you ever deliberately harmed Evelyn?"

She clearly froze. Then she quickly looked up, her voice still soft.

"No."

A red light flashed the next second. The entire chamber went quiet. Some of the color left Cecilia's face.

She forced a smile.

"Maybe I'm just nervous. After all, what happened back then..."

She never finished. A gunshot cracked from the side of the room. Someone reached for a weapon on instinct.

I didn't move. It was only a blank fired by the trial. Before I could blink, someone seized my wrist.

Damian yanked me behind him. He moved too fast to have thought about it. His other hand pressed against the back of my neck while his shoulder shielded me from the gunshot.

I knew that move all too well. When I was seventeen, I'd gone with him to deliver a shipment at the docks, and someone opened fire on us from a warehouse roof. He had pulled me into his arms just like this and taken a flying piece of metal in his back.

Later, I pulled it out while he lay across a table and mocked my shaking hands. But now, after acting on instinct, he went rigid. Damian looked down at the hand gripping my wrist.

He stared at it as if it were a mistake he couldn't explain. I looked up. We were so close I caught the brief shock in his eyes.

"Let me go."

I spoke softly. His grip tightened for one second before he slowly released me. By then, everyone else had recovered.

"The trial probably forced that reaction."

"Damian knew her for years. It makes sense that his body would remember."

"Right. One moment of instinct doesn't erase what she did."

Cecilia quickly regained her composure. She stepped back to Damian's side and tried to take his arm. He let her.

But he kept looking at me. I ran my thumb over the silver ring.

"You don't remember it?"

His gaze followed my hand and stayed on the ring for a long time.

"Should I?"

"It's nothing."

I lowered my hand.

"A long time ago, someone was so poor this was all he could afford. He still promised he'd get me a better one someday."

With that, I turned and walked toward the next door. No one spoke behind me. But just before the door closed, I heard Damian ask one more question.

"Who gave it to you?"

I didn't turn around.

"You did."