Chapter 2

Looking back now, I realize I was a fool of the highest order.

I actually believed that a woman with the soul of an artist could pose a threat to the head of New York City's most powerful crime family.

The reality was a brutal lesson.

In my previous life, when I wandered through a frigid winter rain for an entire night, my Louboutin heels grinding my ankles into a bloody mess while a fever of a hundred and four degrees razed my body, Vince never came for me. While I lay curled up in a derelict Lower East Side tenement waiting for death, Vince hadn't bothered to send a single scout. That very night, he had flown Bella to Sicily.

By the next morning, the Costello family's encrypted group chats were flooded with images of him adjusting her shoulder holster and a video of her rising on her tiptoes to press a kiss against his jaw.

It was a joke so sickening it made my skin crawl.

A cold, sharp laugh escaped my throat.

Vince reacted instantly, his grip on my wrist loosening as he shoved my hand away.

"I've grown weary of repeating myself, Ava," he said, his voice dropping into a professional chill. "Bella's father was loyal to my father. I look after her for that reason alone. Nothing more."

He looked down at the red welts on my neck with an air of clinical detachment. "It's just a mark. Put some Neosporin on it, and it will be gone in two days."

He pulled back, his gaze turning distant and frosty. "Stop inventing fantasies about the two of us. You're becoming paranoid."

I watched the ice settle in his eyes, and a wave of bitterness surged in my chest.

But the bitterness wasn't for him. It was for the pathetic woman I used to be.

In that previous life, after our final break, the adenocarcinoma had dismantled me piece by piece.

The side effects of the cheap chemotherapy I could afford left me vomiting blood until my stomach was empty. When the pain became a physical entity, I would claw at the walls of my room until my fingernails cracked and bled. I lived in a mold-choked basement in New Jersey, paying four hundred dollars a month for a space that lacked even the most basic heating.

Driven by a desperation born of hunger and pain, I eventually dragged myself to a pawnshop to sell the engagement ring he had given me—a custom three-carat black diamond Tiffany piece etched with the Costello family crest.

The bald Jewish owner in Newark offered me a mere five thousand dollars for a ring worth over a hundred and fifty thousand. I stared at the diamond for ten agonizing minutes before sliding it back into my pocket.

When the doctors told me I had one month left, I gathered my remaining strength. My body had wasted away to barely eighty pounds. I took the Long Island Rail Road for two hours, shivering the entire way, just to reach the gates of the estate.

I told myself that he had once knelt in the blood of my murdered parents and sworn to protect me for eternity. I thought that perhaps there was a shred of memory left in him.

When the security guards called the main house, Vince's voice crackled over the intercom. He sounded as calm as if he were discussing the afternoon weather.

"She made her choice," he said. "Tell her to leave."

I sank to my knees outside those iron gates, my forehead pressing against the freezing metal bars.

"Vince, please," I rasped, my voice a broken whisper. "I'm dying. I only want to see you one last time."

The only response was the hollow hum of static.

Then, he hung up.

I stayed there, kneeling in the snow, until the last of my body heat bled into the frozen earth.

In my final moments of consciousness, I saw him and Bella standing in the rose garden. Those were David Austin roses I had personally ordered from Portland; I had spent every weekend pruning and fertilizing them.

They were clinking Waterford crystal flutes—the glasses I had picked out—and then they kissed.

In that moment, the death of my heart was far more agonizing than the cancer.

I snapped back to the present, forcing my emotions into a tight, controlled box.

"I'm not jealous, Vince," I said, my voice eerily level. "And I'm not even angry with Bella."

"I'm just tired. I need space." I looked him directly in the eye, my expression vacant. "You should go back to your guests. It is your anniversary party, after all."

A flash of genuine confusion crossed Vince's handsome features.

He hadn't expected me to be this composed.

I didn't give him a second glance. I turned my back on him and began walking down the driveway, which was cloaked in the lengthening shadows of the evening.

The estate's high-intensity security lights caught my figure, casting a long, distorted shadow across the pavement.

I heard him call my name from behind me, but I didn't stop.

I didn't even flinch.

In this life, my only ambition is to survive.

Everything else is a luxury I can no longer afford.