Chapter 2

When I walked out of the funeral home with the urn in my arms, the sky was still dark.

Antonio was standing by the car, smoking. The moment he saw me, he crushed the cigarette out.

“After Chloe is… properly laid to rest,” he said hoarsely, “can you stay a little longer before you go?”

There was something in his voice I almost never heard, pleading.

“Choose a good place. Say goodbye the right way.”

I’d been trapped in the Rossi family for five years. Chloe had never even left Manhattan.

Her whole world was the high walls of the estate and the small patch of sky outside her window, boxed in by barbed wire.

I nodded.

“Okay. But when I leave, I’m taking her with me.”

I paused, then said it anyway:

“Aiden never wanted to see her. I won’t leave her here, in anyone’s way.”

Antonio opened his mouth, then closed it again. Whatever he wanted to say collapsed into a heavy, “Alright.”

The way he looked at me was exactly the same as it had been fifteen years ago.

I was ten then. My parents and my older brother died in a car accident.

Antonio showed up at the orphanage, looked me straight in the eyes, and said:

“Ella, come home with me. From now on, that place will be your home.”

There was pity in his gaze, sympathy, and something else, buried deep, a quiet exhaustion from knowing how cruel fate could be.

Charlotte Rossi—the Boss’s Lady of the Rossi family, had never liked me.

She always looked at me like I was trash that wandered in uninvited.

At least back then, Antonio and Aiden were good to me.

Aiden used to get into fights with the other kids in the family when they bullied me.

When Charlotte punished me by making me kneel in the study, he would sneak me sandwiches so I wouldn’t go hungry.

But then we grew up. Aiden started getting involved in the family business with Antonio.

And then he met Sophia Costa.

The Costa family was our sworn enemy.

And yet Aiden fell in love with her anyway.

I stepped back into the roles of “adopted daughter” and “little sister,” and stopped trying to step in his world.

When Antonio found out about Aiden and Sophia, he forced Aiden to marry me by holding the family inheritance over his head.

With the family cutting off all his funding and resources, Aiden finally gave in and came back to marry me.

There was no wedding, and no vows.

Just a marriage contract signed under a lawyer’s supervision.

And a ring he tossed at me like it meant nothing.

After that, every time he looked at me, there was only cold disgust and impatience.

Chloe was no exception.

What he forgot was that on my fifteenth birthday, in front of the entire family, he had declared:

“When Ella grows up, I’ll marry her. She’ll be the real lady of the Rossi family.”

Over the years, he and Sophia broke up and got back together again and again, each time causing a scandal that turned into dinner-table gossip for every other family.

I spent an entire year in therapy because of it.

If it weren’t for Chloe, I might have jumped from the top floor of the estate a long time ago.

And now, Aiden had smashed the very last thing holding me together.

I held Chloe’s urn and slid into the back seat of the Cadillac.

Antonio got into the passenger seat and told the driver, “Take us home.”

I lowered my head, my fingers brushing over the cold surface of the urn.

Outside the window, the neon lights glowed on, completely unaware that, just last night, a basement had become a grave.