Chapter 1

I WAS ALREADY DEAD WHEN THE ROSES ARRIVED

My sister Bianca had always loved "joking" with me.

When we were little, she joked that no one remembered my birthday—and kept the gag going until I cried, only then producing the birthday cake.

On a family camping trip, she had Dad drive off and secretly filmed me chasing the car.

Whenever I got angry, she said I just couldn't take a joke.

Then, on the day of my proposal, she came up with a "Mafia Queen of the Skies" photoshoot—and I was hoisted on a rusted crane, dangling nearly five meters above the ground.

I screamed until my voice broke, begging my fiancé—the mafia Godfather, Lorenzo—to let me down.

He didn't save me. He turned his back without a moment's hesitation.

"It's only a few minutes. Bianca put a lot of work into planning this 'Mafia Queen of the Skies' shoot. Don't spoil it for everyone."

They drove off together to collect the flowers for the proposal, leaving me hanging alone beneath a rope about to snap, with nothing but a promise: "We'll let you down in ten minutes."

"She's just putting on an act—she only wants attention," my brother sneered, with no idea that at that very moment I lay sprawled on the ground, blood gushing from me and pooling into a dark stain in the mud.

Why did my family's love have to be built on my endless terror? Why did the cold Godfather who had once sworn a blood oath to protect me walk away without a backward glance while I begged for my life?

Only when they returned to the estate and saw my shattered, blood-soaked corpse did their lofty, arrogant world finally collapse around them.

I watched them fall to their knees, all of them, sobbing and pleading for a forgiveness I would never give.

But I could never come back.

Chapter 1

I hung nearly five meters in the air beneath a rusted crane cable, screaming desperately for my fiancé to let me down. But Lorenzo Falcone—the most feared mafia Godfather in the entire Syndicate—only turned and walked away with cold indifference, off to collect the roses he had prepared for his proposal surprise.

He left me exactly four minutes to watch, with my own eyes, as the cable frayed and snapped.

The icy wind whipped at my face and set my long white dress billowing—the dress Bianca had forced me into. Below, the abandoned estate was overrun with weeds, and the cracked concrete ground stretched out like a silent graveyard.

I was perched on the broken edge of an old foundation, a slab of weathered cement where a house had once stood. Walls and rubble tumbled down the steep slope behind the estate all the way to the bottom; beyond the slab's edge the hillside plunged away, choked with impenetrable brush that ran down into the black depths of the woods.

The crane was parked right at the edge of the concrete platform, and I hung directly above the steepest part of the drop. I gripped the arms of the iron chair until my knuckles went white as bone.

I had severe acrophobia. That bottomless terror locked my whole body rigid; I couldn't move. And every member of my family knew it perfectly well—and had turned it into a weapon to torment me, again and again.

"Lorenzo, please!" I sobbed, looking down at the man who was about to become my husband. "I can't breathe... Please, tell them to let me down."

Lorenzo stopped at the edge of the clearing. In the entire underworld, his name alone made people go pale.

Before he was even twenty-five, he had personally ordered the eradication of two rival families, cementing his rule as the supreme Godfather of our mafia. Merely by standing there, he could silence even the most hardened, blood-soaked hitmen and make them bow their heads.

Yet in this moment, faced with my tears, there was nothing in his eyes but a flicker of impatience at having his mood spoiled.

"It's only a few minutes, Anya," Lorenzo called out, his tone so level it carried not a trace of urgency. "Bianca put a lot of work into planning this 'Mafia Queen of the Skies' shoot. Don't spoil it for everyone."

I looked over at Bianca. My own sister stood beside the crane's control console, a venomous smile playing on her lips. In her hands she clutched a huge bundle of helium balloons, pretending to strain against them—mocking me, acting as if the balloons were what held me aloft.

"Stop blubbering like a giant baby, Anya," Bianca laughed out loud, her jeering voice echoing across the empty estate. "You always have to make everything about you. The Godfather was kind enough to give you a perfect proposal day, and this is how you throw your little tantrum?"

My mother walked to Bianca's side and folded her arms, her face full of severity and disgust.

"Your sister is right," my mother snapped. "You are the eldest daughter of a crime boss. Put away that weak, useless display! Stop shaming this family."

As for my father—the boss himself, high and mighty—he never even looked at me. He was staring down at the luxury watch on his wrist, wholly indifferent to the panic attack churning through my chest.

"Luca, did you get it all on video?" Bianca asked, turning to our brother.

Luca held up his phone, the lens fixed squarely on my tear-streaked face. As a formally inducted core member of the Syndicate, he was a killer who never blinked—but his favorite pastime in all the world was recording every instant of my humiliation.

"Got it all," Luca snickered under his breath. "The boys back at the warehouse are going to love this."

"Please..." I made one last plea. A violent gust of wind slammed into me, the chair lurched, and the sickening swing over the drop churned my stomach; my voice came out thin, almost inaudible.

Lorenzo did not look back. He settled into the back seat of his bulletproof SUV, and my family filed into the convoy behind him. They planned to be gone from the estate for fifteen minutes—just long enough to collect the final, most crucial prop for this grand proposal surprise.

Before getting into the car, Lorenzo made a point of rolling down his window and calling to the estate's steward at the crane console: "Let her down in ten minutes. Take her behind the flower arch to touch up her makeup. When we get back, we start the proposal immediately." The steward bowed.

But before the convoy had even cleared the gates, Bianca leaned out of her window and shouted to him: "Forget her for now! Go switch on the power for the big screen in the front courtyard and hang the fairy lights—the Godfather's grand entrance matters more than anything!" The steward hesitated a beat, then turned and ran toward the front courtyard.

I did not know it then, but the last pair of eyes watching over me on that estate had just been deliberately pulled away—minutes before I fell.

The engines rumbled low; tires crunched over gravel and tore away into the distance. The deafening mechanical roar, mixed with the howling wind, buried every other sound in that clearing.

And then I was utterly alone in the sky.

The silence of the abandoned lot was suffocating. The wind shoved at the iron chair again. And directly above my head, a sound cut through the stillness—the kind of sound that turns the blood to ice.

Snap.

I jerked my head up. The heavy industrial rope holding the chair was fraying apart at a heart-stopping speed. The rough fibers were snapping one after another.

I opened my mouth to scream, but nothing came out of my throat.

The last thread of fiber parted.

The fall lasted only an instant; the raging wind tore the air from my lungs. The snapped cable whipped back with brutal force, hurling the iron chair toward the outer edge of the concrete platform—that slanted slab of cement rushing up to meet me.

A dull, heavy thud, mixed with the crack of shattering bone. I struck the edge, bounced half a foot into the air, then tumbled over the rim, chair and all, and crashed down the steep slope into the dense, impenetrable brush.

Then—silence. No pain. No fear. Only an endless, boundless cold swallowing everything.

I opened my eyes. I was standing at the top of the slope, on the edge of the concrete platform, looking down. A vivid smear of blood scored the concrete edge, trailing down into the darkness below; the brush had been smashed open into a jagged gash. I followed that gash with my eyes—and saw my own body, twisted into a horrible, unnatural posture, wedged in the waist-high thorns at the bottom of the slope. Blood welled steadily from the back of my head, staining the pristine white gown a shocking, ugly crimson. The shattered wreckage of the iron chair lay scattered beside me.

From anywhere in the clearing, the bottom of that slope was invisible.

I was dead.

A strange pulling sensation seized my chest and wrenched me away from the bloody scene. The world blurred and twisted—and in the next instant I was standing inside an upscale flower shop downtown, one owned by the Syndicate.

The air smelled of fresh earth and expensive perfume. My family and Lorenzo were gathered around the open trunk of a pure-black SUV. Packed inside were one thousand roses, blood-red and glistening.

Lorenzo leaned against the mountain of flowers, his broad shoulders relaxed and at ease. He slipped a hand into the inner pocket of his tailored suit, drew out a velvet ring box, and flicked it open with his thumb.

Inside lay an enormous, heirloom diamond ring—the very one I had stared at for a long time in a catalog three months ago. So that one idle murmur of mine—he had remembered it all along.

I stepped forward and reached out with a trembling hand to touch that brilliant stone. But my fingers passed straight through the cold setting and the gem, closing on nothing but empty air.

I drew my hand back and stared at my translucent skin. A bitter, bottomless despair surged up: I would never wear that ring.

"The Godfather really spared no expense for our family's little crybaby," my mother said with a laugh, her face all fawning warmth and doting affection.

"Marrying him is the luckiest thing that could ever happen to that girl," my father chimed in, giving Lorenzo an approving slap on the shoulder.

Luca sauntered to the middle of the shop and cast his phone screen onto the large smart TV mounted on the flower shop's wall.

"Hey, Godfather," Luca called out, "come look at the show I filmed before we left."

The screen flared to life. There I was, hanging in midair, my face white as paper, my eyes bulging with sheer terror, tears streaming down my cheeks as I begged them to let me down.

The whole room erupted in laughter. Bianca giggled and leaned against her best friend Clara—also a peripheral member of the family, a junior florist.

"She's such a drama queen," Bianca jeered. "Look at her shaking. What a pathetic sight!"

Clara laughed along, but her guilty eyes flicked away from the screen for half a second. "Leaving her alone up that high—is that really okay?"

"What could possibly happen?" my mother cut in with a careless wave of her hand. "It'll do her good. Toughen her up."

Lorenzo stared hard at the screen, and the smile on his lips slowly stiffened and died. In the video, my chest heaved violently, my eyes brimming with desperate, cornered horror. A heavy silence settled over him.

He turned abruptly, his jaw tightening. He strode toward the flower shop door and pressed his hand against the glass.

"I'm driving back to check on her," Lorenzo said, his low voice threaded with a sudden, inexplicable restlessness.

Bianca rushed forward and grabbed his arm.

"Oh, come on—you can't!" she whined, cajoling him as she pulled him away from the door. "You'll ruin the big dramatic entrance! Lorenzo, that rope is industrial grade. She's perfectly safe!"

"She looked terrified," Lorenzo murmured, his gaze drifting back to the screen despite himself.

"She's faking," Luca put in, fanning the flames. "You know how Anya is. She lives for attention."

Lorenzo's eyes returned to the door handle. He stood there for a long moment. The one chance to save my life had been right there, within reach of his fingertips.

In the end, he let go.

"All right," Lorenzo sighed softly and stepped back into the room. "We'll finish up here first."

Bianca clapped her hands in delight. "We still haven't picked the photo for the estate's big screen! The one they'll play right before you walk in with the roses."

She swiped through Luca's phone, throwing one frozen frame after another onto the big screen. Finally, her fingertip stopped on a close-up.

It was the shot taken near the end of the video, just before it cut off: me, reaching desperately toward the camera, my face contorted with pain and raw terror, silently screaming for someone—anyone—to save me.

"That one," Lorenzo said, gazing at my despairing face, and for once his eyes turned soft. "Use that one."

"Why on earth would you use that hideous crying face?" Bianca rolled her eyes.

"Because she's reaching for me," Lorenzo murmured, the corner of his mouth lifting into a tender, devoted smile. "She's waiting for me to come over and take her hand."