My daughter was starving. She wolfed down a piece and dropped dead on the spot.
I choked up a mouthful of black blood. As the world dimmed, I heard Gianna's vicious laugh cutting through the haze.
"Serafina Castellano, you should never have come here to disrupt our household. Dante has treated me as his wife for years. If you showed up alive, how was I supposed to go on being the Lady of this house?!"
My daughter and I died like dogs. They rolled our bodies in old carpet and dumped us in an unmarked lot past the rail yards.
After I was gone, Dante wrapped his arms around a weeping Gianna and murmured comfort against her hair.
"She's dead. Let it go. Even if she'd lived, I would've had the annulment papers drawn up and told her to stay away from our family."
The meal I'd once given a starving stranger, the vows he'd sworn on his mother's grave, all of it erased from his memory as though it had never existed.
I died with hatred lodged so deep it followed me into the dark. When my eyes opened again, it was the very day Dante took control of the Ferrante territory.