Chapter 2

Seraphina POV:

The little ceramic cat nightlight sat on my bedside table, its soft glow a familiar comfort against the darkness. For ten years, it had chased away my nightmares. Tonight, it felt like a mockery.

I reached over and yanked the plug from the wall. The room plunged into an oppressive blackness, so thick I felt like I was suffocating. Good. I wanted to feel it. I wanted the darkness to swallow me whole.

My bare feet padded across the cold wooden floor to my closet. I pulled down a dusty duffel bag from the top shelf. One by one, I gathered the ghosts of my life with Dante. The small, silver locket with the Moretti crest he'd given me for my fifteenth birthday. The bottle of "Coral Sea" perfume he'd bought me because he said it smelled like a place he'd take me to one day, a place with no blood and no secrets.

They all went into the bag. Relics of a dead faith.

Under my bed was a locked wooden box. Inside was my diary. I flipped through the pages, my fingers tracing the frantic, girlish script. It was a pathetic history of my devotion. Every kind word, every small gesture from him, was recorded and analyzed like scripture.

Then I found it. A page from years ago, after a rival had tried to send me a "message" by having his thugs follow me home from school. Dante had dealt with them. I never saw them again. That night, he'd found my diary open on my desk. He didn't say anything, but the next morning, I found a new entry written in his sharp, aggressive hand. It wasn't in ink. It was in blood.

*Fina is Moretti property. Touch her and die.*

Property.

The word slammed into me, knocking the air from my lungs. Not a sister. Not a ward. Not even a person. I was a thing. An asset to be protected, like his cars or his collection of antique weapons. His protection wasn't about love. It was about ownership.

A sob tore from my throat, raw and ugly. With frantic, shaking hands, I began to rip the pages from the diary. I tore through every cherished memory, every secret hope, until all that was left was a pile of confetti-sized pieces of my own foolish heart.

The next day, Isabella officially moved into the room adjoining Dante's. My room. The one I used to have before I was moved to the guest wing last year because I was "becoming a woman."

She summoned me to the sitting room. The entire family-Dante's capos, his lieutenants-was there, a silent audience for my humiliation.

Isabella smiled, a condescending, placid expression. "Seraphina, darling. A welcome gift."

She held up a necklace. It wasn't the delicate silver or gold I was used to. It was a thick, gaudy band of some cheap, dark metal, studded with glittering stones that formed the Vescovi family crest. It wasn't a necklace. It was a collar.

My breath hitched. I was allergic to cheap alloys. Dante knew this. He'd once thrown away a bracelet a school friend had given me, his lip curled in disgust as he saw the red rash forming on my wrist.

I looked at him, pleading with my eyes. *Don't do this. Please.*

His face was a mask of indifference. He met my gaze, his dark eyes cold and empty, and delivered the sentence.

"Take it."

His voice was flat. Final. It was an order. In front of everyone, he was showing them my new place in the hierarchy. Below him. Below her.

My hands trembled as I reached for the collar. Isabella's fingers brushed against mine as she fastened it around my neck. The metal was cold, heavy.

"It suits you," she purred, loud enough for everyone to hear. "Every pet should have a collar."

The laughter was polite, but it felt like stones being thrown at me. I stood there, my head bowed, as the metal began to warm against my skin. The familiar, burning itch started almost immediately, a ring of fire tightening around my throat.

I didn't scratch it. I didn't cry. I just stood there and let it burn, branding me with the truth. I was property. And I had just been handed over to a new owner.