Dying Unloved: My Cold Family's Bitter Regret

I made one phone call on my tenth birthday, and it cost me everything.

I just wanted my brother to come home for cake.

They never found his body after the car bomb. So my parents buried their grief in me. Eight years of kneeling in freezing rain. Eight years of being told my existence was a debt I could never repay.

Tonight, on the anniversary of his death, I'm going to die.

And the people who should have saved me won't even pick up the phone.

Chapter 1

SerafinaPOV

Six hours before I died, I was happy.

Not the loud kind of happy. Not the kind that makes you laugh or dance or post pictures online. The quiet kind. The kind that sneaks up on you when you're sitting on a rooftop with your best friend, watching the sun set over a city that's never done you any favors.

Aria had stolen two cans of cherry soda from the vending machine on the third floor of my dorm. She handed me one, the aluminum sweating in the late-afternoon heat, and dropped onto the concrete beside me with a groan.

"You know what I just realized?" she said, popping her tab. "We've been friends for six years, and you've never once let me inside your family's estate."

I took a sip of my soda. It was too sweet, the way all stolen things are.

"There's nothing inside worth seeing."

"I don't believe that." Aria turned her head to look at me. Her eyes were the color of strong tea-dark and warm and sharp all at once. "You grew up there. There has to be something. A childhood bedroom. A favorite hiding spot. Something."

I thought about the soundproof bunker. The locked door. The window I'd jumped from when I was twelve.

"The rooftop here is better," I said.

Aria didn't push. That was the thing about her-she always knew when to stop. She'd been my roommate since sophomore year, assigned randomly by a housing algorithm that didn't know either of our names. Within a week, she'd figured out that I flinched at loud noises and never talked about my parents and kept a fully packed emergency bag under my bed. She never asked why. She just started sitting closer during thunderstorms.

"I'm going to pass those exams," she said now, stretching her legs out in front of her. "The federal entrance exams. I'm going to pass them, and I'm going to get into the academy, and I'm going to become the kind of agent who actually helps people instead of-" she waved her hand at the skyline, at the invisible network of syndicate-controlled territories that lay beneath it like a second city.

"Instead of the kind who takes bribes from my father?"

She didn't apologize for the implication. That was another thing about Aria. She never apologized for telling me the truth.

"The second you graduate and get your badge," I said, "I'll be standing outside the gates. Biggest bouquet of white lilies you've ever seen."

Aria grinned and hooked her pinky around mine.

"Promise?"

"Promise."

We sat there until the sun finished bleeding into the horizon and the streetlamps flickered on below us. I didn't know it was my last sunset. I didn't know that in six hours, I'd be dead.

I thought I had more time.

---

The anniversary of Luca's death always started the same way.

Rain.

It rained every year on September fourteenth. Not the polite, drizzling kind of rain that made people open umbrellas and lower their heads. The violent kind. The kind that fell in sheets so thick you couldn't see three feet in front of you. The kind that turned the cemetery into a swamp and made the marble of Luca's mausoleum slick and freezing.

I'd been kneeling in that mud for three hours when my phone buzzed.

My father's text was three words: Come to me.

Not "please." Not "are you okay." Just an order. A summons from the Capo to the daughter who owed him a debt she could never repay.

I pushed myself up. My legs were numb from the cold. Mud caked the knees of my jeans, and rainwater dripped from the ends of my hair down the back of my neck. I'd stopped shivering an hour ago. That was a bad sign, but I didn't care enough to register it.

The cemetery gates were unmanned. No guards. No escort. My father had stopped sending protection with me years ago. What was there to protect? The family disappointment? The girl who killed the heir?

I walked through the gates alone.

The alley was a shortcut between the cemetery and the main road. I'd taken it a hundred times before. Narrow. Dark. The kind of alley that existed in every mafia-controlled neighborhood in the city-a place where bad things happened to people who didn't have the right last name.

I was halfway through when the hand closed around my throat from behind.

My back hit wet brick, and the breath left my lungs in a sharp, ragged burst. The alley stank of rotting garbage and iron-old blood, the kind that soaked into concrete and never quite washed out.

The man pinning me to the wall had a scar running from his temple to the corner of his mouth. Rain sluiced down his face, catching in the ridges of old tissue. In the dim orange glow of a distant streetlamp, his eyes were flat and patient. The eyes of a man who'd been waiting a very long time.

Dante Moretti.

They called him The Reaper. He was an executioner from a rival bloodline-a man who'd been hunting my family since before I knew what a vendetta was.

"Your father killed my brother," he said. His voice was almost conversational. "Did you know that, little canary? Vincenzo put a bullet in Marco's skull while he was on his knees. Hands bound. Begging for mercy."

He leaned closer. I smelled the sour whiskey on his breath.

"I've been waiting eight years to return that favor. Piece by piece."

My fingers were going numb from the cold, but I forced them to move. Slow. Steady. The taser was tucked inside my coat, its metal casing still faintly warm from my body heat.

My father had given it to me when I was fourteen. Custom-engraved. High-voltage. He'd pressed it into my palms after a rival crew tried to grab me outside my school.

Aim for the chest. Don't hesitate. You're a Rossi. Act like one.

He'd spent an entire weekend teaching me how to use it. How to hold it. How to strike before the other person had time to react. He'd called me his little canary back then-a nickname that had nothing to do with singing and everything to do with the canaries miners used to carry into the tunnels. The birds died first. They were the warning.

Before Luca died. Before my parents' grief curdled into hatred. Before I became the family's designated victim.

I wrapped my fingers around the grip.

Dante's phone buzzed. He glanced down-half a second of distraction-and I moved.

I drove the taser into his chest and pressed the trigger.

Click.

A hollow, mechanical nothing.

The sound of my own death.

Dante looked down at the dead weapon pressed against his sternum. The corner of his mouth curled upward, slow and deliberate.

"That's adorable," he murmured.

He ripped the taser from my hand. His thumb found the small charm dangling from its handle-a tiny gold canary my father had soldered onto the weapon with his own hands, years ago, when he was still someone who protected me.

Dante tore the charm free and shoved it into my coat pocket.

The weapon he tossed into a dumpster without a second glance.

"You actually thought that would work twice?" He laughed, low and rough. "I watched you tase one of my men three years ago. You think I wouldn't learn?"

His hand closed around my throat. Not squeezing. Just resting there.

"I've been planning this for a very long time, Serafina."

I thought about my father's text. Come to me. He'd called me away from the cemetery-away from the guards, away from the mausoleum where at least someone might have seen me. He'd summoned me into the open, alone, on the one night of the year when everyone knew where I'd be.

He hadn't known. He couldn't have known.

But I was alone because he'd made sure I was always alone.

Dante dragged me out of the alley.

---

The warehouse sat at the dead end of a service road, its windows blacked out with spray paint and rotting plywood. Dante kicked the rusted door open and hauled me inside.

The smell hit me first. Iron and bleach and something sweetly rotten, the kind of smell that clung to the back of your throat and refused to let go. A single bare bulb hung from the ceiling, swinging slightly, throwing shadows across the walls.

A surgical table sat in the center of the room. Old leather straps dangled from its sides, dark with stains I couldn't identify. On a metal tray beside it, tools were arranged with the precision of a surgeon's operating theater. Pliers. Scalpels. A hooked blade. A bone saw.

Dante forced a rusted wrench between my teeth. The taste of iron and old grease flooded my mouth.

"Scream all you want," he said, positioning a camera on a tripod. The little red recording light blinked to life. "Your father's going to want to see this in high definition."

He picked up a pair of heavy-gauge pliers.

The first bone in my left hand snapped with a sound like a dry branch breaking underfoot.

The pain was not like anything I'd ever felt. It wasn't sharp. It wasn't hot. It was white. Complete. It swallowed my vision and filled my ears with a high-pitched ringing that drowned out the sound of my own screaming.

I screamed against the wrench, and the noise that came out was barely human-a wet, choking thing that tore at my throat.

Dante worked with patience. From my fingers to my forearm. From my forearm to my upper arm. He peeled skin away from muscle with a precision that spoke of practice. Every time I started to lose consciousness, he stopped and injected something into my arm. Adrenaline. He wanted me awake.

I thought about Aria. About the pinky promise on the rooftop. About the white lilies I'd promised to bring.

I'm sorry, I thought. I'm not going to make it.

I thought about my mother's voice on the phone-the call I'd made when Dante first grabbed me, before he took my phone. My last chance.

"Mom. Mom, please-there's a man-he's trying to-"

A pause. A sigh. The sound of wine being poured into a glass.

"She's faking a kidnapping to get out of her penance," my mother had said to someone in the room. And then, to me: "Stop being dramatic, Serafina."

The line went dead.

I thought about the taser. The hollow click. The way my father had stomped on my bag three weeks ago-enraged that I'd been studying instead of preparing for my penance. I'd heard something break. I'd assumed it was a textbook.

It wasn't a textbook.

Please.

I wasn't sure if I said it out loud or just thought it. The word repeated in my head, a prayer to no one.

Please, Dad. Please come find me.

The last thing I felt was the cold. It seeped into my bones as my heartbeat slowed, as the pool of blood beneath me spread wider across the rusted metal.

The last thing I saw was Dante's face, calm and satisfied, framed by the blinking red light of the camera.

The last thing I thought was: I never got to see my exam results.

Then the darkness rose up and pulled me under.

---