“For six years, I endured my fiancé Silas's calculated cruelty, believing it was the only way to pay for my dying father's black-market lung medication. Then, I overheard him talking to his secret lover-his late brother's widow. "Once the old man suffocates, I'll put Aria in a fortified apartment as my personal whore, and you will wear the Capo's ring." At the syndicate's annual Feast, Silas put his ruthless plan into motion. He publicly humiliated me, tearing my dress open from collarbone to shoulder in front of hundreds of leering mobsters. He deliberately scattered my father's bloody medical money across the dirt and forced me to draw the White Carnation, making me the ultimate laughingstock of the Family. My frail father coughed up blood trying to protect me, while Silas and his lover sneered at my absolute ruin. For six years, I swallowed my pride, thinking I was making a noble sacrifice to keep my father breathing. I never realized I was just a disposable pawn in his sick game, kept on a leash only until my father was in the ground. But Silas didn't know that the night before, I had taken the last of my money to buy a silver Vendetta Rosary. I had ventured into the shadows and pledged myself to Dante, the terrifying, newly ascended Don of the entire syndicate. As I sobbed on the cold wooden floor, the courtyard fell dead silent, and a pair of large, scarred hands reached into my vision holding a flawless Crimson Rose. And in the heavy silence that followed, I understood: either salvation or damnation had come for me, and I was no longer the one choosing.”