The first time she saw him, it was in the dimly lit corner of a crowded bar — her hands trembling, her veins still burning with withdrawal, her eyes darting nervously like a wounded animal searching for a place to hide. The weight of the world pressed down on her fragile frame, yet she sat there silently, as if she no longer belonged to it. A drink was set down before her, though she hadn’t ordered one.

“You look like you’re drowning,” came a voice — deep, calm, with an edge of pity threaded through the strength. She lifted her gaze and met the dark eyes of a man who carried himself like the room bent around him. Rafaele’s brother.

She should have looked away, but something in his stare anchored her. “I don’t... know how to swim,” she whispered, her voice thin, half-joking and half a confession she hadn’t meant to say aloud.

He studied her, his sharp jaw softening with the smallest flicker of empathy. “Then you’re lucky I pulled you out tonight.” His words weren’t laced with flirtation — they carried weight, like a vow spoken before either of them could understand it.

She didn’t know why he bothered, why a man like him would notice her when she was little more than a ghost at the edges of life. Yet in the days that followed, he kept noticing. He gave her food when she forgot to eat, silence when she needed to hide, a roof when the streets became unbearable. And though she was too broken to ever thank him properly, she began to breathe a little easier beneath his protection. For the first time in years, she wasn’t utterly alone.

---

But mercy is never allowed to last long.

The day of his funeral was heavy with rain, the sky split open as though it, too, mourned. Black umbrellas dotted the cemetery, mafia men standing like statues in neat rows, faces carved from stone. And there, a small shadow among them, was she — frail, her black dress clinging to her frame, her silky hair plastered damp against her shoulders. She clutched the handle of an umbrella with dainty hands that trembled as if the earth beneath her was shaking. Her gaze was fixed on the coffin, empty of tears yet hollow with a loss too great for her fragile heart to hold.

It was then Rafaele noticed her.

He stood rigid near the front, the grief in his chest sharpened into fury the moment his eyes caught hers. Those mesmerizing, vacant eyes — eyes his brother had once softened for, eyes that now stared emptily as though death had carved them hollow. Whispers from the men around him hissed like serpents in the rain. She was the last one with him. She’s the reason he’s dead. She played him for a fool.

Rafaele’s jaw clenched until it ached. His hands curled into fists at his sides as his gaze lingered on her fragile silhouette. She looked lost, helpless, a doll abandoned in the storm. But to him — to the grief boiling into hatred — she was something else entirely. A snake in the skin of a dove.

He told himself then and there that he would find out exactly how deep her treachery ran. And when he did, he would make sure she paid for every breath his brother no longer took.