On Easter Sunday, to amuse his adopted daughter Sofia, family heir Luca and his brother Marco dressed me up as a clown. Sofia ripped my gown to shreds and scrawled “TRAITOR” across my face with her lipstick. When I didn’t react, she kicked me into a barrel of pig slop. When they fished me out, the yard was ringed with family members holding up their phones, their jeers cutting like glass. Marco stood a hundred feet away, pinching his nose in disgust, refusing to come within ten feet of me. Sofia beamed. “Elena, happy Easter!” Luca stepped in front of her, shielding her with his body. “It was just a joke,” he said lightly. “Don’t take it so seriously.” He raised his hand and signaled his men. A high-pressure hose came on full blast. The water knocked me flat. I lay there shivering, my skin turning purple with cold. I didn’t beg. Not once. By morning, the video of me soaked and trembling had spread across the entire underworld. Marco blamed me for dragging Sofia’s name through the mud. He threw me out. Luca tore up our engagement contract in front of everyone. “The Costa family doesn’t marry women with stains on their name.” I nodded to each of them. No argument. No tears. They thought I was putting on a brave face. Pretending. They didn’t know the transaction had only three days left. These people? I couldn’t stand the sight of them. In the courtyard, Don Vittorio sat in his high-backed chair and gestured for his capo to step forward. “Shameless! Filthy!” The capo’s belt came down on me again and again. I didn’t explain. I just bit down and took it. Arguing would only make the beating worse. I had barely been back in this house a week when Sofia accused me of stealing her diamond brooch. Of being a mole. My parents searched my room. My brothers stripped me naked in front of the whole household. They found nothing. I thought I might finally get an apology. Instead, Marco knocked out one of my teeth with a single backhanded slap. “You sold it, didn’t you?” he spat. “Where’s the money?” My room was the size of a closet. I didn’t have a single bank card to my name. I tried to explain. He hit me harder, called me a liar who wouldn’t confess. I curled into a ball in the corner. He kicked me until I coughed up blood. Then Sofia gasped. “Found it.” The diamond brooch glittered in the sunlight. To me, it was blinding. I looked at Marco. Not a trace of guilt on his face. He just shrugged. “A little misunderstanding,” he said flatly. “Forget about it.” “I’m Sofia’s brother. Of course I trust her.” He knew he was Sofia’s brother. He forgot I was his real sister. Back in the courtyard, the capo’s belt kept swinging. My body was a mess of bloody welts. Marco stood right there and didn’t say a single word in my defense. He’d let Sofia humiliate me, photograph me naked—then he blamed me for ruining her reputation. He’d tossed my few belongings out the front gate and told me to get lost. I agreed to leave. But my father, Don Vittorio, roared, “You think you can just walk out? You haven’t shamed us enough?” He ordered the family punishment tools brought out. Two hours into the beating, my mother, Donna Caterina, finally raised a hand. “Enough,” she said. “Have her kiss the ring ninety-nine times and write a blood oath. We’ll call it settled.” Don Vittorio threw down his belt, irritated. “You spoil her.” Spoil. I almost laughed. “Kiss the ring,” in my mother’s language, meant pressing your forehead to the Don’s ring and kissing it. If it didn’t make a sound, it didn’t count. The blood oath had to be written in your own blood. Under ten thousand words, or not “sincere” enough, and you did it over. I didn’t speak. I bent down again and again, kissing that ring until I passed out. They threw cold water on me, and when I came to, I kept kissing. I wrote the blood oath all night. Every word scraping me deeper into the dirt. I thought that would be enough. Sofia pinched her nose and stepped back. “Marco, it’s not that I don’t want Elena in the house, but… she reeks.” My brother ruffled her hair fondly and shot me a look of disgust. “You’re not fit for the servants’ quarters. Go stay with Bruno.” Bruno was Sofia’s pit bull. And I was terrified of dogs. I remembered the day they first brought me back. Sofia had been just as disgusted, but back then Marco had only sent me to the warehouse—not the kennel. The cage in the warehouse was bigger than the servant’s room I’d gotten later. And without Sofia giving orders, the guards didn’t bite. I could at least sleep. The kennel—I couldn’t. I dropped to my knees in front of Don Vittorio and Donna Caterina, kissing the ring like my life depended on it. “Don Vittorio, Donna Caterina—if I stink, let me leave the family. Let me go back to the warehouse. Please, I’m begging you, don’t make me stay with the dog.” Don Vittorio’s face softened, just slightly. He was about to speak when Marco grabbed me by the collar. “Elena, stop playing the victim! You’re the reason this family is a laughingstock. You should be grateful you have anywhere to sleep at all.” He dragged me toward the kennel. I looked back at Don Vittorio. He turned away. The stench hit me before I even stepped inside. The dog’s fangs gleamed inches from my face. I closed my eyes. And then the system’s cold mechanical voice echoed in my skull. “Two days left until the host’s transaction is complete.”
I went still. I forced myself to breathe. Two more days. I couldn’t quit now. Three years ago, Sofia had complained of a stomachache after drinking. She’d glared at me with red-rimmed eyes and demanded to know why I’d poisoned her. Before I could get a word out, Marco had pried my mouth open and poured a whole bottle of liquor down my throat. The pain shut my body down. I collapsed in the bathroom. No one checked on me. The whole family took Sofia to a private hospital. As I lay dying, a mechanical voice rang out in my skull: “Host life value detected at zero. Revenge Contract forcibly bound.” “Current mission: Survive three years.” “Mission success: The suffering you endured will be returned tenfold to your enemies. You will also receive a cash reward of one hundred million US dollars.” “Mission failure: Annihilation of the soul.” Back then, I thought I was hallucinating. I didn’t know what a contract was. But when I woke up in that bathroom, my stomach no longer twisting in agony, I believed. The contract gave me a second chance. I was eighteen that year. I started keeping my head down. I learned to stay quiet. I learned to survive. I recalled everything I knew about surviving in this world. I suppressed my fear. I stayed perfectly still. The pit bull circled me, its warmth against my skin both wet and unnerving. Outside the cage, Sofia clung to Luca’s arm, all charm. “Luca, your fiancée smells so bad she’s been sent to the kennel. Does that break your heart?” Luca glanced at me with total indifference. “Don’t say that. I don’t have a fiancée. That engagement was torn up a long time ago.” Even now, my chest twisted. Luca had been different from the rest of them. He was my childhood friend from the streets. When he first showed up in my neighborhood, he had a broken leg and nobody to protect him. I stayed on that block to watch over him. He could barely move, so I stole food for him. I fought off anyone who came for him. One winter, some thugs tried to take his crutch for firewood. I threw myself in front of him. They hung me upside down from a lamppost. They packed snowballs hard as stones and used me for target practice. They broke my nose. Blood everywhere. Luca held my frozen body and cried all night. “Elena,” he whispered. “When I grow up, I’ll protect you.” I smiled through the haze and believed him. Later, when the Costa family brought me home, the first thing I did was help Luca find his real family. He turned out to be the abandoned bastard son of the Balzeri family—our enemies. They’d thrown him away on purpose. To get him back into his family, I proposed a marriage alliance between us. Marco called me cheap. “Back for five minutes and already chasing a man.” I knelt in the courtyard for seven days. No food. No water. My knees ground to blood and bone. At the end of it, I had a marriage contract. It wasn’t that the Costas were beneath me—it was that Don Vittorio and Donna Caterina wanted me to marry higher, to be a stepping stone for Sofia’s rise. The day we went to pick Luca up from the streets, his eyes were swollen and red. He held me so tight I could barely breathe. He swore to the heavens,”Elena, once I’m established in my family, I’ll marry you!” But he never did. He tore up our contract with his own hands. Then he handed me to Sofia like a toy. When did it change? Maybe when Sofia first called him “Luca.” She was prettier than me. Cleaner. Sweeter. She knew exactly how to make people love her. She looped her arm through his and said, “Luca, your engagement to Elena—that was forced, wasn’t it?” Luca didn’t deny it. Maybe it was at some negotiation when I took a drink for him—drank until I vomited blood, collapsed on the floor, couldn’t get up. Luca looked down at me and said, “Elena, you look pathetic.” I brought up marriage once. Rings. A wedding. He got annoyed. He plucked a weed from the roadside and twined it around my finger. Then he went to an auction, crushed every other bidder, and bought a pink diamond for Sofia. He designed the ring himself. I asked him once, “Luca, do you still remember what you said back in the streets?” He laughed—a laugh I’d never heard from him before. Full of mockery. “Elena, you bring up the streets every single day. Don’t you get tired of it?” “Yes, you helped me. But you’ve held that over my head for years. Isn’t that enough?” Held it over him? I’d broken my knees for him. Starved for him. Risked everything to buy him a future. He said, “Elena, stop pretending. You only wanted this marriage because you’re the least favorite daughter in your family.” “Nobody else would have you, so you latched onto me.” “You’re that desperate for a man?” Something inside me shattered. Sofia’s laugh pulled me back to the present. “Luca, don’t be so harsh. Elena was your fiancée for years.” Luca sneered. “Fiancée? A clingy beggar? She was never worthy of that word.” I took a deep breath and asked the system silently. “Does betrayal trigger the backlash too?”
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