Rayna Shaw and Ethan Chase were the famous couple who most hated each other in the entire Shaw mafia. Not because they were madly in love. But because they had spent eight years of marriage trying to kill each other. She put poison in his whiskey. He hid needles under her pillow. They spat venom with every breath and cursed each other to an early grave every single night. She hated him for being a stone she could never warm—a man whose heart had always belonged to another woman. He hated her for using her father’s power to foce him into marriage, for shoving her way in, for being the reason his beloved had been driven away. But when a deal went wrong and capture became certain, he did something she never expected. He took off his only bulletproof vest and shoved it into her arms. “Run, Ray!” Then he turned and ran the opposite direction, gunfire tearing after him. She watched him look back one last time, his lips moving. *I’m going to see Mia now. Next life… let’s not meet again. My heart only has room for one.* By the time she returned with reinforcements, all she found was his shattered body. She spent the next six months alone—luring the Vossberg soldiers, destroying their command center from the inside, and finally becoming nothing more than a name carved into the Shaw family mausoleum. Then she opened her eyes. She was back in her father’s office. The date on the wall told her everything. She reborned. Without a word, she found the current mafia don her father, and said the words she had never spoken before: "I want to cancel the engagement to Ethan Chase," Rayna repeated. Her voice did not shake. "Mine and Ethan's. And I want to take the undercover assignment in Mia's place." ---
Don Shaw stared at his daughter for a long time. “You want to take Mia’s place? You’re not marrying Ethan?” "Rayna." Her father took off his glasses. "Do you know what you're saying." "I know exactly what I'm saying." He didn’t believe her. No one in the compound would. Rayna had spent years declaring to anyone who would listen that she would marry Ethan Chase or no one at all. She had shoved Mia into walls, screamed at her in hallways, and made it absolutely clear that she would burn the world down before letting her sister touch the man she loved. For her to give up the engagement and walk into enemy territory in Mia's place — impossible. “Your wedding is in ten days,” her father said slowly. “Are you sure about this?” Rayna paused. Then she smiled—a small, tired thing. “You’re always telling me that Mia lost her father and I should let her have things. Isn’t that what you want?” Her father's expression shifted through something complicated. Guilt, maybe. Or surprise that his headstrong daughter had finally listened. She didn’t wait for his answer. She turned and walked out. Ever since he had remarried, he had made a habit of telling her to rein in her temper, to be kinder to Mia, terrified she might feel unwelcome under their roof. In her last life, if she hadn't thrown her dead mother — the woman who had died saving him — across his desk, he would have simply rewritten the drawing of lots and put her name on the slip. This time, she was saving him the trouble. So finally he added her name to the infiltration file instead. The hallway outside the Don’s office was cold, She had barely taken three steps when someone slammed into her shoulder hard enough to bruise. Ethan Chase. He looked frantic. His uniform was stained with mud, as if he had just dropped to his knees somewhere. She knew exactly where—in her past life, she had found him begging her father to take Mia’s name off the mission roster. She had dragged him to a priest that same day and forced him to sign the engagement contract. Now she just rubbed her shoulder and stepped aside. Ethan shot out an arm to stop her. Anger and confusion flashed through his eyes. “Rayna.” She pulled free. “The mission was decided by lottery. Those are the rules.” His jaw tightened. “If the Don just gave me more time, I could find another way. We don’t have to send a woman into his bed.” She almost laughed. Time? How much time did he think they had? The war between the families had been bleeding men for three years. Every day they delayed, more of their people would end up in the river. Right now, putting one woman — her or Mia — into Silas Price's house to lift the ledger was the path with the fewest losses, the highest chance of success. “One of us is going,” she said quietly. “Mia or me. You can beg on your knees all day, Ethan. It won’t change anything.” His grip tightened on her wrist. His voice dropped. “"As long as you don't go running to the Commander to make things worse, there may still be another way." She pulled away again. This time, she didn’t look back. "Have it your way. The application's already in. You'll be satisfied when the day comes." She walked off, leaving Ethan standing there, stunned. Behind her, she heard him call her name once. Twice. She kept walking. She had meant to tell him the truth. Now she didn't want to. In her last life he had wished her dead. A few more hours of his hatred wouldn't make much difference. When the wedding day came and he saw the bride wasn't her — he'd probably be a little happier, even. But remembering how he had buckled his only vest onto her, shoved her out of the encirclement, and taken every bullet and shell himself — her throat still tightened. She had spent eight years believing that if she just kept him close, the bitterness would eventually turn sweet. But he had only left her the chance to live, and chosen to die in the dirt beside Mia. *Ethan Chase. You saved my life once. This time, let's call it even.*
When back home, the first thing she did was spread out the Vossberg files across her desk. The target’s name was underlined in red: **Silas Price**. Silas Price held a ledger the Shaw family had been hunting for three years — the full record of his alliances, his foreign accounts, the names of every made man on his payroll. They had never gotten close. Now the head of the German Vossberg Cartel. Her mission was simple in theory: get close. Extract intelligence. Don’t get killed. In practice? No one had ever come back from an operation against him. In her last life, Mia had been exposed within three months and tortured to death. They hadn't gotten the intel. They had exposed their own positions instead. The war had reignited from there, and the casualties had been catastrophic — until, in the end, Ethan had died under enemy fire shielding her. She sat at her desk and thought it through, hour after hour, without sleeping. At dawn, she changed into a simple black dress and headed for the door. The second she pulled the door open, the cold metal pressed against her forehead. A gun. “Why can’t you just leave your sister alone?” Ethan’s voice was raw, nearly shaking. For half a second she froze. She reached up to knock the gun away — and Ethan twisted her arm, locking it across her chest. The strength behind it forced a hiss through her teeth. "Ethan — let go!" She kicked back hard. He pressed her tighter. "You think I don’t know what you did? You went to your father and made sure Mia got the dangerous mission so you could keep me for yourself?" "You’re so selfish and cold—how can you expect anyone to love you?" She went still. Those words. She had heard them before. In a marriage that lasted eight years too long. In fights that left her bleeding on the inside. She came back to herself, drove her heel into his stomach, snatched up the pistol he dropped, and turned the muzzle on his forehead. “You want to shoot me, Ethan? On Shaw property?” The pain knocked the heat out of him. His eyes dropped to her trembling hand, still red where he'd twisted her wrist, and the anger in his face folded into regret. His voice came out softer than he meant. "I'm sorry…" "I lost my head." She didn't answer. She threw the gun at his feet. "It's an assignment. Someone has to go. You don't need to take it out on me. Maybe things will turn out exactly the way you want. Go home — focus on your wedding. You’ll be happy with the outcome.” He didn't catch the bitterness in her voice. He bent down and picked up the pistol, gave a small, self-mocking smile. "You think everyone's as cold-blooded as you, calm enough to plan a wedding at a time like this…" She drew a long breath and walked away, face carefully blank, her molars ached from clenching her jaw. *Ethan Chase. This life, I'll give you everything you want.*
Outside her window, the long black cars came and went through the Shaw gates the way they always did, headlights sliding across the wallpaper. That night, someone left a small box outside her door. Inside was a tray of butterfly pastries—her favorite. The kind you couldn’t buy inside the compound. He must have driven all the way into the city to get them. She didn’t eat a single one. She knew why he did it. Not because he loved her. Because her mother had taken him in when he was an orphan boy, fed him, raised him like a son. He was only trying to repay a debt. She had always been a burden he tolerated out of gratitude. *I’m done being that burden.* The mission approval came through quickly. But her engagement cancellation was kept quiet—at her request. She had asked the Don for that herself. She told her father to inform Mia privately, let Mia sign her own marriage contract with Ethan’s name on it.The rest of the family — the Consigliere, the Capo, the gossiping wives in the long-island houses — would not find out until the morning of the wedding itself, when Ethan Chase lifted the veil and saw the wrong face under it. Every file the Shaw lawyers had built on Silas Price, every dossier on the Vossberg Cartel, every floor plan of his estate — she read once and burned in her own fireplace. Consider it her wedding surprise to him. Ethan, for his part, knew none of it. He moved through the compound like a man with a stone tied to his chest. He pulled men off the rotation just to corner her father in his study. He took up smoking again, the way he hadn't since he was sixteen, and stubbed half the cigarettes out before they were done. He went to the Don’s office every day, argued with anyone who would listen, begged for more time, another solution. *Let me trade in for her. There has to be another way at Price.* Rayna heard about it from the maids. She did not look up from her tea. --- It was a clear, cold afternoon when she came out of the canteen and meet them in the garden pavilion. Mia was sitting on the stone bench in a pale blue dress, her hands folded in her lap, the way she always sat when she wanted to look small. Ethan was bent over the table opposite her, sleeves pushed to the elbow, fingers working a tangle of dried grass into shape. Mia was glowing. She had been told, then. She had been told she was going to marry him. "Ethan." Mia asked, leaning over his hands. "What are you making? I've never seen you do that before." Ethan's fingers moved without looking. Loop, twist, tuck. "Nothing," he said. "Just some scrap." Rayna stopped at the edge of the gravel path. *Scrap.* Her mother had taught him that *scrap.* On the long summer afternoons before the war between the families had bled into their own house, on the back porch of the old place, Rayna's mother had sat with a teenage boy who had come in off a Brooklyn curb with a black eye and no last name, and had pressed a handful of dried grass into his hands and shown him, slow, how to braid. *Make her something pretty, Ethan. She's still half a child.* After her mother had died, the only person who had still made those little woven things for Rayna had been Ethan. Until Mia came along. Rayna had hated that. She had thrown tantrums over it. She had ordered Ethan, with all the petulance of a Don's daughter, not to weave a single thing for the new stepsister. And Ethan, calm and cool, had told her she was being unreasonable. He had told her that a great many times, in eight years of marriage. "What do you want?" Ethan asked Mia now, gentle. Mia's eyes slid sideways. She found Rayna at the edge of the garden, and the corner of her mouth lifted, just a little. A smile only Rayna would catch. "A rabbit," Mia said, sweet as syrup. "Make me a rabbit." Ethan's hands stopped. He didn’t say no. Rayna turned and walked away. A woven straw rabbit. Of all the things. Her mother had made her one, the last summer before the war took her — a small, lopsided thing with one ear bent. After the warehouse fire had taken their old house down to the studs, that rabbit had been the only piece of her mother Rayna had managed to dig out of the ash. It sat now on the top shelf of her wardrobe, in a velvet-lined box, where only one person in the world besides her knew to look. Mia had never cared about woven grass in her life. She was not asking for a toy. She just want to put her thumb on Rayna's pain, because she saw her. Rayna did not hide. She did not duck down a side path. She walked straight back across the gravel with her chin up, and at the moment she passed the pavilion, she felt Ethan's eyes lift and follow her. She did not turn her head. "Childish," Rayna said aloud, to the empty hallway. Her voice was steady. She stepped over the box and shut her door. The next morning, the rabbit was still there. Untouched. The dew had not even gotten to it; someone had set a sheet of waxed paper underneath the box. She stared at it for a long moment, the cold tile under her bare feet. Then she bent down, picked the rabbit up, and slipped it into the inside pocket of her jacket, against her ribs.
The Don Shaw threw her a quiet send-off in the family ballroom. Quiet, for the Shaws, meant fifty people and a string quartet. Black suits, cigars, the smell of old whiskey and gun oil clinging to the men's lapels even in their Sunday best. The big chandelier had been polished. The capos' wives wore their second-best pearls — first-best was for funerals — and watched the door like hawks. By the time Rayna came down from the training wing, Mia was already in the center of the room, surrounded. A handkerchief in her hand. Eyes very wet, very bright. The picture of a brave young woman about to walk into the lion's mouth for her family. "I didn't think the draw would land on you, sweetheart." One of the older wives was patting her wrist. "Rayna's the Don's blood daughter — she should have been the first to step up. Instead she's running around the city forcing poor Ethan to marry her. Our Mia's the one paying for it." "That's the truth of it," another woman sniffed. "And Mia is the one risking her life, and she can’t even come say goodbye?”" Rayna watched Mia's eyes shine through the tears — and underneath the shine, the small, satisfied glint of a girl who had spent her entire childhood learning exactly how to be pitied. Then Mia looked up, saw Rayna in the doorway, and froze. She had not expected her to come. Rayna smiled — a small, amused thing — and walked across the floor as if she had been invited. The whispers changed pitch around her. "What is she doing here —" "Showing off. What else." "Don't look at her like that. Mia's just better than she is. Spoiled little thing — won't even lift a finger while her own sister goes into Vossberg territory. God knows how the Don raised a daughter that cold." Rayna did not break stride. She did not answer. She took a glass of champagne off a passing tray, sipped it once, and set it down again, untouched. After a while the chatter and the laughter began to bore her. She turned for the door. "Rayna." Mia's voice, behind her. Soft. Rayna stopped. She did not turn until Mia had crossed the floor and slid an arm through hers, easy, intimate, the way sisters did in photographs. "Dad told me," Mia murmured against her ear. Her perfume was something light and floral; up close it smelled cheap. "He told me you gave up the engagement on your own. But Ethan's always loved me, you know. So I can't really say I stole him from you, can I?" Rayna let her arm be held. "The draw came up my name," Mia went on, "but I gave you this once-in-a-lifetime chance to make your name in the family. Surely I'm allowed a few words with the soldiers before I go." Rayna laughed. It came out short, low, genuinely amused, and Mia's smile faltered for the first time. "Make your name," Rayna repeated. She tilted her head, studied her stepsister like a curious specimen. "You think you could make a name on this chance ." Mia blinked. "Mia, sweetheart." Rayna's voice did not rise. It didn't need to. "You can't shoot. You can't take a punch. You have never run a mile in your life. You think Silas Price's bedroom is a tea party? You think a Vossberg house is somewhere a girl like you survives a week?" "The only reason you’re even in this life is because my dad protects you." Her smile thinned. "I stepped in to clean up the mess that would have been you. I didn't realize you were stupid enough to mistake that for a favor." Mia's face drained of color. For one long second they stood there, arm in arm, smiling for the room, while underneath the smiles something cold passed between them.
Then Mia's eyes shifted. Just a flicker. A look past Rayna's shoulder, toward the doorway behind her. Rayna saw the calculation land. Mia gripped her wrist tighter — and yanked Rayna's own hand up and slapped herself across the face. The slap rang through the ballroom. "Rayna —" Mia's voice broke beautifully. Tears spilled. "Why would you —!" Rayna opened her mouth to say something cutting about — And a body slammed into her from the side. She didn't see him coming. She felt the shove — hard, deliberate, no half-measure in it — and then her back hit the carved stone edge of the fireplace mantel, low against her spine, and pain blew white through her whole body. The whole ballroom had gone quiet. Fifty pairs of eyes. The capos' wives had even stopped pretending not to listen. Rayna saw, with a small distant part of her mind, that the string quartet had stopped playing. "You've been like this your whole life," Ethan said. Quiet now. Cold. Each word landing exactly where he wanted it. "Spoiled. Cruel. Proud. I told myself for years there was something good underneath it. And now I see is a jealous, spiteful woman" Rayna stared at him. Her back throbbed. Her vision blurred. "Two girls raised under one roof," he said over her, "and Mia comes out loyal, comes out brave, comes out willing to die for this family — and you come out this." He drew a breath. "I don't know who taught you to be this person," he said. "But I'll tell you what I think. I think your mother died of you." The world went silent. Then her hand connected with his face. Eight years. Eight years of marriage, in another life. Eight years of curses across the breakfast table, eight years of pins under his pillow and his arm thrown across her in his sleep anyway, eight years of every cruel thing two people could find to say to each other. He had never crossed this line. Not once. Not even at the end. The slap was clean. It rang. His head jerked half a degree to the side, and a red bloom rose at once along his cheekbone. "You," she said. Her voice was perfectly level. "Of every person in this room, are the one with no right to speak about my mother." She did not wait to see his face. She turned, set her hand against the stone for balance, and started walking — slow, even, one foot in front of the other, because her lower back was screaming and she would die before she limped in front of any of these people. She made it ten steps before her knees buckled. Ethan was there before she went down. He caught her without a word. He swept her up off her feet — one arm under her knees, one behind her shoulders — the way he had carried her exactly once in their first life, on the night of the last mission, after he had buckled his vest onto her. His hands were shaking. Behind them, Mia called after him—“Ethan, wait!”—but he didn’t stop. He did not turn his head. He did not slow down. He carried Rayna all the way to the estate’s infirmary without another word. The family doctor patched up her back. Bruised, not broken. Ethan stood in the doorway, hands hanging at his sides. When the doctor had gone, he opened his mouth. “I didn’t mean it,” he said to the floor. Rayna did not look at him. She rolled onto her side, away from the door, and pulled the blanket up to her shoulder. “Get out. I’m sleeping.” A long silence. "I'm sorry, Rayna." She did not answer. After a moment, the door clicked shut. She lay still in the dark, listening. A moment later, a muffled smack came from the hallway—the sound of a palm hitting a face. Ethan had hit himself. Rayna closed her eyes. Two more days. Then I leave. Then he marries Mia. Then everyone gets what they want. Everyone except me.
The morning of her departure arrived before dawn. She had laid everything out on the bed — the false papers, the fake jewelry, the small velvet box of pearl earrings that were a parting gift from her father and also, she suspected, a tracker. And the last one, the most important, the one that had survived fire and betrayal. But when Rayna reached for it, the drawer was empty. She knew, without needing to think, who had taken it. She knew, without needing to think, who had told her. She found Mia in the side garden. Mia was sitting on the low stone bench in a pale dress, the sun in her hair, a small pile of dry grass on her lap. “Mia.” The name came out of Rayna's throat low and shaking. Mia's hand jerked. The last of the woven body came apart in her fingers. The straw fell into her lap in a small, dead heap, and there was nothing recognizable left of it at all. Mia looked up with wet eyes. "Rayna—" The word was small, watery, prettily broken. "Please don't be angry. I wanted to make Ethan something to remember me by — just a little keepsake — I didn't think you'd —" She rose to her feet as she spoke. Apologetic. Trembling. Both hands lifted, palms out, as if she were the one being threatened. And as she rose, the toe of her shoe came forward — perfectly aimed — and ground down on what was left of the straw on the gravel. Carefully. The way a woman crushes out a cigarette. The last of the rabbit's shape disappeared under her shoe. Rayna's vision went white at the edges. She moved before she thought. Her hand went to the small holster at her hip, and the pistol came up, and she took two steps forward with the muzzle already rising. A hand closed around her wrist from behind and twisted hard. She knew that grip before she saw the face. Ethan locked her arm across her own chest, pinning the gun against her ribs, and his voice was low and tight against her ear. "It's a straw rabbit, Rayna. You're going to pull a gun on family over a straw rabbit?" She turned her head. Her eyes were burning. “You gave it to her,” Rayna said. Not a question. “You told her where I kept it.” He didn't answer. Ethan’s silence was the only answer she needed. “Let me go,” she whispered. He didn’t. “Ethan. Let. Me. Go.” He held on tighter. “Because of you, Mia might die on that mission. Does a pile of straw really matter more than her life?” "A pile of straw." Rayna repeated it, very quietly. "You know exactly what that was. You know who made it." His jaw clenched. “It was my mother’s.” Ethan flinched. His grip loosened—just a fraction. “I’ll make you another one,” he said. “A better one.” Rayna wrenched her wrist free and lunged for Mia. “I don’t want anything from you.” In a single motion Ethan drew his sidearm and leveled it at her chest.“Stop, or I’ll shoot!” She stopped. She looked at the gun. She looked at the man holding it. The second time, now. The second time he'd put a gun on her under this roof. She laughed—a thin, wild laugh—and she kept walking. Ethan saw something in her face and flinched. His arm jerked. The pistol kicked in his hand before he could catch it. The crack of the shot rang off the marble. The bullet tore past her shoulder, grazing skin. Blood soaked through her sleeve. Time stopped. Rayna looked down at her own hand—still holding the training pistol she had grabbed. Ethan’s gun clattered to the ground. His face went gray. He had just realized. The pistol in her hand was a training replica. It couldn't have fired a round if she'd begged it to. “You weren’t going to shoot,” he breathed. “You never… you never had bullets. Why didn’t you shoot me, Rayna? You hate me. Why didn’t you pull the trigger?” She didn’t answer. Her legs gave out. She fell into his arms before she could stop herself. Ethan caught her. She felt his arms close around her, felt how badly his hands were shaking. She had held back tears for two days. Now one slipped down and broke against the back of his hand. He flinched as if she'd burned him. “Sorry,” he said. “God, I’m sorry.” She weren't even armed. Why was he so certain she'd kill him? She tried to speak. Her eyelids were too heavy. Something was rising in his chest that he couldn't name and couldn't swallow, something that locked his throat shut. In Ethan Chase's arms, in the wreckage of a straw rabbit, Rayna closed her eyes.
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