The Bastard Bride's Vow of Mafia Vengeance

Isabell POV

The air in the living room tasted of stale cigar smoke and desperation. It was a scent I had grown up with, woven into the peeling wallpaper and the cheap, imitation velvet of the armchair where my father, Jerrold Talley, currently sat. His face was a mask of purple rage, a vein throbbing dangerously at his temple.

In the center of the threadbare rug, my half-sister Emmalee was on her knees. Her sobbing was the only sound breaking the heavy silence, a pathetic, mewling noise that grated on my nerves.

"Get up," Father spat, ash from his cigar falling onto his trousers. "You are embarrassing yourself."

"I can't do it, Papa," Emmalee wailed, clutching at the hem of her skirt. "Please, don't make me go to him. They say he feeds traitors to his dogs. They say his hands are stained with so much blood it never washes off."

I stood in the shadows near the window, watching the performance with dry, calculating eyes.

Last week, the decree had come down from the heavens—or rather, from the Griffith estate, which amounted to the same thing in our world. Don Damian Griffith, the King of New York, needed a connection to the local docks, and he had chosen our lowly family to provide a bride. It was a golden ticket, a chance to elevate the Talley name from the gutter of *Associates* to the gilded circle of the *Made Men*.

Emmalee, the legitimate daughter, the pretty one with the golden curls and the soft heart, had been the chosen sacrifice. She saw it as a death sentence.

I saw it for what it truly was: a throne.

My gaze drifted to the window, looking out at the gray, rain-slicked streets of our neighborhood. I knew where Emmalee had been yesterday. I knew about the cheap diner on 4th Street, and I knew about Coleton Joseph. A low-level lawyer for the Griffith front companies. A man with soft hands and a softer spine.

Emmalee had come home smelling of grease and cheap cologne, her eyes shining with a foolish light. She had whispered to me about love, about a small apartment in Queens, about a life free from the "sins of the Family." She called the Don's mansion a "Cold Palace."

*Fools,* I thought bitterly.

A memory clawed its way to the surface of my mind—a ghost from my childhood. I was ten years old, walking these very streets, when I saw her. A woman who had once been a Capo's wife, tossed aside like garbage when her husband was executed. She was fighting a stray dog for a bone in the alley, her silk dress in tatters, her fingers black with grime.

That was the true Cold Palace. It wasn't marble floors and diamond necklaces; it was irrelevance. It was hunger. It was being powerless in a world that ate the weak.

I would not be that woman. I would not be Emmalee, trading a kingdom for a coward's