Too Late: The Innocent Traitor I Destroyed

I walked out of the federal penitentiary with a terminal cancer diagnosis and exactly six months to live.

Desperate for money to pay for a sky burial, I returned to the Vitiello family, the people who now wanted me dead.

Dante, the man I had loved since childhood, looked at me with pure hatred.

He thought I was the monster who killed his mother.

He didn't know I had confessed to a crime I didn't commit to hide the ugly truth—that she had taken her own life.

To punish me, Dante became cruel.

He forced me to work as a servant, making me stand guard outside his bedroom door while he was intimate with his fiancée, Sofia.

When the estate caught fire, I didn't hesitate. I ran into the inferno.

I dragged Dante to safety, my back burning as debris fell on me, scarring me forever.

But when he woke up, I hid in the shadows and let Sofia take the credit. I couldn't let him feel indebted to a "murderer."

I thought that was the worst of it. I was wrong.

On the eve of his wedding, Sofia had an accident and needed a blood transfusion. I was the only match.

Dante didn't know my body was already shutting down. He didn't know my blood was poisoned with cancer markers.

"Take it all," he roared at the doctors, ignoring my frail, trembling body. "Just save my wife."

I died on that table, drained dry to save the woman who stole my life.

It wasn't until the monitor flatlined that his right-hand man finally threw a file onto Dante's lap.

"She didn't kill your mother, Dante. And she didn't just leave town. You just executed the only person who ever truly loved you."

Chapter 1

I walked out of the federal penitentiary with five years of darkness behind me and exactly six months of life left in front of me.

The prison doctor had handed me the diagnosis along with my release papers, his eyes filled with a pity that burned more than the bile in my throat. Stage four pancreatic cancer. Inoperable. Terminal.

I did not cry. Crying was a luxury for people who had a future to lose. I had nothing but a blood oath and a body that was slowly turning against me.

My first stop was not a warm bed or a hot meal. It was a funeral home on the edge of the city. I placed my entire prison wage on the counter, a pathetic stack of crumpled bills that smelled of sweat and desperation.

"I want a Sky Burial," I told the director. "In the Aspen mountains."

He looked at my cheap clothes and my hollow cheeks. "That is expensive, miss. This is barely a deposit."

"I will get the rest," I promised.

That promise led me to The Night Banquet.

It was the most exclusive gentleman's club in New York, a place where the air smelled of oak-barrel scotch and sin, and where