

Everyone in southern Italy knew that Lorenzo Moretti loved me like a madman. And yet he had been keeping a much younger woman in Naples. They said she looked just like I had years ago. He told people she was only a reminder of the woman he had once loved most. He also gave strict orders that no one was to let me hear about her. Until the day I found out I was pregnant. I went to his office to tell him the news myself, only to stop outside the door when I heard a young woman’s voice from inside. “Lorenzo… am I only here because I remind you of her?” The door was slightly ajar. Through the gap, I saw a young woman who looked too much like me, wrapped in his jacket and holding his glass. I stood there, barely breathing. Then I heard him answer. “Don’t compare yourself to her.” “She could never be what you are.” I turned and walked away without making a sound. That night, I called my mother. “Mother, I’ve made up my mind.” She was silent for a moment. “I want a fire,” I said. “Something no one survives. By the time it’s over, Sophia Moretti needs to be dead to the world.”

Bryce Davidson married into the Barber family and has never quite stood straight under the weight of it. On New Year's Day, his wife Ginny leaves to collect relatives and asks him to bathe their infant with a towel. Out of some small, stubborn impulse he fills the bathtub instead. The phone rings. He looks away. By the time he looks back, it is too late. In his collapse he hides what happened. He conceals the baby,covers the room, holds himself together through the Barber family's New Year visit. Every attempt by the relatives to see the child Bryce deflects. Ginny watches him, and something in the way he moves begins to pull at her. She can feel the shape of a closed door. She moves toward it.

In the eternal night of the vampire realm, Isolde believed she had found true forever with Alaric Voss — the Golden Heir who publicly abandoned the Vampire Throne for her, a woman from the slums. For years he built blood empires in her name, knelt under the blood moon, and swore she was his only salvation. Then she discovered the truth. Behind her back, Alaric had maintained a secret life with his childhood companion Evelina Rizzo. Together they had twin sons who carried his crimson eyes. Heartbroken and pregnant, Isolde made a single, irreversible decision. With the help of her oldest confidante Selene, she staged her own death in a catastrophic silver-flame curse during their wedding renewal ceremony. The hall burned.