They put me in a white dress and called it a wedding. It was a trial. My fiancé smiled at nine hundred guests and whispered in my ear that I was a stray dog wearing silk. My mother knelt in blood before midnight. And the blood test in the priest's hand said I wasn't my father's daughter. That was the exact second the Kane family decided I should die. The chapel under the Kane estate was carved out of rock, older than the city above it. Nine hundred candles. Nine hundred faces. Every crime family in the country had sent someone to watch the Kane heir bind himself to the Ashcroft bloodline. Dorian Kane took my hand at the altar like he loved me. His fingers closed on my wrist until the small bones ground together. "Smile, Ivy," he murmured against my temple. "You look almost worth the price." "You're hurting me." "That's the point." His breath was warm and his voice was ice. "Understand something before the ink dries. You're not my wife. You're a womb with a last name. Your father sold you to buy a seat at my father's table, and after tonight I'll use you when I'm bored and forget you when I'm not." I looked at him — the golden boy of the Kane empire, white-blond hair, black tuxedo, eyes like a shark that had never once been hungry. "Take your hand off me," I said, "or I'll take it off you." He laughed. Loud. Delighted. Nine hundred people laughed with him because he was the future of this world and I was nothing in it. Then the old man came down the steps. Don Ambrose Kane. Seventy-eight years old, silver-haired, the crown of five families sitting invisible on his head. In his hands he carried the Ledger — three hundred years of bloodlines, written in blood, sealed in blood, the only document in our world that could not be argued with. "Before we bind these houses," he announced, "the girl is verified. As all brides are verified. Blood to blood." The needle went into my thumb. Three drops onto the page beside my father's name. I remember the sound of the room. Not screaming. Silence. The kind that comes before a building falls. The priest's face went gray. "The blood does not match the Ashcroft line." Someone dropped a glass. Then it started — a low, ugly wave of noise rolling through the pews. Bastard. Whore's daughter. She's not his. My stepmother stood up in her emerald gown, hand pressed to her mouth to hide a smile that wasn't hiding at all. My half-sister Adele didn't even bother. "Oh, Ivy," Adele called out, sweet as poison. "All those years pretending you were better than me. Turns out you're not even a real Ashcroft. You're just Mommy's little mistake." I turned to find my mother in the third row. Helena Ashcroft. Small. Elegant. Terrified. She was already shaking her head — no, no, no — and I saw the exact moment she stopped being a wife and became a dead woman. My father crossed the aisle in four strides and hit her so hard she went over the pew. "Jonathan—" she gasped. "I swear on my life, she's yours—" He dragged her into the aisle by her hair. Into the candlelight. In front of every family in the country. "You bitch," he screamed. "You put another man's child in my house. You made me raise a bastard—" I lunged. Dorian caught me by the throat before I got two steps. "Please!" my mother sobbed. "Ivy is yours! There was never anyone else—" My stepmother's voice cut through it all, calm and delighted. "She's polluted our blood, Jonathan. Kill them both." And my father took the knife off the altar. I screamed until my voice tore. I clawed at Dorian's hand. I watched my father drive the blade into my mother's stomach in a church, in front of nine hundred witnesses, and not one of them stood up. Not one. Dorian dragged me forward and lifted me by the throat, so the whole room could see. "I, Dorian Kane," he said, "reject the Ashcroft girl. Publicly. Permanently." He dropped me on the stone. "Cage her in the cellar. Every man in this house can have her. She's not a bride anymore — she's furniture." Blood ran from my mouth onto the open Ledger. Three drops. Onto the sealed founding page. Onto a name nobody in that room had spoken aloud in twenty-two years. The priest looked down. And started to scream. Ninety miles north, in a black car on a dark road, a phone rang once. A man with a wolf inked on his hand answered it. "Sir," said the voice. "The blood came back. It's her. The Ghost's daughter is alive." For nine seconds, he didn't breathe. Then: "Where." "The Kane estate. Sir — they're killing her tonight." The car turned around so fast it left rubber on the road. "Whoever touched her," he said quietly, "dies before sunrise."