Rebirth_ Winning Back My Own New Life

After I was reborn, I tore up my blood-ink invitation to the Vale inner circle with my own hands.

And turned down both my childhood sweethearts' passionate confessions.

Because in my last life, I chose one of them Daphne Vale.

On the day of our blood-bound union, he ran off for Lydia Everett, and the shock killed the grandmother who'd raised me alone.

At my lowest point, my other blood-bound companion took my hand and said: "You still have me. I will never let you down."

He walked me through the darkness, but after our union, he turned cold.

I thought he regretted that we couldn't have children.

Then came a car accident. He left me dying on the pavement to go save Lydia, who had nothing worse than a scrape.

I died right there. And as my soul drifted, untethered, I finally learned the truth.

My entire life had been nothing but a love game between the three of them.

They'd already drawn up their wills, signing every holding and every front to Lydia Everett's name.

And my years of infertility? That was them too. To prove their devotion to Lydia, they'd bribed a doctor to take my uterus while I slept.

This time around, I was going to stay far away from all of them and live a life that was mine.

When I tore up the invitation, my handler in the Ashford house went pale.

"Vera Ashford, what are you doing?"

Four names from our territory had been offered seats within the Vale inner circle this year.

I was the only one who'd earned it on merit a mind the elders valued more highly than a hundred soldiers, recognized after I broke every cipher they put in front of me.

Every old man in the network, not just my handler, had high hopes for me.

I kept my expression calm. "I don't want the Vale seat anymore. I've been taken into The Order of the Black Lily. They've agreed to send their own people to watch over my grandmother."

"Ah. I see. All right. I know the Ashford name carries more grief than gold these days, Vera. Train hard, build yourself a future, and make your Nonna proud."

I nodded. Before I even had time to grieve for everything that had happened in my last life, Daphne and Maeve Marlowe were already on the line, telling me to come downstairs.

The whole way down through the Ashford house, men stared and women whispered behind their hands.

Someone caught my heel on the stairs.

Called me a whore.

I had no idea what was going on. I got to my feet, limping.

At the turn of the corridor, I caught Lydia talking to my two blood-bound companions, her voice pitched just soft enough to carry.

"I did see Vera getting out of a Vale lieutenant's car in the middle of the night, but that doesn't necessarily mean anything. Maybe she really did earn her place on her own."

She touched her bottom lip with her ring finger, a single, almost reverent gesture, as if blessing the words.

"Stop defending her, Lydia. She won't even let anyone see her test results. She's obviously too guilty to let anyone find out."

"Exactly. You're just too kind, Lydia, that's why she keeps fooling you. A scheming woman like her is capable of anything."

After I'd entered The Order, I'd sworn a blood oath of silence. My records were sealed every score, every file, every trace of who I'd been before. That is the Order's deeper code, and not even a Vale can break it.

I never imagined that silence would become the very thing Lydia used to frame me.

And my two blood-bound companions, who knew exactly how hard I'd worked for my grandmother's sake, still chose to believe every word Lydia laid in front of them.

I laughed bitterly to myself. Told myself it didn't matter.

Once I crossed onto the Order's compound, all of it would be classified ground no Family could touch.

After that, I could cut ties with them completely.

No more listening to words designed to wound.

No more living like a fool inside someone else's web of lies, only to end up dead and discarded on the pavement.

I walked up to the three of them as if I'd heard nothing. The corridor went quiet the way a room does when something dangerous steps into it, except the dangerous thing was only me, and they didn't know it yet.

"You wanted to see me?"

Daphne dropped the contempt of a moment ago and smiled, smooth as a man closing a sit-down in his own favor.

"Vera, this is good. We'll be moving in the same circles again. All those years of hard work finally paid off."

His thumb moved once along the inside of his signet ring. In the old life I never knew what that meant. In this one, I did.

Maeve was smiling too.

"We get to keep protecting you now! Four years isn't enough, though. We're talking a lifetime."

A few girls passing by the social club watched us with open envy.

I felt nothing.

In my previous life, all four of us had ended up in the same territory. Same circles. Same obligations sealed at the matriarch's table.

I'd worked myself to the bone, studying the Family's operations, throwing myself into every task the elders set before me, all for a better future. All to prove the Ashford name still meant something on the Seaboard.

But in the end, my seat in the Family council and the patronage I'd earned were quietly taken from me and handed to Lydia.

Word on the street spread that I'd bought my standing on my back, that I'd been sleeping with one of the old guard to secure my position.

I was isolated and frozen out for four straight years. No one sat with me at the Sunday table. No soldier acknowledged me in the halls.

Back then, these two had sworn up and down they'd stand by me. Protect me. Blood-bound, they'd called it.

It wasn't until after I died that I learned they were the ones behind all of it.

Through all those endless sleepless nights, all those hours crying until dawn, they'd been feeding my pain to their precious Lydia to make her smile.

When I said nothing, Lydia's voice turned sour.

"Vera is so lucky. Born into a Family bloodline, a pampered heiress, and two blood-bound companions who'd do anything for her."

"I could never be that lucky. Without Vera's patronage, I wouldn't even have a Family willing to shelter me." The moment those words left her mouth, both men's faces softened with concern. Her ring finger brushed her bottom lip, soft as a blessing.

"Don't say that, Lydia. You're beautiful and talented. You've got an amazing future ahead of you. Once you're established, I'll have my father set you up running one of our front operations. General manager of a Vale house, at minimum." Daphne ran her thumb along the inside of his signet ring as he said it.

"No, Lydia, come to the Marlowe organization instead. I'll give you a higher position, a bigger cut, whatever you want. It's yours."

The two of them fell over each other trying to one-up their offers for Lydia.

The bitterness was hard to swallow.

All these years of knowing each other, and they had never once made that kind of promise to me. Never once shown me that kind of favoritism.

Of course. Love that's performed can never compare to devotion that comes from the heart.

I was about to leave when Daphne noticed something was off.

He reached for my hand, a trace of guilt flickering across his face.

"Vera, don't overthink it. We're only good to Lydia because she's your friend."

Maeve ruffled my hair the way he used to when we were kids, back when the three of us ran wild through the estate gardens and no one had taught us yet what a blood debt was.

"Stop reading into things. Everything's settled now. Let's go for a drive. We got you a present."

I nodded. Didn't refuse.

I was leaving soon anyway.

I just wanted one last look at this territory where the three of us had grown up together. The streets the Families controlled, the old restaurants where our grandfathers had once broken bread, the waterfront where the boundary lines had been drawn before any of us were born.

In the garage, Daphne and Maeve both scrambled to get Lydia into their front passenger seat.

Lydia looked at me with that perfectly rehearsed expression of reluctance. Her fingers drifted to the hollow of her throat.

"I thought the front seat was only for Vera?"

"She'll be upset if I sit there, won't she?"

Daphne was faster. He guided Lydia into the passenger seat and buckled her in.

"She doesn't deser" He caught himself. "She won't mind. She's got the best temper of anyone I know."

Maeve shot Daphne an annoyed glare. The knuckles of his right hand twitched toward his jaw, then he forced his palm flat against his thigh and held it there, the restraint visible.

He slammed his car door shut, visibly irritated.

It wasn't until the engines were about to start that either of them realized I still wasn't in a car.

They rolled down their windows and looked at each other.

Both wanted to explain. Neither could find a single good reason.

"It's fine. I'll drive myself."

The relief on both their faces was instant and simultaneous, though a flicker of confusion followed, as if my calm wasn't what they'd expected.

"Vera..."

I rolled my window up. I didn't want to hear another manufactured word.

But the scenery along the road still pulled old memories to the surface, one after another. The iron gates of the Vale estate. The corner where Maeve had bloodied a boy's nose for looking at me wrong when we were twelve. The old social club where the capos used to let us sit in the back booth and eat cannoli while they talked Family business in voices too low for children to hear.

The three of us were blood-bound companions who'd grown up side by side, raised across allied Families with the understanding that bonds formed at the matriarch's table were sacred.

For as long as I could remember, both the Vale and Marlowe households had competed to claim me as a future daughter-in-law. The Ashford bloodline was old, and old blood still carried weight on the Seaboard, even when the money and the soldiers were gone.

Then my parents died, gunned down in what the Families called an accident but no one truly believed was one, and the once-mighty Ashford Family shrank down to just me and my grandmother, holding on to each other with nothing else left.

An old woman and a young girl, holding together a crumbling household in a circle of wolves.

So I threw everything I had into learning the only currency that mattered in our world: knowledge. Codes, ledgers, the architecture of power. Desperate to shoulder the Family's burden before the last of our name was swallowed whole.

Lydia Everett came from nothing. No Family name, no bloodline, no standing. At the gatherings of the Five Families, nobody gave her the time of day.

When I found out she was an orphan too, I felt for her. I reached out first, paid her way, brought her under the Ashford roof, and told her we'd get through the hard times together.

I never imagined she'd take my kindness as charity.

That she'd resent me for everything I had.

That she'd use every trick she knew to wrap my two blood-bound companions around her finger.

And then, together with them, destroy my life.

While I was still lost in those thoughts, the cars rolled to a stop at the ridge.

What had happened on the drive up had left both of them uneasy. They fell over each other to open my door and carry my things.

"Lydia, look. This is the overlook we used to come to as kids. Maeve and I bought the whole hillside. From now on, it's ours. Private ground. No one sets foot here without our say."

Maeve nodded. "I already had soldiers plant your favorite yellow roses across the ridge. By this time next year, there'll be a whole sea of them."

"Then the four of us can come up here together, drive around, watch the stars."

Their faces were bright with plans for the future.

I stood staring at the land in silence.

This really had been our secret place when we were little. Before blood oaths and Family politics turned everything sharp. It held every happy memory the three of us shared.

But I had never liked yellow roses.

I was allergic to pollen. All of it.

While I stood there turning that over, fireworks burst open across the sky above us. Brilliant colors spelling out a name in fire. Lydia's, not mine.

Under that dreamlike canopy, Daphne produced a ring box lined in black velvet and held it out to her. Inside, on a bed of silk, sat a signet ring bearing the Vale crest. Not his own. A woman's ring, smaller, older, the gold worn smooth by generations of Vale brides.

"Lydia, this is the Family heirloom. My parents told me to give it to the future lady of the Vale house. I've wanted to give it to you for a long time. I just had to wait for the right moment."

"Be with me instead, Lydia. Don't you remember? When you nearly drowned as a kid, I jumped in after you without thinking. I'd give you my life, let alone some ring!"

The night had gone very still around us, the kind of quiet where even the soldiers at the tree line stopped shifting their weight. In my last life, this was exactly what had fooled me. The two of them, performing devotion so convincingly.

Back then I was naive enough to believe it. Blood-bound companions, a happy ending waiting for us. My grandmother and the Ashford name would finally have someone to lean on.

I didn't learn the truth until the day I died.

Devotion that deep can be faked.

I was about to turn and leave them to it.

Then Lydia spoke up. "Vera, why did you tell people I've been spreading whispers about you? Now everyone's attacking me..."

She held her phone up to my face. Her ring finger drifted to the curve of her bottom lip and touched it once, soft, almost reverent, the way a woman blesses a lie she knows has landed.

Under the Westbrook feed, hundreds of comments called me shameless, said I'd sold myself for a seat at the Vale table. The handful of voices defending me became, in Lydia's telling, proof that I'd sent them to bully her.

Maeve snatched the phone from her hand. He cracked the knuckles of his right hand against his jaw, once, twice, the sound loud in that hushed dark, and his voice came out shaking with rage.

"Vera, how could you do something like this? Fine, you've got no shame. But why blame Lydia for it?"

Daphne, the calmer of the two, didn't explode. But his thumb moved slow along the inside of his signet ring, and his eyes pinned me with the same accusation.

I swallowed the storm inside me. "I didn't do it. If you don't believe me, look into it yourselves."

Neither of them heard a word I said. They were already busy comforting Lydia.

"Don't worry, Lydia. I'll have our people scrub it by morning."

"Sweets always help. Come on, I'll take you for something."

One on each side, they flanked Lydia and walked away.

Neither of them looked back.

I let out a long breath and watched the ash drifting down where the fireworks had been. The Vale ring box sat on the stone wall where Daphne had set it down, forgotten, the worn gold catching the last of the light.

Compared to life and death, this much hurt was nothing.

At least I was still alive. I still had a brand-new life ahead of me.

I had no choice but to follow the three of them.

As I passed a thicket of old oaks, Maeve's voice carried through the dark, impatient and unchecked.

"Babe, how much longer do we have to keep up this act? I seriously can't take it anymore. Tommaso been spreading her legs all over the Territory. Who knows what she's caught."

"Tommaso pathetically stupid. Can't even tell a real alliance from a setup. No wonder some older man talked her into bed with a few pretty words. A woman like that doesn't deserve to stand beside the Vale name. The family heirloom bracelet, the real one, only you deserve to wear it, Ivy." Daphne ran his thumb slowly along the inside of his signet ring as he said it, the way he did when a decision had already been made and only the blood remained to be spilled.

Ivy gazed up at them with that wounded, fragile look of hers.

"Vera has done a lot of awful things, that's true. But she helped me once. How could I just abandon her? If you two don't do what I say, I'll never speak to either of you again!" Her ring finger drifted to her bottom lip, brushing it once, soft as a benediction over the lie.

At that, both of them, heirs who answered to no one, sons of the two most dangerous families on the Eastern Seaboard, fell over themselves apologizing to her.

They'd have trampled me into the dirt if it meant lifting her higher.

Over a decade of knowing each other, of growing up side by side, of bread broken at the same table and oaths sworn on the same saints, and none of it weighed as much as a few words from Lydia Everett.

I forced the tears back and turned away.

The night stretched endless around me as I walked toward the Ashford house, every step heavy with exhaustion. The streets were empty. Even the soldiers who used to patrol our block when I was a child were long gone, reassigned to families that still mattered.

By the time I reached the house, my twisted ankle had swollen beyond recognition.

Nonna's face crumpled when she saw it. She brought out liniment and knelt to rub it in herself, her hands shaking but sure, the way they'd always been.

I didn't want her worrying, so I told her about the invitation from The Order instead.

Her expression shifted from shock to pure joy.

"My Tommaso really made something of herself! Nonna's getting old. You're the only one left who can carry the Ashford name."

I nodded, blinking hard against the sting in my eyes.

"It's been so many years since this family had anything to celebrate. Nonna's going to throw you a proper feast. A real celebration!"

The smile on her face was identical to the one she'd worn the day she sent me off to my blood-bound union in the last life.

Back then, she'd believed I'd found a good man. She'd been so happy.

Then Daphne fled the altar, and the shock killed her right there in front of the gathered Families.

This time around, I would never let either of us walk that road again.

Nonna was too frail for the work, so I handled every detail of the feast myself. I booked the private back room at Ashford's, the old restaurant on Mulberry Street that still bore our name even though we hadn't owned it in years. The current owners let us have it for nothing. They remembered my grandfather, and what the Ashford name had once meant on this stretch of the Seaboard.

When my two blood-bound companions heard about the feast, they both showed up volunteering to help.

They even brought a strawberry cake, my favorite since I was little, as a peace offering.

"Vera, you haven't answered a single message in days. Are you still upset about what happened?"

"We weren't trying to blame you. We were worried you'd go down the wrong path. For people in our position, reputation matters." Daphne's thumb moved once over the inside of his ring, then went still.

I didn't forgive them. But I let them stay and help.

In our last life, they owed me more than they could ever repay.

No settling that ledger.

All I wanted in this life was to never see them again.

After my parents died, the Ashford family declined until no one bothered to pay respects at all. The old alliances dissolved. The seats at our table stayed empty.

Now that I'd finally done something worth celebrating, this was our chance to show the Five Families that the Ashfords still had an heir. That we were no longer a bloodline anyone could push around.

Nonna understood that. She treated this feast like the most important evening of her life, refusing to cut a single corner. Before she gave each instruction to the kitchen, she folded her hands over the worn silver crucifix at her neck, not in prayer but in purpose. This night had to be perfect.

The night of the feast, the back room filled with every name that mattered in the Territory.

Ivy glided in behind both Daphne and Maeve, wearing a gown that cost more than anything a girl with no family name should have been able to afford, perfectly at ease.

She took in the lavish room, the crystal, the white linen, the old Ashford crest mounted above the fireplace, and jealousy burned behind her eyes.

"Vera really does have all the luck."

"But so what if you were born into a bloodline and caught the eye of The Order? I can still make sure you spend the rest of your life wishing you were dead." Her ring finger touched her lip again, that single reverent press, blessing the thing she was about to set loose.

The words had barely left her lips when the screen at the front of the room lit up with my photos.

One after another. Every single one showing me naked in bed with a different man.

The room went very still. A glass was set down somewhere too carefully.

"Isn't that the Ashford heiress? Dio, she really gets around. Figures. No parents to raise her right."

"No wonder everyone says Vera spread her legs to get that invitation. Looks like it's true after all."

"The Ashford name is finished. They're selling their own blood off as some made man's whore."

I'd lived through mockery like this twice in my last life.

Once at my own altar. Daphne walked out of the blood-bound union for Lydia, and the humiliation killed my grandmother. The Ashford name became a punchline whispered in every social club across the Seaboard.

Once at my funeral. My body wasn't even in the ground before Maeve offered Lydia an alliance pact right there beside my casket. My entire life, reduced to a joke between two heirs.

The memories hit me and I turned to find my grandmother. Her breathing was ragged, her eyes bloodshot as she stared at the forged proof on the screen. "My Vera would never do something like this!"

Something was wrong. I could see it in the way she swayed, and my heart seized. I begged the people around me to help me get her to the ward. Every single one of them stepped back, terrified of being tied to a woman like me. Men who had once sat at my grandfather's table, who had kissed his ring and sworn loyalty to the Ashford name, turned their backs and melted into the crowd like strangers. The room emptied of allegiance the way a glass empties of wine.

In the end, it was the two blood-bound companions who stepped forward.

Daphne drove. Maeve and I held my grandmother between us, and we raced for the ward.

"Good thing you got here when you did. Any later and we might not have saved her."

I thanked the doctor over and over.

Then I sat at my grandmother's bedside and pulled up the venue's tape. Just as I'd expected, there was Lydia on the footage, swapping the proof herself. Every single image was a fake. Forged composites, all of them.

I took the tape and went out to call the Feds.

The two of them blocked my path.

"It was just a prank. Do you really have to blow it this far out of proportion? Do you have any idea what you'll do to Lydia?"

I stood there, stunned. Then something inside me snapped loose and I screamed.

"What about me? My grandmother almost died! Didn't Lydia think about destroying me? Destroying the entire Ashford family?"

Maeve shoved Lydia behind him and pushed me hard enough to stagger. The corridor light caught the signet ring on his hand as he straightened, and I watched his right fist twitch at his side before it pressed flat against his thigh.

"Give it a rest, Vera! Your grandmother's fine, isn't she? Besides, where there's smoke there's fire. You must've done something shady first for word like that to travel!"

None of it could hurt me anymore. I pushed past them both, numb.

Daphne caught my wrist. His expression was unreadable. He was still. Perfectly, terribly still, the way only he could be, the kind of stillness that made soldiers lower their voices and consiglieri choose their words with surgical care.

"Vera. Don't make this harder on yourself. You know the weight our Families carry. No one on this Seaboard would touch this case."

When I still wouldn't let go, his grip tightened.

"Don't forget your grandmother is still in that ward. One word from me, and the doctors stop treating her."

The ring on his right hand was motionless. His thumb did not move along its inner edge. Not turning. Not restless. Already decided.

"I'll count to three. If you don't hand over the tape, I'll have them pull her off the ventilator."

He dialed a number right in front of me.

"Three."

"Two."

"I was wrong!"

I dropped to my knees, tears streaming down my face. I didn't dare. I didn't dare gamble with my grandmother's life.

Maeve snatched my line and hurled it at the ground. It shattered. Shards bit into my skin.

He looked down at me, cold. "As long as we're standing here, don't even think about touching Lydia."

I sat crumpled on the floor, and it wasn't until their backs disappeared around the corner that the pain finally broke through. Somewhere down the hall a monitor beeped, steady and indifferent. Two lifetimes of grief tore out of me at once, and I sobbed until I couldn't breathe.

The childhood promises were lies. The blood-bound oaths were lies. Only the pain was real.

I don't know how long it was before I dragged myself back to the ward. Terrified that Daphne or Maeve would tamper with her care, I stayed at my grandmother's side for days without leaving once.

The only messages I received were from Lydia. The two of them had taken her traveling, bungee jumping, doing every single thing they'd once promised me and never followed through on.

I blocked her number.

When I looked up, two men in crisp bearing stood at the foot of my grandmother's bed. They inclined their heads to me, the way men do on sovereign ground.

"Miss Ashford, we've been sent by The Order as medical personnel. Please rest assured. While you're away, we will guarantee your grandmother's safety and her health."

Only then did it hit me. It was time to go.

I went back to the Ashford house and threw away everything connected to those two men. Every photograph. Every token. Every memory that smelled of gunpowder and broken oaths.

Then I boarded a plane and never looked back.

Neither Daphne Vale nor Maeve Marlowe was someone I could depend on. I would depend on myself. For my grandmother, for the Ashford name, I would carve out a future worth having.