Blood and Chandeliers
The chandeliers had been polished that morning by a man named Salvatore who had worked for the Morettis for thirty years and who Bella suspected knew more about the family's secrets than the priest who baptized her. She'd watched him from the staircase, balanced on a ladder with a cloth in each hand, coaxing light out of crystal until the whole ballroom seemed to hum with it. Now, hours later, that same light poured down over four hundred guests in tuxedos and gowns, over champagne towers and a string quartet playing something Vivaldi-adjacent, over a room built to make people forget what the Moretti name actually meant.
Bella stood near the base of the grand staircase in a dress the color of dried blood—her mother's choice, of course, though Isabella had called it "garnet" with a smile that dared anyone to disagree—and felt, as she always did at these things, like a prop in a play she'd never auditioned for.
"You look beautiful, cara," Isabella had told her upstairs, fastening the clasp of a necklace that probably cost more than a house in the neighborhood where Ana, the girl Bella hadn't met yet, had grown up. "Beautiful and untouchable. That's what we need tonight."…