Chapter 1 — The Toast She Refused

Alessia Vero remembered the taste of poison.

Almond first. Then copper. Then nothing below her neck while her father watched men close the lid of an unmarked coffin.

She opened her eyes to chandeliers and applause.

Eighteen candles burned on a white cake. Don Matteo Vero stood beside her with one hand resting on her shoulder, the picture of a father welcoming his lost daughter home. Bianca, the sister raised in silk while Alessia moved through foster houses, lifted a champagne flute.

“To family restored,” Bianca said.

The room repeated it.

Alessia looked at the glass waiting beside her plate.

This was the night she died the first time.

Memory returned without mercy: Matteo's lawyer saying her existence threatened Bianca's succession; a doctor declaring accidental overdose; damp earth striking wood. She had been nineteen then, killed after a year inside the Vero household. Now she had returned twelve months earlier, at the first dinner after a genetic test proved she was Matteo's elder daughter.

The poison should not have come until next year.

Someone had accelerated the plan.

Alessia smiled and reached for the glass.

Across the ballroom, Zara Finch touched one finger to her earring. Nightglass signal: unknown chemical risk confirmed by portable spectrometer.

Alessia lifted the champagne toward the light. “Family restored.”

Then she let the glass slip.

Crystal broke across marble. Wine spread beneath the tablecloth.

Bianca stepped back too slowly. One drop struck her shoe.

“Clumsy,” Matteo said softly.

“Nervous,” Alessia replied. “I have never had three hundred people watch me drink.”

Servants moved to clean the spill. Zara arrived first disguised as event security, placed an absorbent evidence strip over the liquid, and sealed the broken stem inside a waste bag. To onlookers, she was protecting guests from glass. To Nightglass, she was preserving chain of custody.

Matteo offered Alessia his own flute.

In the first life, she would have taken it to prove she trusted him. Now she watched his eyes.

“I would rather cut the cake,” she said.

The orchestra resumed. Guests relaxed because rich families trained rooms to ignore danger when music returned.

Alessia sliced the cake with Matteo's silver knife. She accepted no food from the service line until Zara's team tested it. Nightglass had spent six years building protocols for executives, witnesses, and dissidents. None of its clients knew the company's founder had begun coding threat models at twelve from a foster-home computer.

At sixteen, Alessia created a maritime-risk algorithm under the name A. Glass. Zara, a former military investigator, found the code and became the adult signatory required to incorporate. Nightglass grew into a legal intelligence firm tracing sanctions exposure, port theft, and corporate coercion across borders.

Matteo believed his abandoned daughter arrived with one suitcase and no allies.

Alessia intended to preserve that mistake.

Bianca joined her near the balcony. She was twenty, beautiful, and controlled enough to make cruelty resemble etiquette.

“Father bought you an apartment,” Bianca said. “The estate can be overwhelming.”

An apartment outside the walls meant surveillance without access.

“I would like to live here while I learn the family,” Alessia replied.

“We barely know you.”

“That is why learning seems useful.”

Bianca's smile tightened. “Do not confuse a blood test with a place.”

Alessia remembered Bianca signing the cremation authorization after her first death. The coffin had been buried empty because Matteo's men sold her body to a private laboratory. Bianca claimed she had not known.

Perhaps that had been true. It had not stopped her signature.

Matteo called both daughters to the dais and announced Alessia would receive a nonvoting family council seat. The title sounded generous and revealed nothing. Alessia thanked him publicly.

“I want to understand the legitimate businesses first,” she said. “Shipping, warehouses, and insurance.”

The illegal businesses depended on those same systems. Matteo approved because he thought ignorance would make the request harmless.

After midnight, guests left through a line of black cars. Zara entered Alessia's new bedroom through the service corridor and placed the evidence bag inside a shielded case.

“Preliminary strip shows aconitine,” Zara said. “Enough to stop a heart.”

“Same poison.”

Zara knew about the other life because Alessia had told her two years ago—before the rebirth should logically have existed. In this timeline, Alessia had awakened with future memories at age twelve and built Nightglass to prevent the grave waiting at nineteen.

“We can take this to police,” Zara said.

“With what context? A security contractor stole trash at a private party, and every camera belongs to Matteo.”

“Then an independent lab and duplicate samples.”

They documented the seal, cut the evidence into three portions under recorded conditions, and arranged delivery to separate accredited laboratories. One report would go to counsel outside the city.

Alessia opened her laptop. Nightglass analysts had already mapped guests who approached the table. Two caterers, Matteo's steward, Bianca, and a photographer entered the glass's reach.

The ballroom camera feed had lost eleven seconds.

Zara recovered a reflection from another guest's live video. A gloved hand switched two flutes. The face remained outside the frame.

Alessia examined the recovered stem under portable light.

A partial print curved along the base. Nightglass software compared it with public biometric images and a fingerprint left on Bianca's signed art-auction certificate.

The match probability exceeded ninety-eight percent.

Before sleeping, Alessia asked Nightglass counsel to prepare a sealed incident memorandum. It listed who handled the glass, which cameras failed, and which assumptions remained unproven. Bianca's print appeared as one fact among many, not a verdict.

Zara also checked Alessia's new suite for listening devices. She found two installed by Vero security and left them active, feeding ordinary conversations recorded earlier. Removing them would reveal awareness. A third microphone, hidden inside the birthday flowers, used a different manufacturer and transmitted to an unknown receiver beyond the estate.

More than one person wanted to hear whether Alessia survived.

Alessia closed the case. Suspicion could wait; survival had already changed the timeline.

The poisoned glass bore Bianca's print.