My betrothed, Liam Falcone, the Young Don of the most feared crime family in Crestfield, had a childhood sweetheart who stabbed a man in a nightclub. He pushed me forward to take the fall, swore a blood oath that he would marry me when I walked free.
After five years inside the joint, Liam kept his word. He arranged the alliance ceremony. But on the day I stood in the fitting room wearing the gown meant to bind me to him forever, he climbed behind the wheel of his black Maserati and drove it straight into me, shattering both my legs.
He said, "I'm sorry, Clara. I was just too excited. I couldn't control myself when I thought about you becoming my bride. Don't worry, I will definitely find a doctor to treat your legs."
He postponed the blood-bound union and summoned every renowned surgeon the Falcone Syndicate's money could reach. None of them could make me walk again.
I remembered the person who had made me a promise while I rotted in that concrete cell, and I wheeled myself to my fiancé's study to ask for his help. But before I could knock, I heard his voice through the heavy oak door. Intimate. Breathless. Tangled with the unmistakable sounds of a woman who was not me.
After realizing it was all a scam, I pulled back from the door without making a sound and took out my phone. My fingers were steady as I dialed the only number that had ever meant safety.
"Donna Elisabetta," I said quietly. "I've repaid your kindness. Can you let me go now?"
A pause on the other end. Then the Donna's voice, warm and careful the way it always was when she spoke to me: "Clara, did Liam bully you? Tell me, and I'll go teach him a lesson, okay?"
I said nothing. Instead, I held the phone out toward the gap beneath the study door. The sounds of frantic, unrestrained breathing bled through the wood and carried clearly across the line.
The Donna's persuasive voice stopped dead.
I pulled the phone back to my ear, turned my wheelchair around, and began rolling myself toward the bedroom. The hallway of the Falcone compound stretched long and dark ahead of me, lined with oil portraits of men who had killed for less than what was happening behind that door.
"Donna Elisabetta, you pulled me from the wreckage on Fairview Bridge when I was a child. Afterward, I gave your son one of my kidneys so he could live. Now he has a new love, so I won't bother you anymore."
My words were firm. I left no crack for sentimentality to seep through.
The Donna hesitated. I could hear her breathing change, the faint clink of rosary beads shifting in her hands. When she spoke again, her tone was conciliatory, almost pleading. "Clara, why don't you wait another week? Your ceremony with Liam is in a week. If he's still like this then, I'll let you go, okay?"
——
I acquiesced to the Donna's request.
This was my last compromise.
Before long, Liam came in, having changed his clothes. The faint scent of another woman's perfume clung to him beneath the sharp notes of his cologne. As he approached me, I forced myself to suppress my nausea and said, "I know a highly skilled healer. Could you help me find her?"
Liam looked at me with that practiced tenderness, took my hand in his, and said, "There aren't that many powerful experts in the world. Don't worry, Clara, I will definitely find someone to heal you."
"What if it can't be cured?" I asked, staring intently into his eyes.
Liam smiled. It was the kind of smile he wore at sit-downs when he wanted someone to believe the knife wasn't coming. "How could it not be cured? It was all my fault for being careless and forgetting that you were taking something from the trunk. Don't worry, I will marry you no matter what."
"Clara, don't think too much. All you need to do now is be my bride. Leave the rest to me."
I lowered my eyes and said nothing.
Thinking of what I had just witnessed through the study door, my heart ached as if someone had drawn a blade slowly across it.
If I hadn't seen Liam on top of another woman with my own eyes, his body moving against hers while I sat crippled twenty feet away, I might have believed him.
Seeing that I was in low spirits, Liam assumed I was sad because I couldn't stand up.
He suddenly grabbed my hand and slapped it against his own face, saying as he did so, "I'm sorry, Clara, it's all my fault. I should have checked more carefully. I promise I'll never do it again. Please forgive me."
I pressed my lips together and remained silent.
Liam's expression shifted. The warmth drained from his face the way color drains from a man's cheeks when you press a gun to his temple. His voice turned to ice. "Clara, there's a limit to your temper. Don't you want to marry me? You'll get what you want in a week."
After saying that, perhaps realizing that his tone had been too harsh, he reached out and gently patted my head, the gesture almost grotesque in its false affection. "I have a dinner tonight with some associates. I'm going out first. You stay home and wait for me."
Liam didn't come home for a day and a night, but my phone was full of his whereabouts.
They were sent by his beloved Vanessa.
I scrolled through Vanessa Mercer's social media feed and found that five years ago, while I was locked in a concrete cell taking the punishment for her crime, Vanessa had been plagued by nightmares after stabbing that man. Liam had spared no expense to find reclusive healers, spiritual counselors, anyone who could soothe her troubled sleep.
All that effort, all that money, all those connections the Falcone name could buy. For a peaceful night's sleep for the woman who had let me rot.
I gripped my phone so tightly that my knuckles turned white, the bones pressing sharp against the skin.
The latest message was from just hours ago. Liam had spent midnight celebrating Vanessa's anniversary.
It read: "I'm still the beloved little princess of the Mercer clan! Someone said they're going to prepare a surprise for me tonight~ I can't wait~"
The accompanying picture showed Liam making a cake by hand. The Young Don of the Falcone Family was wearing a pink apron, and because his movements were clumsy, cream was smeared across his jaw, his forearms, the marble counter around him. He was laughing. I had never seen him laugh like that. Not once. Not for me.
I suddenly remembered a night when I had been sick, my body so weak I could barely lift my head from the pillow. I had asked Liam to make me a bowl of soup. Just broth. Anything warm.
He had frowned and said, "How would I, a man in my position, know about those things? Just bear with it for now, and if you can't stand it, just order something."
I reached out and traced the outline of the man in the photo with my fingertip, following the line of his jaw, the crease of his smile. But there was no longer any place for me in those familiar eyes.
I reached up and touched the jade pendant around my neck. It was the only keepsake left to me by my parents, the ones who had burned on Fairview Bridge.
Whenever I felt restless, I always reached for it without thinking, as if my mother and father were still beside me, as if the fire had never come.
I didn't know when she arrived. But Vanessa pushed open my bedroom door without knocking and saw that I was holding something in my hand. She crossed the room in three quick strides and lunged for it.
"What are you doing?!" I panicked, pulling back, but the wheelchair gave me nowhere to go.
Vanessa's face twisted with contempt. "You slut! How dare you hoard Liam's things? A filthy, despicable wretch like you doesn't even deserve to touch what belongs to him!"
In the violent struggle, her nails raking at my throat, I shoved her away with every ounce of strength left in my arms.
Vanessa stumbled and fell to the floor.
And Liam appeared in the doorway at that exact moment.
"What are you doing?!"
His voice cut through the room like a gunshot. The two enforcers flanking him in the hallway went still, their eyes trained on the floor. They knew better than to witness what happened behind closed doors in the Falcone compound.
Vanessa immediately dissolved into sobs. "Liam, I know my sister has never liked me, but I never expected she would push me over a jade pendant!"
She clutched her arm as though it were broken, her voice climbing to a pitiful, practiced tremor. "I just kindly thought that the jade pendant looked like the one you gave me before, so I wanted to ask her to take it off so I could see it. But she not only refused to give it to me, she also pushed me away..."
Liam stared at me. His jaw was set, his eyes flat and cold, the way they looked when he passed judgment at a sit-down. "Clara, apologize to Vanessa."
I clutched the jade pendant against my chest. "She was the one trying to steal it from me!"
My voice came out raw, desperate, and I hated the sound of it. I swallowed and forced the next words out flat and hollow. "Whatever my sister says goes. After all, I am the lowly wretch she speaks of. I should recognize my place. I'm sorry, sister."
Liam's face darkened further. "Clara, apologize to Vanessa right now, or I won't forgive you."
I didn't respond. I couldn't. My fingers were locked around the pendant so tightly that the edges of the jade bit into my palm.
Liam's gaze zeroed in on the spot I was covering. He crossed the room in two strides, and his hands closed over mine. He pried my fingers apart one by one, his grip bruising, methodical, and then he yanked the cord.
It snapped.
The thin rope dragged across the back of my neck and left a raw, bloody line where it had bitten into the skin before breaking.
"Give it back! That's mine!"
I reached for it, my body lurching forward, and the wheelchair tipped. I crashed to the floor, my useless legs folding beneath me. The cold marble of the Falcone compound pressed against my cheek. I could see the hem of Vanessa's dress from where I lay.
Liam looked down at me with a frown of distaste. "You pushed Vanessa just now. Consider this an apology."
"Why..."
My words were cut short. Vanessa bent down, picked up the jade pendant from Liam's outstretched hand, and held it up to the light. She examined it the way a jeweler examines a stone, turning it slowly, letting the lamplight catch its deep green heart. Then she looked down at me on the floor and smiled.
"This jade pendant is indeed a fine piece. I'll gladly accept your offer and thank you for parting with it, sister."
Liam's expression softened as he watched Vanessa clasp the pendant around her own neck. But when his eyes returned to me, crumpled on the marble, they held nothing but disgust.
"You should learn from Vanessa. Look how sensible she is. Vanessa is so generous and doesn't hold grudges."
He adjusted his cufflinks. A small, unconscious gesture. The same one he made after every verdict he handed down.
"Don't be unreasonable in the future. After all, you have no one to back you up. Reflect on your actions."
