My Fiancé Loved His Secretary for Ten Years,I Married His Brother in Three Days

Dante Falcone checked his phone the entire time we were choosing gowns for the alliance ceremony.

I picked up a piece of curtain fabric, walked over to him, and asked, "How about this gown?"

He didn't even lift his head, his thumb still lazily swiping across the screen. "Looks good."

I picked up another piece. "And this one?"

"Yeah, that's nice. Really suits your skin tone."

I lowered my eyes and said nothing.

This was just an ordinary piece of curtain fabric I'd grabbed at random. It wasn't an alliance ceremony gown to try on at all.

Lately, Dante Falcone had been growing more and more perfunctory with me. If that was the case, I needed to reconsider our marriage.

The seamstress watched me from her corner. I could feel the careful pity in her gaze, the kind that existed only behind closed lips in this world, where a woman engaged to a Falcone heir was to be envied, never mourned. I smoothed the lace between my fingers one last time and let it fall.

It wasn't until he received a pouty-kitten sticker from his personal assistant and walked out without a second's hesitation, past the soldiers who straightened and fell into step behind him, leaving me standing there alone among a dozen white gowns that no one would help me carry.

Only then did I open my mouth, my voice light and even:

"Come home early tonight."

"I have some wonderful news to tell you."

——

He didn't turn around. The boutique door swung shut with a soft chime that sounded, in the emptied room, like a bell tolling.

Four in the morning.

Dante finally came home.

The Falcone estate was silent at that hour, the kind of silence that belonged to houses where armed men patrolled the perimeter and every camera feed ran to a basement console no guest ever saw. I heard his footsteps on the marble staircase before I heard his breathing. Uneven. Heavy. The particular rhythm of a man who had drunk past strategy and into sentiment.

He climbed on top of me, drunk and heavy, his palms burning hot, his voice tender:

"Serena..."

I switched on the bedside lamp.

The tenderness in his eyes vanished, replaced by a flash of undisguised disgust.

An awkward beat of silence. The lamplight caught the sharp line of his jaw, the loosened knot of his tie, the faint smudge of lipstick on his collar that he had not bothered to hide. He looked at me the way men in this family looked at obligations they had inherited and could not yet discard.

He grabbed a pillow, pressed it over my face, and reluctantly prepared to continue.

Then he heard me say:

"I'm on my period."

He walked to the bathroom like a man reprieved.

The moment Dante left, his phone lit up on the nightstand. The screen threw a pale rectangle of light across the bedsheet. I did not have to reach for it. The notification was right there, as careless as everything he left in my reach, because nothing I saw had ever mattered enough to hide.

A message from Serena Bellini:

Des, thank you for taking all those drinks for me so the creeps would leave me alone. I promise I won't pick up bar shifts anymore. Serena's going to be your one and only personal assistant forever ^^

I stared at the ceiling.

Ten years ago, when I confessed to him in front of everyone at the Falcone family's annual Christmas gathering. The long dining table, the silver candelabra, the capos and their wives pretending not to watch while every word I said echoed off the vaulted stone.

Dante, who knew perfectly well I was allergic to alcohol, pointed at a full bottle of whiskey and told me, casual as anything, that if I could down the whole thing in one go, he'd consider accepting me.

So I did.

The room had gone quiet. I remembered the burn, the way my throat closed and my vision blurred, the sound of someone's chair scraping back in alarm. I remembered finishing the bottle and setting it down with hands that shook so badly the glass rattled against the table. And I remembered Dante watching me the entire time with an expression I mistook, then, for admiration. It was only later, after the hospital, after half my stomach was cut away in a private clinic where no public record would ever exist, that I understood what that look had been. Curiosity. The same idle interest a boy gives a dog that performs a trick he didn't expect.

I pressed my hand over the half of my stomach that was no longer there, reached behind the pillow, and pulled out the wedding invitation I'd prepared.

Then I sat down on the sofa. And waited.

Dante was out of the shower in less than ten minutes.

The gardenia scent on his skin was identical to the handmade aromatherapy set Serena had given me last time, presented in a ribbon-tied box with a shy note about how she hoped I'd like it, how she only wanted us to be close. I had smiled and thanked her. I had set it on the bathroom shelf. And now its scent came back to me on my fiancé's wet skin like a signature I had been too slow to read.

Before I could speak, he fished a gift box from his coat pocket, lazy and unhurried, and tossed it at me like spare change. It landed on the cushion beside my hip with a muffled thud.

Inside was a pair of pigeon-blood-red earrings.

One look and I knew they'd been cut from the leftover stone of the ruby necklace he'd given Serena last month. The same fire in the facets, the same deep arterial color, but smaller. Remnants. The kind of stones a jeweler sets aside after the important piece has been finished and the patron asks what to do with the scraps.

When I glanced at them once and closed the lid, Dante raised an eyebrow, smirking.

"What? Need me to put them on you myself before you're satisfied?"

"Dante, we've known each other fifteen years. You don't know I don't have pierced ears?"

Maybe my tone was too calm, because he actually looked up from texting Serena and, for once, tried to coax me. He gave his tie knot one sharp, precise tug, a reflex that surfaced whenever some small thing caught him off-balance.

"Tch. Such a small thing. I'll take you to get them pierced tomorrow."

Before, if he'd offered to go somewhere with me, I would've thrown myself into his arms on the spot. I would've kissed him a hundred times no matter how red his ears got, no matter how hard he tried to peel me off. I would have believed, with the desperate faith of a woman raised to see a Falcone betrothal as the highest possible fate, that the offer meant he was turning toward me at last.

But now I walked past the arms he'd opened out of habit, and placed the invitation in his hands.

"Congratulations, Dante. The groom's been changed. You don't have to marry me anymore."

"Hm? Congratulations for what?"

He was too busy flirting with Serena to hear a word I'd said. His eyes never left the screen. His thumb traced a line of text and the corner of his mouth twitched upward, and I stood there holding the rest of my life in the silence between us while he smiled at someone else's words.

Just as I told him to open the invitation and look at the groom's name, his phone rang.

This late at night, it could only be one person.

The girl's breathy little voice came through, sweet and wheedling:

"Des... I just saw this horror video and it was so, so scary..."

The second he heard that, Dante dropped the invitation. It slipped from his fingers and landed face-up on the marble floor, the gold-embossed lettering catching the lamplight. He stepped over it without looking down and headed downstairs without looking back. I heard the front door, the murmur of a soldier acknowledging him, and then the roar of his sports car fading beyond the estate gate, past the guardhouse, past the iron fence lined with cameras, out into a city that parted for him the way it parted for every man who carried the Falcone name.

I picked up my phone and tried to call him.

Nothing but a busy signal.

Oh. Right.

The day of our betrothal ceremony. The day the Valentis and the Falcones had sealed the pact in front of the Commission, my father clasping hands with old Don Falcone while I stood in white and smiled as though my heart were not already cracking along a fault line only I could feel.

That same evening, so I wouldn't bother him while he was out with Serena at some reunion, Dante had already blocked me.

I pressed my thumb to the inside of my wrist and held it there for one measured breath. Then I bent down, picked the invitation up off the cold marble, and set it on the table where he would have to see it in the morning.

If he came home in the morning.