The blood drained from my face. My hands began to tremble at my sides, a fine, uncontrollable shaking that I could not will away. I pressed my nails into my palms until the pain grounded me, but it wasn't enough. Nothing was enough.
Adelina Vianello noticed. Of course she noticed. Her dark eyes flicked to my trembling hands, then back to my face, and a wide, knowing smile spread across her lips. It was the smile of a woman who had already won and wanted to make sure I understood it.
With a deliberate, almost theatrical grace, she slipped the ring from her finger and held it out to me between two fingers, as though offering a trinket to a child.
"Gianluca was drunk," she said, her voice light and sweet and laced with something venomous underneath. "He didn't mean to give me the ring. Don't take it too seriously." She tilted her head, her smile sharpening. "He always acts like a boy when he's had too much. You must know that by now."
The mockery in her tone was precise and unhurried, the kind that comes from someone who has had a long time to rehearse. I took the ring from her hand. My fingers closed around it so tightly that the metal bit into my skin.
And then, finally, Gianluca looked at me.
He pushed himself up from the booth and started toward me, his steps uneven but his eyes suddenly focused, and for one desperate, foolish moment, a glimmer of hope flickered in my chest. Maybe he would explain. Maybe there was something I didn't understand. Maybe this was all the bourbon and the late hour and the strange gravity of a man about to change his life.
Maybe.
The hope died in the time it took him to reach me.
Gianluca's eyes locked onto the ring in my clenched fist, and his expression transformed. The softness vanished. His jaw tightened. His nostrils flared. He looked at me the way a man looks at someone who has taken something that doesn't belong to them, with a fierceness that was almost feral, territorial, the instinct of an animal guarding what it considers its own.
"That ring," he snarled, his voice low and dangerous, "is Addie's. Not yours. Give it back to her."
The words landed like a slap. The room went still. One of the men near the door shifted his weight, hand moving instinctively toward his waistband before he caught himself and froze.
An associate stepped forward, placing a careful hand on Gianluca's shoulder, his smile forced and brittle. "He hasn't seen Adelina in years, Adriana. He's out of his mind right now. Don't let this get to you. He doesn't know what he's saying."
But Gianluca shrugged the hand off and grabbed my wrist. His grip was crushing, his fingers digging into the tendons of my hand as he tried to wrench the ring free. I could feel the bones grinding together, the skin pulling taut, the sharp edge of the band cutting into my palm as I refused to let go.
I stared into his eyes. They were dark, almost black in the low light of the social club, and I searched them for something, anything, that resembled the man who had spent five years beside me. The man who had brought me espresso in bed on Sunday mornings. The man who had whispered Addie against my hair in the dark.
I couldn't find him.
The face before me was a stranger's. Hard, furious, stripped of every tenderness I had ever believed was real.
I held on.
Gianluca pried my fingers open one by one, methodically, as though dismantling something. I felt the skin of my palm tear against the metal, a thin line of fire, but I didn't cry out. I wouldn't give him that. Not here. Not in front of her.
Two of his men moved to intervene, reaching for his arm, murmuring his name. He shoved them back with a violence that sent one stumbling into a chair. The crash echoed through the silent room.
In the end, he took the ring.
He turned away from me without a word and stumbled back toward Adelina Vianello, holding the band up before him like an offering, like a man presenting tribute at an altar. And then, with a reverence that made my stomach turn, he sank to one knee on the worn hardwood floor of that smoke-filled social club.
"Addie," he said, and his voice broke on the word, cracking open to reveal something raw and aching underneath. "Will you marry me? This ring was made for you. Only you." He swallowed hard, his eyes glistening. "I've been waiting for you for so many years."
The silence that followed was absolute. No one breathed. No one moved. The only sound was the distant ticking of a clock on the wall and the faint hum of the city beyond the blacked-out windows.
His proposal hung in the air like smoke.
My chest constricted so tightly I thought my ribs might crack. Anger and betrayal braided together inside me, twin serpents coiling around my heart, squeezing until I couldn't tell where one ended and the other began. My eyes burned, but I would not cry. Not here. Not in a room full of Castellano men. Not in front of her.
In that moment, I understood with a finality that left no room for doubt or hope or self-deception.
Gianluca's love had never been for me. Every whispered Addie, every tender gesture, every promise made in the dark of our bedroom in the Castellano estate. None of it had been mine. I had been living inside a love letter addressed to someone else, reading my own name into words that were never meant for me.
I gritted my teeth until my jaw ached. The burning on my face was shame, and rage, and the searing heat of a world rearranging itself into a shape I didn't recognize. I turned on my heel and walked toward the door.
I made it three steps before the crash came.
I spun around. Gianluca had collapsed, his body crumpling to the floor like a marionette whose strings had been cut. The ring rolled from his open hand across the hardwood, catching the light before it came to rest against the leg of a chair.
Adelina didn't move to help him. She stood over his fallen form with her arms crossed, watching me with a half-smile that held no warmth, only a thin, calculated contempt.
