"Take him home," she said, her voice carrying clearly across the room. "And pretend this never happened." She paused, letting the words settle. Then, softer, with a cruelty so precise it could only have been rehearsed: "Gianluca invited me to your ceremony. I'll be there. It's a shame, really." Her smile widened. "You're about to bind yourself to a man who will never truly be yours. How unlucky for you, Adriana."
The men moved quickly after that, two of them hoisting Gianluca's dead weight between them, his head lolling, his feet dragging across the floor. They carried him out through the back entrance to where my car sat idling in the alley, and someone opened the rear door and folded him inside with the practiced efficiency of men accustomed to handling bodies.
"He's just had too much," one of them said to me, not quite meeting my eyes. "The ceremony's in a week. Don't let tonight cause problems. You know how he gets."
I was briefly distracted by the mechanics of it, the door closing, the weight of Gianluca's unconscious form settling into the back seat, the engine humming beneath me. And then I was behind the wheel, and the alley was empty, and Adelina Vianello's smirk was seared into the backs of my eyelids like a brand.
Her words echoed with a clarity that cut through the fog of shock.
You'll never be the one he truly loves.
I pulled out of the alley and onto the dark street. My mind felt blank, scraped clean, struggling to process what had just unfolded in the span of twenty minutes. The city slid past the windows in streaks of neon and shadow, and I drove without thinking, without feeling, on a kind of terrible autopilot.
I couldn't decide which was worse. The pain or the anger. They fought for dominance inside my chest, trading blows, neither willing to yield. The pain was a deep, hollow ache, the kind that comes from discovering that the ground you've been standing on was never solid. The anger was sharp and hot and wanted to burn everything.
But I couldn't leave him. Even now. Even after what I had witnessed. I couldn't leave Gianluca Castellano unconscious and drunk in the back of my car in the middle of the night. Whatever he had done to me, whatever he had revealed himself to be, the habits of five years do not break in twenty minutes. The instinct to protect him was still there, lodged deep, even as the reason for it crumbled to ash.
I slammed the car door harder than necessary when I parked outside the estate. The sound echoed off the stone facade and disappeared into the night.
Behind my eyes, the image played on a relentless loop: Gianluca on his knees, the ring held up like a sacrament, his voice breaking on a name that wasn't mine. And then, layered over it, the memory of every time he had called me Addie in the warmth of our bed, his lips against my temple, his arm around my waist. The same word. The same sound. A different woman's ghost living inside it all along.
Five years. Five years of building a life beside him, of learning the rhythms of his moods, of sitting across from him at Sunday dinners in the Castellano dining room while his mother poured wine and his father held court. Five years of believing that the alliance between our families had bloomed into something genuine. Something chosen.
A wave of nausea rolled through me, sudden and violent. I gripped the steering wheel and breathed through it, my knuckles white, my torn palm throbbing.
The memories that had once felt warm, the quiet mornings, the whispered promises, the way he tucked my hair behind my ear when he thought I was sleeping, now rearranged themselves into something grotesque. Every tender moment recast in the light of what I had just witnessed. Every Addie a lie. Every touch meant for someone who wasn't there.
Five years of love that was never mine.
A cruel joke, and I had been the only one not laughing.
I couldn't shake the memory of his proposal.
Six months ago, Gianluca and I had been traveling through the mountains along the coast when the earth gave way beneath us. A landslide, sudden and merciless, tore the road apart like God himself had decided to collect. In a desperate, thoughtless act, I had thrown myself between him and the collapsing ground, shoving him clear of the worst of it. He walked away without a scratch. I tumbled down the mountainside like a broken doll, and the world went black.
The doctors said I was fortunate. The medical team had reached me just in time, pulled me from the rubble with minutes to spare. I spent weeks recovering, drifting in and out of consciousness in a private clinic the Castellano Family kept on retainer. When I was finally discharged, Gianluca was waiting outside the doors with a bouquet of white peonies, his dark suit immaculate, his expression more open and vulnerable than I had ever seen it.
He dropped to one knee on the clinic steps, and the handful of associates and family members who had come to see me home went quiet. Even the bodyguards standing at the perimeter seemed to hold their breath.
"Addie," he said, his voice thick with what I believed was genuine emotion, "you saved my life. I want to spend the rest of mine taking care of you."
I covered my mouth, overwhelmed. Tears blurred my vision as the small crowd murmured their approval. Someone clapped. Someone else whistled low. I let him slide the ring onto my finger, the diamond catching the afternoon light, and I thought, foolishly, that this was the beginning of our forever. That the blood-bound union our families had arranged had finally become something real, something chosen.
Throughout our years together, Gianluca had been steady. Measured. Considerate in the way men raised in the life were taught to be with the women they claimed. He opened doors, he remembered small things, he kept his voice low and his promises firm. If it weren't for what had happened tonight, I would have gone to my grave certain of his devotion.
But now, as he slumped unconscious in the passenger seat with the smell of whiskey and cigarette smoke clinging to his clothes, that certainty had crumbled to ash.
I drove in silence through the darkened streets, the city lights sliding across the windshield like slow-moving ghosts. My mind was already turning over the possibility of ending everything. Five years might seem like a long time, but a lifetime was infinitely longer. The thought of binding myself in a blood-bound union to a man whose loyalty was divided, whose heart had already been given to someone else, made my stomach turn with something worse than grief. It was revulsion.
