I tried to keep my expression neutral. Tried to stop my brows from furrowing, to arrange my face into something polite and blank—the mask every woman raised in the orbit of Family power learns to wear before she learns to read. I wanted to tell him it was fine. That none of this mattered anymore. But then I thought about my father, about the soft rasp of his breathing when I had called the coastal house that morning, about the way Theo Romano's voice had cracked for half a syllable before she smoothed it flat again and told me everything was under control. About the little time he had left.
My thumb found the inside of my ring finger—the place where the betrothal band sat, the blood-bound token I had not yet removed. I pressed against it once, hard enough to feel the metal bite, and took a steadying breath.
"Don't worry about meeting my family." My voice sounded foreign to me, too level, too still, like the surface of water just before something breaks through from underneath. "Let's move the ceremony up. How about three days from now?"
If we did that, I could leave as soon as possible. Sign what needed signing, stand where the Family protocol required me to stand, and then drive south to the coastal enclave where my father was folding his handkerchief into perfect squares so I would not see the tremor in his hands. I could be with him before whatever remained of his time ran out like sand through a cracked hourglass.
Dominic let out a mocking laugh—low, certain, the sound of a man who believed the world rearranged itself around his schedule. His signet ring caught the overhead light as he rolled it once against his knuckle, a single rotation that said he found my urgency amusing and slightly beneath him. "Fine, if that's what you want. But don't expect anything fancy."
"Alright."
"We'll do it at my place." He turned toward the wet bar, pouring himself two fingers of something amber without offering me a glass. The crystal decanter caught the city light and threw fractured rainbows across the dark marble. "You know my parents aren't exactly thrilled about you. And your parents? Better if they don't come."
Better if they don't come. The sentence landed in the quiet room and sat there, ticking like a device with a timer no one could see. In the world we inhabited, a Family wedding without the bride's blood present was not simplicity—it was a message. It told every capo, every associate, every old-blood wife adjusting her pearl bracelet in the front pew that the bride's people were not worth the chairs they would have occupied. That the coastal Romanos, for all their decades of loyal bookkeeping and legitimate fronts, ranked somewhere below the floral arrangements.
"Fine by me."
No matter what conditions he set, I agreed calmly. Each concession cost me nothing now, because there was nothing left in the account. His expression shifted, a flicker of confusion crossing his face the way a crack appears in plaster before anyone notices the foundation has moved. He set the glass down and turned to look at me—truly look, perhaps for the first time that evening.
"Bianca, what's wrong with you? You're not acting like yourself."
Not acting like myself? I almost laughed. The sound built somewhere behind my sternum and I held it there, a breath that could have become something wild if I had let it loose. That was probably because he didn't know me anymore. Perhaps he never had. Perhaps the version of me he recognized was only the one who flinched, who accommodated, who pressed her thumb against a ring and swallowed whatever sharp thing threatened to surface.
There was a time when I would have trusted him without question. He used to tell me that his relationship with Serena was purely proper—a bond between allied families, the Bellandi heir and the Valente silent partner's daughter, a friendship that had lasted for years and carried no heat beneath its surface. I believed him. He used to sit across from me at Sunday dinners and say the words the way a man recites a prayer he has memorized but no longer means, and I took every syllable into my chest like communion wine and let it warm me. He promised he would marry me, that I could always be myself around him, that the alliance between our families would become something real—something chosen. I believed that too.
And what did I get for believing in him? Night after night, he didn't come home, the penthouse echoing with his absence while the city hummed outside like a machine that never stopped counting. He crossed boundaries with Serena as if they didn't exist—private dinners at Family-owned restaurants where the staff knew not to mention her name to me, late arrivals smelling of her jasmine perfume beneath the tobacco and leather, text messages that made his mouth curve in ways I had stopped being able to provoke. He refused to meet my parents, using the excuse of a stripped-down ceremony to pressure me into isolation. He made fun of my taste, mocked the coastal town I came from as though the salt air and fishing boats were something to be ashamed of rather than the honest labor that had kept allied supply lines running for a generation.
Whoever I had fallen in love with—whatever I had once cherished in him, the rare gentleness, the way he had once pressed his forehead to mine in the back seat of a Town Car and whispered that I was the only thing in his life that the Family hadn't chosen for him—had vanished long ago. Now there was nothing left but an empty shell wearing a tailored suit and a signet ring that meant more to him than any vow ever would.
