Beneath the photos, Chiara's message glowed on the screen:
"Everyone, I am so sorry for any trouble, especially to Neve and Dominic. I didn't mean to ruin the most important day of your lives. Dominic, thank you for being the best Don I could ever ask for. You always make me feel like the most important person in the world."
The reactions piled up beneath her words. Hearts. Prayers. Adoring replies from soldiers and household staff alike. And then the bolder ones, the ones that twisted the knife.
"You two look so good together."
"If fate had willed it differently, you would make such a beautiful pair."
"God works in mysterious ways."
Chiara, Chiara. It was always Chiara that everyone favored. Chiara, the saint. Chiara, the angel. Chiara, the poor little orphan who could do no wrong.
Tears spilled down my cheeks before I could stop them. They fell onto the screen of my phone, blurring Chiara's smiling face into a watercolor smear. I wiped them away with the back of my hand, but more followed, hot and relentless.
Five years. I had waited five years, and all I had to show for it was the slow, sickening realization that I had been making a mistake this entire time. Loving Dominic Valente had cost me my pride, my peace, and very nearly my sanity.
It was time to correct it. It was time to choose myself.
I opened a new message to Dominic. My fingers were steady now. The tears still fell, but something inside me had gone very quiet, very cold, the way a lake freezes over in the dead of winter.
"Call me."
I sent it. I knew he would not call unless I asked. Even then, there was no guarantee.
I sat on the edge of the bed and waited. The clock on the nightstand ticked. Outside the window, the late morning sun cast long shadows across the compound's manicured grounds, where the chapel still stood draped in ivory silk and red roses that no one would see.
Five minutes. Ten. Twenty. Thirty.
Nothing. No call. No reply. Not even the three pulsing dots that would have told me he was typing.
I was about to stand, to do what I did not yet know, when the phone finally rang. His name filled the screen. I answered.
"Anything happen, Neve?" Dominic's voice was clipped. Distracted. Irritated, as though I had pulled him away from something far more important.
"Is that all you have to say?"
The hurt in my own voice surprised me. I had meant to sound cold, controlled, the way the women in this world were supposed to sound. Instead, I sounded exactly like what I was: a woman whose heart was breaking.
"Sorry." He exhaled. The sound was heavy, tired, the exhale of a man carrying the weight of an empire on his shoulders. "I can't think clearly right now. Chiara got hurt. I needed to make sure she'd be okay."
"Right. As expected from Don Valente."
A beat of silence. When he spoke again, his voice had an edge.
"What's that supposed to mean?"
I closed my eyes. The tears had stopped. The cold, frozen thing inside me held firm.
"It means we're over. The betrothal is severed."
I ended the call before he could draw another breath.
After Neve hung up on me, the room felt like a sealed coffin. She had never done that before. Not once in all the years I had known her, in all the years she had been promised to me. The silence that followed the dead line was louder than any gunshot I had ever heard.
I set the phone down on the mahogany desk, slow and deliberate, the way a man sets down a weapon he is trying not to use. Then I leaned back in the leather chair and stared at the ceiling of my study, at the hand-painted fresco my grandfather had commissioned decades ago. Angels and serpents, tangled together. He'd always said that was the truest portrait of our family ever made.
Her words had cut deeper than I wanted to admit. After everything we had been through, after all the years bound together by our fathers' blood oath, how had it come to this?
But what else could I have done? Chiara had been hurt during combat training, and as the Don, I had an obligation. The Family always came first. That was the weight I accepted the day they placed my father's signet ring on my finger and every man in the room kissed my hand. I thought Neve, of all people, understood this. She was my betrothed. She was supposed to stand beside me as Donna of this Family.
