“You don’t deserve the Moretti name,” my mother, Isabella, had snarled, her eyes glinting like poison in the firelight. “If you can’t support your sister, Chloe, the heir, then get out.”
I should have seen it coming. In the Moretti family, family is everything—unless you’re me. Alessia Moretti, the disappointment.
While my beloved sister, Chloe, got the love, the title, and even the loyalty of my fiancé, Nico, I got an engagement party with no guests. Not even the man who’d sworn he’d always be mine showed up.
That night, I ran.
Now, I’ve carved out a new life for myself with an Eastern European crew, where bullets settle every argument.
I learned to count cash, to kill, and to make men twice my size back down with a single glare.
But when a message arrives that Chloe is on the verge of death, the family demands my return.
“Come home, Alessia,” my father, Lorenzo, the Don of the Moretti family, had crackled over the phone. “Your sister needs you.”
I almost laughed. After everything they’d done?
But this time, I wasn’t the weak principessa they’d cast aside.
————————
1
Today was supposed to be my engagement party with Nico.
Nico Gallo was going to announce our betrothal in front of the entire Moretti family. We’d been together since we were children. Everyone said we were a perfect match.
I smoothed the skirt of my couture gown for the hundredth time and glanced toward the entrance again.
Still no one.
No one had shown up—not my parents, not my brother, Marco, not even Nico.
Just me, standing alone in the crushing silence.
I pulled out my phone and checked it for the fifth time. No new messages. My thumb hovered over Nico’s name for a moment before I dialed his number again.
The phone rang twice, then went to voicemail.
I stared at the screen, not sure whether to laugh or smash it against the marble wall.
Then, a notification lit up the screen—a banner flashing across a live feed: “WELCOME HOME, CHLOE MORETTI.” Beneath it, the video played automatically.
They were all there. My family. All of them.
They were gathered on the tarmac of our private airport, where the family’s jet had just landed. My father was beaming, my mother was weeping with joy, and Marco was lifting Chloe into the air and spinning her around. Even Nico was there, standing just behind him.
Chloe’s blonde hair gleamed under the camera flashes.
Her arm was draped intimately over Nico’s shoulder, as if that was where she was always meant to be.
She always was.
A fire burned in my chest.
A moment later, my phone vibrated again. It was Nico.
“Don’t make a scene, Alessia,” he said, his voice clipped and dismissive. “We’ll have the party later. Chloe just got back from her ‘training’ in Sicily—”
He hung up.
I stared at the screen, my nails digging into my palms.
The ballroom around me remained silent, the only sound the soft hiss of bubbles rising in the champagne tower.
I looked down at the gown I had spent months designing. It now pooled around me like a shed skin, something I didn't deserve to wear.
I stripped it off and left it pooled on the floor.
The Moretti estate was alive with celebration when I returned.
Someone was singing old ballads by the bonfire in the courtyard.
The scent of Chloe’s favorite cigars wafted from the main hall—Cuban leaves and leather, strong enough to overpower everything else. Laughter spilled from the open doors.
A grand, thoughtless celebration.
No one noticed me slip in through a side door.
I went straight to my studio and sat by my easel, staring at the scribbled entries in my sketchbook. A simple list. Every time I was forgotten, overlooked, passed over.
I added a new entry at the bottom:
Engagement party—no one showed up.
