I said nothing.

Lorenzo grew frantic.

"Adriana, what's wrong? Are you upset?"

"Where are you? I'll come get you right now!"

He was still so attentive, so careful, quick to read every shift in my mood, knowing exactly how to make me feel safe. The same voice that could order a man's hands broken over the phone, gone soft and pleading for me.

"I'm home. I don't feel like going out today."

Lorenzo went quiet for a beat, then kept coaxing.

"Okay. I'll come straight home to be with you."

He didn't demand to know why I'd left him waiting.

It wasn't that he loved me enough to indulge my whims.

It was only because, in that carefully staged room with its candlelight and its hired violinist, he had already offered the pledge ring to the woman he loved, and she had said yes.

I was just his backup plan, the one he kept in reserve for the night his proposal failed.

When Lorenzo walked in, I was just coming out of the bathroom.

The sight of Vittoria Marchetti behind him pulled my brows into a knot.

"Why did you bring her here?"

Was he really so eager that he had to drag her into my home to rub it in my face?

Lorenzo smoothed the lapel of his too-perfect suit with his palm, a flicker of guilt crossing his face.

"Adriana, I ran into Vittoria downstairs and only then found out she lives in our building. She heard you were back from across the water and insisted on coming up to apologize to you."

I watched him perform, my eyes cold.

"Adriana, what my mother and I did back then went too far. I'm apologizing on her behalf. Can you grant us mercy?"

My voice trembled as I asked Lorenzo,

"So you think I should forgive the two of them?"

The pain of a ruptured eardrum. The pain of being beaten with a bamboo cane until my legs went numb. The pain of my mother's keepsakes thrown into the fire pit and burned to ash.

I didn't lower myself to ask him why he'd fallen for Vittoria.

That would have made me look like I had no backbone.

Lorenzo's guilt evaporated as I stubbornly waited for his answer.

"Adriana, Vittoria was just a child back then. What did she understand about right and wrong? She's felt guilty over it for years, and she's already apologized to you. Why keep nitpicking over the past?"

The abuse, body and soul, that dragged me into a bottomless pit, he called that the past.

My refusal to grant Vittoria mercy, he called that nitpicking.

Back then it was him who'd carried me to the back-room doctor, him who'd seen what the Marchetti woman's daughter had done. No one knew better than he did how deeply I loathed the stepmother and stepsister who had married into my blood and my name.

Yet of all people, he had fallen for Vittoria and lined himself up against me.

Lorenzo reached for my hand, trying to make me clasp hands with Vittoria and bury the blade between us.

I slapped his hand away and snarled,

"Lorenzo, what gives you the right to make me forgive those two?"

Abusing me behind my father's back, poisoning him against his own heir, and in the end, after my father died, refusing even to honor him with a proper burial. Leaving the dead untended is the deepest disgrace our world knows, and they had let him rot in it.

Lorenzo looked at the back of his hand, red where I'd struck it, and his brows drew together in confusion and displeasure he couldn't hold back.

"Adriana, I'm doing this for your own good. You have no father, no mother now. Vittoria and her mother are the only half-family you've got left. Why cling to the past, why keep dwelling on it and put yourself through all this agony?"

"People have to look forward, don't they?"

Lorenzo's words were earnest, but on that calm, unruffled face was the impatience I knew so well.

The tenderness and care I used to know were nowhere left in it.

I heard my own heart, already riddled with wounds, shatter completely into dust.

The pain was so deep I could barely speak.

And in Vittoria's brimming, tearful eyes, the smugness and provocation buried beneath were exactly as they had always been. Her smile held a half-second too long, and her fingers found the pendant at her throat and twisted it.

"Adriana, it's fine if you don't grant me mercy. But I'll keep repenting, keep feeling guilty, until you accept me as the family member you have no blood ties to."

"Get out!"

I gripped the edge of the doorway hard, just to keep myself from shaking too badly.

The impatience on Lorenzo's face was plain for anyone to read.

"Adriana, why are you being so unreasonable? Everyone makes mistakes. Where's your generosity gone?"

He had watched with his own eyes as Vittoria and her mother drove me to the brink of throwing my own life away.

There was a time he would have stood between me and them, would have raised his voice in the old Castellano study until the soldiers in the hall went still.

What in the world had turned him into a man standing on the other side of the room now, shielding Vittoria like she carried his blood?

I let the pain swallow me whole, and told Lorenzo word by word:

"Unless she dies in front of me, I will never forgive her!"

A vein jumped at Lorenzo's temple, anger simmering just beneath the surface.

This was exactly how he used to look when he raged at Vittoria and her mother for me.

"Adriana Castellano! Two years across the water and you come back this vicious creature? Fine. Don't forgive her, then apologize to her. I won't have men laughing in the social clubs that my intended is a petty, poisonous shrew."

"Your mother put herself in the ground because she was weak. If she'd spared one thought for how young you were, your father would never have buried a wife and married into the Marchetti name. Don't pin all your misfortune on Vittoria and her mother. Rosa was wrong, but it wasn't a crime worth dying over. If you mean to fixate and torture yourself the way your mother did, then you deserve every nightmare you get."

He nearly spat the word nightmare through his teeth.

The disgust that flickered across his face, I caught it clearly.

So the man who once swore on his life to protect me had, in the end, grown sick of me and my nightmares.

In the end, all my misfortune and all my pain had become the blades he used to hurt me, running me through until nothing was left whole.

The man who once went red-eyed the instant he heard me cry out in the dark would never again gather me close and say:

"Adriana, I'm here. No nightmare, no monster, no demon will ever lay a finger on you."

He'd carried me out of the abyss with his own hands, and now he had shoved me back into it with those same hands.

For Vittoria's sake, he stood there and told me I deserved it.

My body trembled until I couldn't hold the doorway any longer, and I staggered backward.

Lorenzo caught me with quick hands and only then saw my knees, swollen and red.

He dropped into a crouch to look at the injury.

"How did your knees get hurt this badly?"

"Forget it. If you won't apologize, I'll apologize for you. But you can't be this rude from now on."

I tore my hand free, my face ashen, and pointed at the door.

"Get out. All of you, get out."

Lorenzo knew exactly how close to breaking I was in that moment, and reached to pull me into his arms to settle me.

But Vittoria, tears streaming down her face, bowed to me.

"Adriana, I'm leaving now. Please don't torment yourself over me anymore."

The moment the words left her mouth she bolted for the door, but she turned too fast and slammed into the frame, her whole body toppling to one side. Her fingers had been twisting that pendant at her throat, and her smile had held a half-second too long before the fall.

Lorenzo released me instantly, lunging to catch her, and the two of them went down together just past the threshold.

Even so, Vittoria's head still struck the frame, the spot flushing red at once, a thin line of blood seeping through.

Lorenzo scrambled up, swept her into his arms, and rushed for the elevator.

"Vittoria, does it hurt? I'll get you to a doctor right now."

At last the doorway fell quiet.

The hush that came after was the hush of a room after a sit-down ends badly, when everyone already knows what's coming and no one will say it aloud.

And my heart sank to the very bottom.

Ten years of knowing each other, ten years of loving each other, and in the end we'd become strangers.

I took out my phone and booked myself passage on a flight for the day of the alliance ceremony.

Seven days left. Just enough time to clear away everything from the past.

Lorenzo was right. A person has to look forward.

I pressed my thumb against the bare band of skin where my mother's ring once sat, and held it there until the trembling stopped.

From this day on, I would cut myself off completely from all the joy and all the pain of what we had been.

I threw out every piece of the alliance ceremony I'd gathered with my own hands.

This safe house had never really been mine, and now not a single trace of me remained inside its walls.

The last thing left was the slips from our covert sit-downs across the water, the ones I'd kept folded like a diary of our love.

I hesitated for half a moment, then fed them into the fire one by one.

Every slip the flames swallowed was a version of me that had loved Lorenzo.

When the burning was done, all that remained was a basin of ash and a choking column of black smoke.

It looked exactly like these ten years of love.

The next morning, the smell of cooking woke me.

"Adriana, hurry and go freshen up. I've already made breakfast."

"Eat first. I'm going to bring Vittoria her breakfast, so you don't need to come along."

"Mm."

Lorenzo's hands paused over the thermal container.

"Don't feel guilty. Vittoria doesn't blame you."

"After we eat, we'll go pick out a new stone for the pledge ring. There was a problem with the one I had cut, and it won't arrive in time for the union."

"Fine."

He liked playing his little drama, so I'd just play along.

Maybe it was because I seemed so cold, but Lorenzo, his face heavy with guilt, brought over the kit to clean the cut on my knee.

"Adriana, we've loved each other for years. Everything I do is for your sake. I don't want you standing at our union without a single soul of your blood beside you."

"You said you couldn't find anyone to stand for you, didn't you? I've already taken it on myself to have Vittoria stand at your side for the ceremony."

"Fine."

Lorenzo said it carefully, and when he saw how readily I agreed, his eyes filled with disbelief.

Then he took my hand and pressed a warm, wet kiss to it.

After he delivered Vittoria's breakfast, he didn't come back.

I was scrubbing my palm raw when he called.

"Adriana, when you're done eating, come straight down to the garage. I'm waiting in the car."

When I got to the garage, I reached for the passenger door out of habit, only to find Vittoria already sitting there.

Without a word, I got into the back seat.

Lorenzo glanced at me a few times, pleased that I knew my place.

"Adriana, Vittoria has an eye for stones. With her here, she's sure to help you choose one you'll love."

I nodded and closed my eyes, pretending to doze.

When I opened them by chance, I saw Lorenzo give Vittoria's cheek a gentle pinch.

In the rearview mirror, our eyes met, and he smoothed the lapel of his too-perfect suit with his palm before he spoke.

"Vittoria had something on her face. I was just wiping it off for her."

I closed my eyes again and kept them shut until we got out of the car.

The three of us walked into the jeweler's, a quiet front near the heart of Castellano territory, and the clerk, all warmth, addressed Vittoria, who was pressed close to Lorenzo.

"What would you like to buy your sweetheart today, sir?"

Vittoria and Lorenzo both flushed at the same time.

Lorenzo pulled me over by the arm.

"What are you standing so far away for? Come pick out a stone!"

The clerk turned bright red with embarrassment and hurriedly brought out the diamonds for me to choose from.

But Vittoria took the lead, inspecting them and offering her opinions.

"This one isn't big enough."

"This one's poor quality."

…

Set against the stone already on her own hand, not a single one met her standards.

The clerk glanced at me awkwardly, hesitating to speak.

Vittoria pretended not to notice, and in the end picked out a rather ordinary one.

"Adriana, just take this one. It'll do for the ceremony. Later I'll design you something with my own hands, prettier than mine."

The clerk awkwardly complimented her on her good eye.

But Vittoria, not without smugness, thrust her hand in front of my face. Her fingers found the pendant at her throat and twisted it.

"Of course it's prettier. My intended designed and had this one made just for me."

Beside us, Lorenzo just stood there quietly watching her show off to me, neither stopping her nor looking the least bit guilty, the smile at the corner of his mouth all but melting into the spring air.

"Then we'll buy the one Vittoria picked!"

He didn't even bother letting me try it on. Lorenzo had already paid.

He took out the stone and slid it onto my finger, his face blank.

No bended knee, no roses, no words spoken over a pledge.

This time the ring wasn't big. I had to force it on.

I knew Vittoria had done it on purpose.

She had an eye for stones. She could gauge a size precisely at a glance. There was no way she'd make such a glaring mistake.

I couldn't be bothered to call her out. I just pulled the ring straight off.