After two years of exile in Palermo under Don Ferrante's protection, I cut my time short, eager to return to Clearmont Harbor, ready to be wed.

As I was preparing our future home in the compound, I discovered thousands of plane tickets carefully preserved by my blood-promised of ten years, Ansel Montecaro.

Every month, he had been traveling to Palermo at least once, and it wasn't to see me.

Even though I was only a hundred kilometers from wherever he landed.

I arrived early at the place where he had planned to offer me the blood-bound ring, only to see him on one knee, offering it to someone else.

"Elara Corsetti, will you marry me? As soon as you say yes, I'll switch brides immediately!"

His gaze was filled with anticipation and I couldn't take another step forward.

Since I was not the one he wanted to bind his bloodline to, I might as well let them have this union.

But after I ran away, he crossed oceans and territories, searching the world for me!

——

The site was decorated with roses, bathed in the warm glow of soft yellow lights. Romantic and intimate.

Ansel, kneeling on one knee, was the exact image of the proposal I had dreamed of countless times.

But the person standing in front of him wasn't me.

"Elara, will you marry me?"

Elara covered her mouth with one hand, trembling as she took the roses with the other.

A dazzling ring was slipped onto her finger. Not a Valente heirloom. Something new. Something bought with my father's treasury.

The two embraced tightly, kissing passionately. Their intimate whispers carried to my ears by the wind.

I found myself unconsciously rubbing the matching ring Ansel had sent me from across the sea.

I never told him the ring was too big.

To keep it from slipping off, I had wrapped half a loop of red thread around it to make it fit.

Perhaps after all this time, when I tugged at the thread, it came undone.

The ring, freed from the thread that once held it in place, slipped off my finger in an instant and rolled into a distant drain.

Just like Ansel, who, after two years abroad, was no longer tied down by me.

An ill-fitting ring doesn't need to be retrieved, just as a man who didn't love me didn't need to be held onto.

"Ansel, I hope your union goes as planned."

"Why? The only one I want to marry is you!"

"Because... I plan to crash your wedding! That way, it will prove you're truly in love with me!"

My steps faltered.

Because I was curious just how far Ansel would go to hurt me for Elara's sake.

"You little rascal, only you could come up with such a crazy idea!"

"Then I better prepare an extra pair of running shoes, so I can run faster when we elope!"

"Are you really willing to do this to Serafina?"

"Marrying her to keep my promise is already the most I can do. If she can't keep her husband from being whisked away at the altar, she can't blame me, can she?"

Their joyful laughter pierced my heart like a dagger.

I turned around, leaning against a tree, my legs so weak I couldn't move an inch. Somewhere behind me, a car door opened and closed. One of Ansel's soldiers, probably. Standing watch over a moment that was never meant for my eyes.

Fearing that my sobs might alert them, I covered my mouth tightly and walked away.

But halfway home, my legs gave out and I fell hard onto the ground.

I returned home, battered and broken, and dialed Don Ferrante's number on the clean line.

"Don Ferrante, I've decided to join that operation you mentioned."

The old Don was pleased, but also puzzled.

"Didn't you say you were planning to settle down in Clearmont Harbor after the union? Did your husband agree to a long-distance arrangement? Being apart after a blood-bound union can be really challenging. Are you sure you don't want to rethink this decision?"

I was wiping the scrapes on my bruised knees, each touch sending a sharp pang through me.

"The union is off. From now on, I'll be your right hand, fully devoted to the work."

Don Ferrante, who treats me like his own daughter, immediately sensed something was wrong. I could hear the faint sound of him removing his reading glasses, the soft drag of cloth against a lens.

"Today's the deadline. I'll put your name on the list. Come back to Palermo soon so we can get started. Keeping busy will help take your mind off things."

"Don't think I'm meddling, but over the past two years, it's always been you looking after Clearmont Harbor, while he's never bothered to come to Palermo. That's a clear sign he doesn't love you as much as you believed."

"Once you've made up your mind to move on, don't linger in the past."

If it weren't for that thick stack of flight tickets, I could have confidently dismissed Don Ferrante's warning that "he doesn't love you as much."

No wonder he was always out of touch at the end of each month.

Turns out, he was busy traveling thousands of miles to be with Elara.

For two whole years, I felt like a fool, desperately racing to master the cipher work and prove my value to the Ferrante operation, just to carve out time to fly back and see him.

Those brief meetings after long flights were once the happiest moments of my life.

Yet, my cross-ocean love, in the face of that stack of tickets Ansel cherished, had become a joke.

As I made my way to the proposal site, I tried to convince myself that maybe he had traveled to Palermo for business. A sit-down with an allied family. A supply-chain problem. Anything.

When I saw him offering the blood-bound ring to Elara, the very woman who had once tormented me, it became clear why he hadn't visited me despite the mere hundred kilometers between us.

Elara had barred him from seeing me, leaving him to send word through intermediaries, stories of longing and sorrow to explain his absence.

He knew exactly how much Elara and I were sworn enemies.

After my father remarried, Vittoria Corsetti and her daughter became the most persistent shadows of my childhood. The beatings behind closed doors. The isolation. The burning of my mother's letters. All of it hidden behind the Valente name while the name still meant something.

I had imagined countless scenarios over the past two years of our separation.

Ansel might fall for someone else, I thought, but I never expected him to fall for Elara. I never anticipated that he would go so far as to agree to let me be humiliated at the union ceremony just to please her.

I submerged myself in a warm bath, the heat gradually stopping my trembling. The water stilled around me. My breathing slowed until it was almost nothing, a long, measured silence, the kind that comes when a decision has already been made and the body is simply catching up.

Then, Ansel's call came in.

"Serafina, where are you? I'm already at the seaside park!"

I stayed silent.

Ansel grew anxious.

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

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

He remained as attentive and careful as ever, able to pick up on my emotions and offer comfort.

"I'm at the estate. I don't want to go to the park today."

There was a brief pause before Ansel spoke again, still trying to reassure me.

"Alright, I'll come home right away to be with you."

He didn't question why I had canceled.

It wasn't that his love for me was so deep that he could overlook my whims. It was simply that he had successfully offered the blood-bound ring to Elara in that carefully orchestrated setting. I was merely his backup plan for when the proposal didn't go as expected.

As Ansel walked in, I was just coming out of the bathroom. Seeing Elara behind him, I couldn't help but frown.

"Why did you bring her here?" I asked warningly.

Was he really so eager to rub my face in it?

Ansel, looking a bit guilty, rubbed his nose. "Serafina, I ran into Elara downstairs and found out she lives on the next block over. She heard you were back in Clearmont Harbor and insisted on coming up to apologize…"

I watched him coldly, unimpressed by his performance. The compound was quiet around us, the kind of silence that settles in a house where the wrong word can change everything. One of Ansel's men stood just outside the door, close enough to hear, pretending not to.

"Serafina, my mother and I were in the wrong back then. I'm apologizing on her behalf. Can you find it in yourself to forgive us?"

Elara's head tilted slightly to the right, her smile softening into something that looked, to anyone who didn't know better, like genuine remorse.

I turned to Ansel, my voice shaking.

"So, you think I should forgive them, both mother and daughter?"

The pain of a ruptured eardrum. The numbness from bamboo whips. The torment of seeing my mother's belongings reduced to ashes, her correspondence burned, the backup cipher keys and personal letters gone forever because Vittoria Corsetti decided the first wife's memory had no place in her house.

I didn't ask why he fell for Elara. It would have made me seem too weak.

As I stubbornly waited for his response, Ansel's guilt seemed to dissolve into the air. His fingers drifted to the base of his left ring finger, brushing the bare skin there, and then he spoke.

"Serafina, Elara was just a kid back then. She didn't understand right from wrong. She's been remorseful for years and has already apologized to you. Why hold onto the past so tightly?"

The physical and emotional abuse that threw me into an endless abyss. That's what he called the past.

Refusing to forgive Elara wasn't about being petty. He was the one who took me to the hospital back then. He knows better than anyone how deeply I loathe my stepmother and her daughter, what Vittoria and Elara did to me in the years behind my father's back. Yet he chose to fall in love with Elara and align himself against me.

When Ansel reached out to take my hand, trying to broker peace with Elara, I slapped his hand away.

"Ansel, what gives you the right to ask me to forgive them?" I asked sharply.

Behind my father's back, they abused me, tricked him into despising me. And after Don Valente's passing, they didn't even bother with the funeral rites. In this world, that alone was an act of dishonor that should have severed every tie between our families permanently.

Ansel looked at the back of his hand, now red from where I had slapped him, and frowned in confusion and discontent.

"Serafina, I'm trying to help you. You're without parents now, and Vittoria and Elara are the only family you have left. Why hold on to the past and continue to suffer?"

"You need to move forward, don't you?"

Ansel's words were meant to be comforting, but the impatience I knew so well was already showing through his otherwise calm and composed face. But there was no longer the familiar tenderness and care in his voice. He spoke the way he spoke to soldiers who had disappointed him. Measured. Already finished with the conversation before it ended.

I could feel my heart, already battered and broken, shatter into dust. The pain was so intense it left me almost speechless.

Elara's eyes, brimming with feigned sorrow, held a glint of the same smugness and provocation as before. She stood in my doorway like she belonged there, in the compound that had been built on my father's treasury, wearing a ring from the man who had been promised to me.

"Serafina, it's alright if you can't forgive me. I'll keep repenting and feeling guilty until you accept me as your family."

"Get out."

I gripped the hallway wall to keep myself from shaking too violently.

Ansel's impatience was unmistakable.

"Serafina, why are you being so unreasonable? Nobody is perfect. Where has your tolerance gone?" He raised his tone, the way a man accustomed to obedience raises it when he doesn't receive any.

He had witnessed me being driven to the brink of suicide by Elara and her mother.

Once, he had been willing to argue with them on my behalf, even to the point of furious outbursts. He had stood in front of me like a wall between me and them, his voice shaking the windows of the Corsetti parlor.