"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.

What on earth had driven him to oppose me and start defending Elara?

I let the pain overwhelm me and told Ansel, word by word.

"Unless she dies before my eyes, I will never forgive her!"

Ansel's forehead was throbbing and he was visibly about to lose his temper. The muscle in his jaw flexed. His hand dropped to his side, fingers curling once, twice. The hallway seemed to narrow around us.

This was the same look he had when he used to rage at Elara and her mother on my behalf.

"Serafina! How did you become so bitter after just two years in Palermo? If you can't find it in yourself to forgive her, then at least apologize to Elara! I can't stand the thought of people in every family from here to the old country mocking my blood-promised as a spiteful, resentful woman!"

"Your mother's decision to end her life was her own weakness. If she had considered your youth, your father wouldn't have had to remarry! Don't blame all your misfortune on Elara and her mother. Vittoria made mistakes, but she didn't deserve to die! If you, like your mother, are going to stubbornly wallow in your misery, then it's no wonder you're plagued by nightmares!"

He practically spat out the word nightmares through gritted teeth.

The revulsion that flashed across his face was clear to me.

So, the person who swore to protect me for life was now clearly fed up with being haunted by my nightmares. The man who controlled half the waterfront, who had soldiers kiss his ring and call him Boss, could not stomach the sound of me screaming in my sleep.

In the end, all my misfortune and pain had become the sword he used to wound me, leaving me scarred and broken once more.

Once, the man who would feel heartache and tear up at the mention of my nightmares no longer held me close and promised.

"Serafina, as long as I'm here, no nightmare or monster can hurt you!"

He had once used his love and care to pull me out of the abyss, but now he was the one who had shoved me back in.

For Elara's sake, he said I deserved it!

Trembling uncontrollably, I could no longer cling to the hallway wall and staggered backward. Somewhere deeper in the compound, a door closed. The silence that followed was the kind that fills a room after a gunshot.

Ansel quickly steadied me, only to see that my knee was swollen and bruised.

He immediately crouched down to inspect the injury.

"How did you hurt your knee so badly?"

"Forget it. If you won't apologize, I'll do it for you, but you mustn't be so disrespectful in the future."

I wrenched my hand away with all my strength, my face ashen as I pointed toward the door.

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

Ansel, recognizing my vulnerability, tried to soothe me with a comforting embrace.

But Elara, tears streaming down her face, bowed deeply.

"Serafina, I'm leaving now. Please, don't torment yourself over this."

Her head tilted slightly to the right, her expression softening into something that looked almost like compassion. Then she turned to leave, spinning too quickly, crashing into the doorframe and falling sideways.

Ansel instantly released me and rushed to catch her. They both tumbled out into the hallway together.

Despite everything, Elara's head still struck the doorframe, instantly turning red with a hint of blood seeping out.

Ansel scrambled to his feet, cradling her as he rushed towards the elevator.

"Elara, does it hurt? I'm taking you to see a doctor right now!"

The doorway finally fell silent.

My heart sank to the depths.

After ten years of knowing each other and ten years of love, a decade of blood promise, we had reached this point of estrangement. The compound settled around me, indifferent. The hallway light hummed. I stood alone in the doorway of a home built with my father's treasury, wearing the silence like a shroud.

I took out my phone and booked a flight for the day of the Blood-Bound Union.