The curtain next to me opened, and Serena stepped out wearing an off-the-shoulder gown with a low-cut back. Her dress sparkled twice as much as mine. The associate went still, and even one of the soldiers near the entrance shifted his gaze before catching himself.

And Dominic—he was speechless, unable to tear his eyes away from her, his gaze growing almost misty. Serena, sensing his reaction, smirked and put on an act. "What's the matter? Did I surprise you? Tell me, who looks better—me or your promised bride?"

Only then did Dominic's eyes drift back to me, as if remembering my existence, and he blurted without hesitation, "You look better."

Serena playfully slapped his arm, scolding him. "Idiot! You're supposed to compliment your bride at a time like this. You really have no charm, do you?"

Realizing his blunder, Dominic looked at me, a bit embarrassed. I just lowered my gaze, focused on sending a picture of the dress to my parents. My father would be in the old armchair by the window of the coastal house, my mother smoothing the bedsheet flat beside him while they waited for news of the fitting—news that was supposed to be joyful. Once I got their response, I didn't bother saying anything more and turned back to the fitting room to change.

When I came out, Serena was pulling Dominic into selfies, giggling as he posed in an absurd tuxedo with a dramatic tailcoat. He'd always been averse to dressing up. Even during our trips through the shops along the Bellandi waterfront, he'd never tried on anything, not even once. But now, here he was, fully dressed up, laughing like a carefree teenager while a daughter of a silent partner leaned into his shoulder as though the betrothal ring on my finger meant nothing at all.

Four years together, and he wouldn't even try on clothes for me. So that was it—his so-called rules applied only to me. With that realization, I grabbed my purse, ready to leave. Just as I reached the door, Dominic called after me.

"Bianca, I don't have all day for dress-fitting. We can't go to check on another shop."

"I'm fine with the last one," I replied quickly.

He frowned. "I wasn't saying you can't try another one. Go look around. Take your time."

I shook my head. "No need. I'm good with this one."

We wouldn't be having a real wedding, anyway. Why waste any more time?

He tossed his tie at me the way a man discards something that has already served its purpose, the silk landing across my forearm with a whisper of expensive fabric against skin. His eyes held nothing. Not anger, not frustration—just the flat, practiced coldness of someone who had learned early that indifference was its own kind of weapon.

"You're still mad because I didn't meet your parents?" The words came out clipped, rehearsed, as though he had been turning them over in his mouth the entire drive back from the atelier. "You've been giving me attitude ever since. Seriously, is it necessary?"

The penthouse study where he stood smelled of cedar humidor wood and the faint residue of whatever bourbon he and his father's capos had been drinking before we left. Beyond the floor-to-ceiling windows, the city's skyline glittered—Bellandi territory from the waterfront to the financial district, every building either owned, leveraged, or owed. Dominic moved through that view the way he moved through every room: as if the walls existed only because he permitted them to stand.

"You should be grateful I'm here today at all." He unfastened one cufflink, then the other, setting them on the obsidian console with two deliberate clicks. "What more do you want?"

I tried to keep my expression neutral. Tried to stop my brows from furrowing, to arrange my face into something polite and blank—the mask every woman raised in the orbit of Family power learns to wear before she learns to read. I wanted to tell him it was fine. That none of this mattered anymore. But then I thought about my father, about the soft rasp of his breathing when I had called the coastal house that morning, about the way Theo Romano's voice had cracked for half a syllable before she smoothed it flat again and told me everything was under control. About the little time he had left.

My thumb found the inside of my ring finger—the place where the betrothal band sat, the blood-bound token I had not yet removed. I pressed against it once, hard enough to feel the metal bite, and took a steadying breath.

"Don't worry about meeting my family." My voice sounded foreign to me, too level, too still, like the surface of water just before something breaks through from underneath. "Let's move the ceremony up. How about three days from now?"

If we did that, I could leave as soon as possible. Sign what needed signing, stand where the Family protocol required me to stand, and then drive south to the coastal enclave where my father was folding his handkerchief into perfect squares so I would not see the tremor in his hands. I could be with him before whatever remained of his time ran out like sand through a cracked hourglass.

Dominic let out a mocking laugh—low, certain, the sound of a man who believed the world rearranged itself around his schedule. His signet ring caught the overhead light as he rolled it once against his knuckle, a single rotation that said he found my urgency amusing and slightly beneath him. "Fine, if that's what you want. But don't expect anything fancy."

"Alright."

"We'll do it at my place." He turned toward the wet bar, pouring himself two fingers of something amber without offering me a glass. The crystal decanter caught the city light and threw fractured rainbows across the dark marble. "You know my parents aren't exactly thrilled about you. And your parents? Better if they don't come."

Better if they don't come. The sentence landed in the quiet room and sat there, ticking like a device with a timer no one could see. In the world we inhabited, a Family wedding without the bride's blood present was not simplicity—it was a message. It told every capo, every associate, every old-blood wife adjusting her pearl bracelet in the front pew that the bride's people were not worth the chairs they would have occupied. That the coastal Romanos, for all their decades of loyal bookkeeping and legitimate fronts, ranked somewhere below the floral arrangements.

"Fine by me."

No matter what conditions he set, I agreed calmly. Each concession cost me nothing now, because there was nothing left in the account. His expression shifted, a flicker of confusion crossing his face the way a crack appears in plaster before anyone notices the foundation has moved. He set the glass down and turned to look at me—truly look, perhaps for the first time that evening.

"Bianca, what's wrong with you? You're not acting like yourself."

Not acting like myself? I almost laughed. The sound built somewhere behind my sternum and I held it there, a breath that could have become something wild if I had let it loose. That was probably because he didn't know me anymore. Perhaps he never had. Perhaps the version of me he recognized was only the one who flinched, who accommodated, who pressed her thumb against a ring and swallowed whatever sharp thing threatened to surface.

There was a time when I would have trusted him without question. He used to tell me that his relationship with Serena was purely proper—a bond between allied families, the Bellandi heir and the Valente silent partner's daughter, a friendship that had lasted for years and carried no heat beneath its surface. I believed him. He used to sit across from me at Sunday dinners and say the words the way a man recites a prayer he has memorized but no longer means, and I took every syllable into my chest like communion wine and let it warm me. He promised he would marry me, that I could always be myself around him, that the alliance between our families would become something real—something chosen. I believed that too.

And what did I get for believing in him? Night after night, he didn't come home, the penthouse echoing with his absence while the city hummed outside like a machine that never stopped counting. He crossed boundaries with Serena as if they didn't exist—private dinners at Family-owned restaurants where the staff knew not to mention her name to me, late arrivals smelling of her jasmine perfume beneath the tobacco and leather, text messages that made his mouth curve in ways I had stopped being able to provoke. He refused to meet my parents, using the excuse of a stripped-down ceremony to pressure me into isolation. He made fun of my taste, mocked the coastal town I came from as though the salt air and fishing boats were something to be ashamed of rather than the honest labor that had kept allied supply lines running for a generation.

Whoever I had fallen in love with—whatever I had once cherished in him, the rare gentleness, the way he had once pressed his forehead to mine in the back seat of a Town Car and whispered that I was the only thing in his life that the Family hadn't chosen for him—had vanished long ago. Now there was nothing left but an empty shell wearing a tailored suit and a signet ring that meant more to him than any vow ever would.

I was about to respond when Serena spoke up, her voice cutting through the tension like a blade drawn slowly enough to admire. She had been leaning against the doorframe of the study—how long, I couldn't say—one crimson nail tapping three quiet beats against the rim of the wine glass she carried. Tap. Tap. Tap. The smile that followed was porcelain-bright and surgically precise.

"Don't worry, Dominic." Her tone was warm silk over cold wire. "She's probably just got cold feet. This is when you're supposed to comfort her. You don't want her to change her mind, would you? What if she backed out—wouldn't that drive you nuts?"

The room tightened. I could feel it in the air the way you feel a storm shifting pressure before the first crack of lightning—the bodyguard stationed in the hallway adjusted his weight from one foot to the other, leather creaking, a sound so small it should have been inaudible but wasn't.

"Back out?" Dominic's expression hardened, the brief flicker of concern snuffed like a candle flame pinched between two fingers. His tone dripped with disdain, each word placed with the casual cruelty of someone who had never been told no by anyone whose opinion he valued. "She's almost thirty. Who else would want to marry a leftover woman like her if not me?"

The words landed in the silence of the study and did not echo. They simply sat there, occupying space, filling the room with the particular stillness that follows a blow delivered so openly that even the furniture seems to hold its breath. Beyond the windows, the city lights pulsed on, indifferent, a glittering empire that belonged to his bloodline and not mine.

Serena feigned surprise, playfully slapping his arm with the kind of easy, practiced intimacy that comes only from years of touch no one was supposed to see. "Hey! I'm almost thirty too. Do you call me leftover?"

Dominic's face softened instantly—not gradually, not with effort, but with the automatic ease of a man returning to the only frequency he had ever actually wanted to tune into. He tried to backtrack, his voice dropping into something low and conspiratorial, a register I had once believed was reserved for me alone. "Of course not. You're different. Guys are lining up for you. But Bianca? She's not exactly in demand. She should be grateful to have me. While you, you get to pick and choose. But if you don't take any of them there's still…"

He trailed off, leaving the suggestion hanging in the air like smoke from a spent round. The unfinished sentence curled between them, and Serena's mouth curved into something that was not quite a smile and not quite a promise but occupied the exact territory between both. Her crimson nail had gone still against the glass. She didn't need to tap it again. She had already won whatever silent game she was playing, and everyone in the room knew it except possibly the man who had just handed her the victory.

I tightened my grip on my purse. The leather creaked softly beneath my fingers, and I waited for the familiar sensation—the hot wire of heartbreak threading through my ribs, the sting that had once been so reliable it felt like a companion. It barely came. A ghost of it, perhaps. A shadow passing over ground that had already been scorched bare. For once, my heart didn't ache. I had finally learned to let go, to detach myself from the pain. The realization did not feel like freedom. It felt like standing in a room that had already been emptied.

"You're right." My voice was steady, shaped into something almost pleasant. "I should thank you for your generosity."

My smile felt distant, as if it were someone else's alliance ceremony we were talking about, not mine. As if the bride in question were a woman I had read about in the society pages—some unfortunate daughter traded between bloodlines for a stability she would never personally enjoy. Dominic stared at me, stunned, the glass halfway to his mouth, still watching as I turned and walked out of the study. My heels clicked against the obsidian floor in a rhythm that sounded, for the first time, like something final.

When I got home to the penthouse bedroom that had never felt like mine, I began packing my things. I moved quietly, methodically, folding garments into boxes I had asked a trusted courier to bring—a service that answered to neither Bellandi nor Valente, just a man who moved parcels and asked no questions. Four years of my life with Dominic, four years of Sunday dinners with capos who looked through me and holidays where Theo Bellandi straightened her pearl bracelet before explaining, with exquisite courtesy, why the seating arrangement required me to be farther from the head of the table than Serena. All of it barely filled two boxes. The smallness of it was its own kind of violence.

When Dominic returned later, stepping through the front door with the loose-limbed ease of a man who had spent the intervening hours doing something he considered more interesting than his promised bride, he arrived just as the courier was leaving with my things. The man passed him in the hallway, a plain cardboard box under each arm, and Dominic's eyes tracked the movement with sudden, almost animal alertness. He looked alarmed, as if panicked by what he saw—not because he loved me, but because unexplained movement of property in a Bellandi household carried implications that even an heir could not afford to ignore.

"What's with the boxes? Why'd you call a courier service?"

My reply came easily, as casual as could be. "Just sending some gifts to my parents." A peace offering for the coastal house. Tribute, in the language he understood, though not the kind he was imagining. He would picture wine, perhaps, or one of the decorative items his mother had deemed too provincial for the penthouse. He would not picture the last four years of my life sealed in cardboard and carried out the door by a stranger.

He opened his mouth to ask more—I could see the question forming, the faint crease between his brows that meant his instinct was pulling against his indifference—but right then, his phone lit up with a notification on the console where his cufflinks still sat. A game invite. The screen glowed against the dark marble, and instantly, his attention shifted. The crease smoothed. The question died. Whatever flicker of suspicion had surfaced sank back beneath the water without a ripple.

I knew it was from Serena. She had posted on her feeds just minutes earlier, hinting at a wild night of singlehood for Dominic before he "settled down"—the kind of public digital whisper that Omertà could not quite reach, visible to anyone with eyes and a screen. She was planning two straight days of gaming with him to celebrate his "last days of freedom," and the invitation glowing on his phone was her way of pulling the leash she had never officially been given but had always held.

He picked up the phone without looking at me. His thumb moved across the screen, and something in his face shifted into the private, unguarded expression I had spent four years trying to earn and never once received. The study door closed behind him with a soft click that sounded, in the emptied hallway, like the turning of a lock.