He Didn't Know Whose Ring I Was Wearing

At the betrothal sit-down, Lorenzo learned that the girl he'd once called his own was being bound in an alliance-marriage to the half-blind Don everyone had written off as finished.

Without hesitation, he tore across the city and swore a private union with her before a bought priest that very night.

By that afternoon, the two had slipped out of every family's territory, hiding away abroad like lovers who answered to no one.

Their childhood romance, so touching and profound, ran wild through the whisper-network of the families, dressed up as devotion by every bought mouthpiece in the city.

Meanwhile, I became the stain on the alliance, the woman who had come between two hearts, and the dishonor was heaped on me so thick I could not step past my own door.

Then that half-blind Don, the one Lorenzo had cut down to run off with his promised bride, showed up at my threshold.

"I've always been one to repay a grievance in full. Since that Gallo brat took what was pledged to me, I'll simply take what was his. A debt paid in kind, Miss Russo. Would you swear a union with me?"

I looked down at the whispers making their rounds, their kiss beneath the northern lights passed hand to hand through every family in the city.

Without hesitation, I placed my name in the hands of the man before me.

——

Even with the union sealed and witnessed, I still couldn't believe I'd bound myself in a single stroke.

And the man I'd bound myself to wasn't Lorenzo, my promised one of eight years, but Dante, a man I'd crossed paths with only a handful of times, a man who had once stood on the other side of the table.

"Once the oath is sworn, there's no walking it back. When do you come to the house?"

Understanding what he meant, my face instantly heated. Lucky for me, his eyes couldn't catch it.

"Half a month. I still need time to pack."

Dante nodded. "That works. Half a month is enough to prepare the blood-bound union. Take whatever pleases you."

He pressed a black card into my hand, the flush climbing his ears betraying the eagerness he tried to bury. His thumb moved once, slow, along the edge of the card before he let it go.

I pressed my lips into a smile and thought it wasn't a bad beginning.

Ten days into their hiding-out, Lorenzo finally remembered I existed and called.

"My flight lands at three. Come get me."

No explanation. No acknowledgment. As though nothing had ever happened between us.

Yet for ten days the whisper-network had run thick with word of him and Vittoria off in their sanctuary abroad, every tender moment paraded out for the families to sigh over.

I'd seen them tangled together in the steaming waters, their kiss beneath the aurora, their vows of forever traded on the black sand beach.

He had taken another woman first to every place I'd once dreamed of for myself.

"I'm busy. Get a car."

Once, no matter the hour or the place, one word from him and I'd have dropped everything and gone to him without a breath of hesitation.

Lorenzo went quiet a moment, then let out a cold snort and cut the line.

By then I thought this was the silent breaking between two grown people. But when I came home that evening, I found him seated on my sofa in a bathrobe, at ease, as though the walls belonged to him.

Seeing me, he lifted his gaze, careless, as if nothing had passed at all.

"Place looks tidy without me in it."

Over the past days I'd thrown out plenty that carried his name.

The photograph of the two of us that once hung in the front room was gone, yet he didn't seem to notice.

He gestured at a paper bag on the table.

"A tribute for you. Have a look."

I glanced at it. A pile of broken seashells, some still crusted with mud.

Only moments before, Vittoria had been flaunting through the network that Lorenzo had given her a massive Ocean Star stone, the kind of blood-token relic families kill over.

With a few whispers pulled from the right corners, I finally understood that every so-called heartfelt gift I'd taken from him over the years had been nothing but discarded trash.

On the lovers' feast, he gave Vittoria a designer piece none but a handful in the world could own, while I got a heart folded from wrapping paper.

On her birthday, he set the whole city alight with fireworks, yet on mine he took me to a street stall for skewers.

Every holiday he claimed the Family's business kept him too tied up to meet my parents, when in truth he was breaking bread at Vittoria's table instead.

"Mr. Gallo, you're a bound man now. Isn't it improper to appear at my door in the dead of night?"

A flicker of guilt crossed Lorenzo's face.