Shattered For His Dead Love

I shattered the statuette.

The one my husband, Lorenzo Gallo, carved with his own hands for his lost love, Elena Ricci.

As punishment, he sent me to the Gilded Cage—a secret estate where men of our world send their disobedient women.

There, in the cruelest way imaginable, he taught me the true meaning of despair.

I crawled back from hell, only to discover I was pregnant with his child.

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1

I was on my knees, gathering the cold fragments of the sculpture from the floor, when my husband walked in. Lorenzo Gallo. The Don of the Gallo family.

Ever since I married him, chores like this had been far beneath me.

I thought he would stride over, help me to my feet, and inspect my hands for cuts, just as he would have in the past.

Instead, he lunged at me and slammed me to the floor.

The force was so great that a shard of ceramic sliced deep into my palm.

Before I could cry out, his hand clamped around my throat. His handsome face was a mask of pure fury. "What the hell were you doing touching Elena's things, Scarlett?"

I couldn't explain. His fingers tightened, squeezing the air from my lungs.

Only when Lorenzo finally released me was I able to drag in a desperate, ragged breath, a pathetic mess on the marble. The ice in his eyes extinguished the last flicker of guilt in my heart.

A surge of defiance coursed through me. "It was an accident, Lorenzo," I rasped. "I'm an art restorer. I can fix it."

"Fix it?" he sneered. "How? Don't you dare compare yourself to her. I carved this statue for Elena with my own two hands. It's the last piece of her I have."

The color drained from my face.

The Elena he spoke of was his untouchable first love, Elena Ricci.

I knew of her, of course. But I never considered her a threat, because Elena was dead.

Before our wedding, my best friend, Chloe Knight, had warned me. She said the living could never win a fight against the dead.

But Lorenzo had sworn he loved me. Elena was the past; I was his present and future. His Principessa.

I believed him.

But now, watching the blood well up from my palm, reality crashed down on me with the force of a physical blow. I was a naive fool for thinking he could ever let go of the love of his life.

I struggled to my feet, intending to clean my wound.

But Lorenzo wasn't finished. He gripped my wrist, his fingers digging in. "Why, Scarlett? Why can't you even leave a dead woman in peace?"

"Do you think destroying a statue erases Elena from my heart? Impossible! You will never measure up to her! If you didn't look so much like her, you never would have set foot in this house!"

His words struck me, and my body began to tremble uncontrollably.

I had once believed Lorenzo and I were soulmates.

It turned out he was just looking through me, at the ghost of another woman.