The Heir He Gave Away, The Empire I Took Back

My father was quiet for a long moment. The clock on the mantel ticked. Outside, a car passed on the street, its headlights sweeping briefly across the drawn curtains.

"Good riddance," he said finally.

I held it together for as long as I could. Then the wall cracked, and I let the tears come, sobbing against my mother's shoulder the way I hadn't since I was a girl. They'd never thought highly of Simone. They were a minor family, the Ferrantes, respected but small, and they'd seen the marriage for what it was from the beginning: a transaction dressed up in white lace and Sunday blessings. They were convinced he didn't truly love me.

And they were right.

I had chased Simone Valente for seven years. Seven years of showing up at the social club functions, of being the girl from the old neighborhood who wouldn't stop looking at the Valente heir like he'd hung the moon over the waterfront. When he finally agreed to be with me, I ignored everyone's warnings, thinking I could eventually make him love me. That if I was patient enough, loyal enough, quiet enough, the warmth would come.

It didn't. And here we were, facing the dissolution of an alliance that had been built on nothing but my stubbornness and his indifference.

I learned the hard way that you can't force a bond. A decade of my youth taught me that lesson. I waited and waited, but Simone still hadn't signed the papers. Just after I threatened to take the matter before a judge, to drag the Valente name into a public courtroom where the Feds would be watching and the other Families would be whispering, he finally texted me.

I'll come by tomorrow to pick you up and let Rocco and the others apologize. Stop making a fuss. I'm exhausted. Don't make me pick between you and Silvana.

Then, a second message:

I'm sorry, but can't you see my perspective? I said I'd distance myself from her, but she's carrying a child and needs support. You see, her husband's never around.

He acted like he was torn between Silvana and me just because she was with child, but time and again, he proved he always chose her.

On our wedding day, what did he do? He left the reception. Left me standing in the hall of the Valente estate in my white dress while the guests whispered behind their hands, because Silvana had called, upset after a fight with Enzo. On our anniversary, he walked out of the restaurant because she was "panicking" during a thunderstorm, and she needed him, and apparently the Marchetti soldiers who guarded her home weren't enough. On my birthday, she let him know the Ricci family's last remaining business had turned a profit, and he went to celebrate with her instead of sitting across from his own wife.

Every holiday, he tried to keep things balanced by getting gifts for me and for his former love. As if fairness in gift-giving could paper over the fact that his heart had never left the old neighborhood.

I'd brought this up to him more times than I could count, but he always said it wouldn't happen again. Yet here we were, and every time it did, he'd call me petty. He'd say I was being difficult. He'd say the Family needed peace and I was the one disturbing it.

Honestly, the best moment we ever had was when he proposed.

That night was something else. He'd taken me up to the ridge above the city, the old lookout point where the Valente men used to keep watch during the wars of the seventies. The stars felt so close I could almost reach them. The city sprawled below us, all those territories and borders reduced to a carpet of distant light. Under that sky, he slipped a ring on my finger, looking more serious than I'd ever seen him. His vows were heartfelt. His voice didn't waver. He went all out for that moment, and I believed every word.

That was the cruelest part. He'd meant it. He just hadn't meant it enough.

When Simone noticed I hadn't replied to his messages, he called. His voice was controlled, the way it always was when he needed something from me. "Darling, I've booked a private room for everyone to apologize to you. Please don't make a scene."