Chapter 1

At the alliance feast, Marco learned that his first love was being handed into an arranged blood-bound union with the wounded heir he despised.

Without hesitation, he went before the priest and the bosses and had his own union sealed with her instead.

That same afternoon, the two of them slipped off to a Family safe estate in Iceland for their retreat.

Their childhood devotion, so touching and profound, ran through every parlor and social club in the territory.

Meanwhile, I became the disgraceful woman who had come between two lovers, my name torn to pieces in the whispers of the Families' wives and capos until I couldn't so much as cross my own doorstep.

Unexpectedly, that blind heir Marco had scorned showed up at my door.

"I've always been one to repay a grievance in full. Since that pup Marco stole my promised bride, I'll just have to take his woman. A fair trade requires reciprocity, Miss Rossi. Would you enter a blood-bound union with me?"

I glanced down at the whispers already spreading, their kiss beneath the aurora passed mouth to mouth across every Family in the city.

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

——

Even after the union was sealed before the priest, I still couldn't believe I had just bound myself in a single afternoon.

And the man I'd bound myself to was not Marco, the man I'd stood beside for eight years, but Lorenzo, someone I had crossed paths with only a handful of times, someone who had once stood on the enemy's side of the truce.

"Once the vow is spoken, there's no backing out. When are you moving into the estate?"

Understanding what he meant, my face went hot in an instant. Mercifully, he couldn't see it.

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

Lorenzo nodded, his thumb tracing the rim of his wine glass as he listened. "That works. Half a month is enough time to prepare for the union. Buy whatever you like."

He pressed a black card into my hand, the flush at the tips of his ears betraying an excitement he was trying to hide.

I pressed my lips into a smile and thought it was not a bad start.

Ten days into their retreat, Marco finally remembered I existed and called.

"My flight lands at three. Come pick me up."

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

Yet for ten days the whispers had carried nothing but him and Adriana, every sweet moment paraded through the Families in real time.

I had heard how they wrapped themselves in each other at the Blue Lagoon, how they kissed beneath the aurora, how they swore eternal love on the black sand.

He had taken another woman first to every place I had once dreamed of for my own retreat.

"I'm busy. Get a car."

Once, no matter the hour or the distance, a single word from him would have been enough for me to drop everything and go to his side without hesitation.

Marco went silent for a moment, then let out a cold snort and hung up.

By then I thought this was the unspoken end between two grown people. But when I came home that evening, I found him sitting on my sofa in a bathrobe.

He lifted his gaze at me, careless, as if nothing had happened.

"Place is pretty tidy without me around."

Over the past days I had thrown out everything of Marco's.

The photograph of the two of us that had once hung in the front room was gone now, and still he didn't notice.

He nodded toward a paper bag on the table.

"A gift for you. Take a look."

I glanced inside. It was a heap of broken seashells, some still crusted with mud.

Only moments earlier, Adriana had been flaunting to the Families that Marco had gifted her a massive Ocean Star stone.

With the whispers piecing it together for me, I finally understood that every so-called heartfelt gift I had received over the years was nothing but discarded trash.

On Valentine's Day he gave Adriana a limited designer bag, while I got a heart folded from wrapping paper.

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

Every holiday, he swore the Family's business kept him too busy to meet my parents, when in truth he was seated at Adriana's family's table instead.

"Mr. Bellandi, you're a bound man now. Isn't it improper to turn up at my place in the dead of night?"

A flicker of guilt crossed Marco's face. He laughed, a half-beat too early and too loud, and wiped his palm down his trouser leg.