He Chose My Stepsister at Our Engagement,I Walked Out and Never Came Back

Two years overseas, learning the trade at Don Lombardi's table, and I cut it short, coming home glowing with happiness, ready to be a bride.

But while I was setting up the house that was meant to be ours, I found over a thousand plane tickets the man I'd been promised to for ten years had carefully saved.

At least one crossing to England every single month, and not one of them was for me.

Even though I was barely a hundred miles from where he landed.

I came early to the place he'd dressed up for the proposal, and there he was, down on one knee, pledging himself to the woman he loved:

"Vittoria, will you marry me? Say the word, and I'll have the bride swapped out before the night is through."

His eyes were so full of longing that I couldn't make my feet carry me one step closer.

If I wasn't the woman he meant to bind his life to, then I'd hand this whole alliance over to them and be done with it.

But after I walked away from that ceremony, he crossed oceans and turned over half the world looking for me.

The room was draped in roses, soft and close under a warm yellow glow.

Lorenzo Falcone on one knee was the exact picture I'd built in my head a thousand times of my own pledge.

But the woman standing across from him wasn't me.

"Vittoria, will you marry me?"

Vittoria Marchetti had one hand pressed to her lips, the other already reaching out, trembling, for the roses.

A diamond caught the light as it slid onto her finger.

The two of them folded into each other, kissing deep, and the low, intimate sounds drifted to me on the still air.

I caught myself absently turning the matching band Lorenzo had mailed me from across the water.

I'd never told him the ring ran too big.

To keep it from slipping, I'd wound half a loop of red thread around the band until it finally sat right.

Maybe it was the wear of all those months, but one hard pull and the thread came loose.

Freed of the thread, the ring slid clean off the base of my finger and rolled away into a far storm drain.

Just like Lorenzo, freed of me across two years of water.

A ring that doesn't fit doesn't need picking up. A man who doesn't love me doesn't need holding onto.

"Lorenzo, I hope your wedding goes ahead just as you've planned it."

"Why? I only want to marry you."

"Because I want to walk into your wedding and take the groom. Then everyone will know you love me most."

My feet, already turning for the door, went still.

Because I wanted to know just how far Lorenzo would go to wound me for Vittoria's sake.

"You wicked little thing, only you could dream up a scheme that filthy."

"Then I'd better keep a second pair of shoes by the door, so I can run faster when I steal you away."

"And you'd truly do that to Adriana Castellano?"

"Keeping my word and standing at the altar with her is already my limit. If she can't even hold onto her own husband, if he's taken from her at the altar, that's no fault of mine, is it?"

The two of them broke into delighted laughter, and it went through me like a knife between the ribs.

I turned and leaned into the trunk of a tree, my legs too weak to carry me another inch.

Terrified my crying would reach them, I clamped a hand over my mouth and made myself leave.

But halfway out, my legs gave way beneath me and I went down hard on the ground.

I got home a wreck and called the old Don who'd taught me everything across the water.

"Padrino, that work you spoke of, taking a place at your table. I'm in. I'll come."

Don Lombardi was glad of it, but puzzled too.

"Didn't you tell me you were going home to be married, to settle into that life? Or has your intended agreed to all this distance between you? A union lived apart is no union at all, figlia. Are you certain you won't take your time and think it through?"

I pressed at my scraped knee, every touch sending a sharp, piercing ache through me.

"The wedding is off. From now on I'm your right hand, given fully to the work."

Don Lombardi had always treated me as his own blood, and he caught the wrong note in my voice at once.

"As it happens, the door closes today. I'll set your name down myself. Come home to us soon and we'll bury ourselves in it. A person kept busy has no hours left to sit with old wounds."

"Don't take it hard, an old man speaking out of turn, but these two years it was always you crossing the water to him, and never once did he make the journey to you on his own. That tells you plainly enough how little he loves you."

"Once you've made up your mind to let go, don't keep drowning yourself in what's behind you."

If I hadn't seen that thick stack of tickets, I could have answered the old Don's "how little he loves you" with the same easy certainty I always had.

No wonder he was always too buried in business to reach at the close of every month.

So that was it. Buried in crossing half the world to lie at Vittoria's side.

For two whole years I'd been a fool, driving myself to the bone to keep ahead in my studies, to put my name to the work, all to scrape together the hours to fly home and be near him.

A short reunion after more than ten hours in the air had once been the happiest stretch of my life.

But my love, the love that crossed oceans, had become a joke laid out beside that stack of tickets Lorenzo kept like treasure.

On the way to the proposal, I'd even talked myself into believing he might go to England for the Family's business.

But watching him kneel to Vittoria, the woman who had abused me, I finally understood why he'd never once come the short hundred miles to see me.

Vittoria wouldn't allow it, so he fed me sweet lies about how he ached for me.

He knew full well that Vittoria and I were sworn enemies.

To be exact, after my father remarried and built his second house, Vittoria and her mother became the darkest shadow over my childhood, the Marchetti blood folded into the Castellano name.

I'd pictured it more times than I could count, that across two years of distance, Lorenzo might give his heart to someone else.

But the one thing I never once imagined was that he'd give it to Vittoria, that to earn her favor he'd agree to disgrace me at my own altar.

I sank into the warm bath, and only then did my body slowly stop shaking.

Lorenzo's call came through.

"Adriana, where are you? I'm already at Seaside Park."

I said nothing.

Lorenzo grew frantic.

"Adriana, what's wrong? Are you upset?"

"Where are you? I'll come get you right now!"

He was still so attentive, so careful, quick to read every shift in my mood, knowing exactly how to make me feel safe. The same voice that could order a man's hands broken over the phone, gone soft and pleading for me.

"I'm home. I don't feel like going out today."

Lorenzo went quiet for a beat, then kept coaxing.

"Okay. I'll come straight home to be with you."

He didn't demand to know why I'd left him waiting.

It wasn't that he loved me enough to indulge my whims.

It was only because, in that carefully staged room with its candlelight and its hired violinist, he had already offered the pledge ring to the woman he loved, and she had said yes.

I was just his backup plan, the one he kept in reserve for the night his proposal failed.

When Lorenzo walked in, I was just coming out of the bathroom.

The sight of Vittoria Marchetti behind him pulled my brows into a knot.

"Why did you bring her here?"

Was he really so eager that he had to drag her into my home to rub it in my face?

Lorenzo smoothed the lapel of his too-perfect suit with his palm, a flicker of guilt crossing his face.

"Adriana, I ran into Vittoria downstairs and only then found out she lives in our building. She heard you were back from across the water and insisted on coming up to apologize to you."

I watched him perform, my eyes cold.

"Adriana, what my mother and I did back then went too far. I'm apologizing on her behalf. Can you grant us mercy?"

My voice trembled as I asked Lorenzo,

"So you think I should forgive the two of them?"

The pain of a ruptured eardrum. The pain of being beaten with a bamboo cane until my legs went numb. The pain of my mother's keepsakes thrown into the fire pit and burned to ash.

I didn't lower myself to ask him why he'd fallen for Vittoria.

That would have made me look like I had no backbone.

Lorenzo's guilt evaporated as I stubbornly waited for his answer.

"Adriana, Vittoria was just a child back then. What did she understand about right and wrong? She's felt guilty over it for years, and she's already apologized to you. Why keep nitpicking over the past?"

The abuse, body and soul, that dragged me into a bottomless pit, he called that the past.

My refusal to grant Vittoria mercy, he called that nitpicking.

Back then it was him who'd carried me to the back-room doctor, him who'd seen what the Marchetti woman's daughter had done. No one knew better than he did how deeply I loathed the stepmother and stepsister who had married into my blood and my name.

Yet of all people, he had fallen for Vittoria and lined himself up against me.

Lorenzo reached for my hand, trying to make me clasp hands with Vittoria and bury the blade between us.

I slapped his hand away and snarled,

"Lorenzo, what gives you the right to make me forgive those two?"

Abusing me behind my father's back, poisoning him against his own heir, and in the end, after my father died, refusing even to honor him with a proper burial. Leaving the dead untended is the deepest disgrace our world knows, and they had let him rot in it.

Lorenzo looked at the back of his hand, red where I'd struck it, and his brows drew together in confusion and displeasure he couldn't hold back.

"Adriana, I'm doing this for your own good. You have no father, no mother now. Vittoria and her mother are the only half-family you've got left. Why cling to the past, why keep dwelling on it and put yourself through all this agony?"

"People have to look forward, don't they?"

Lorenzo's words were earnest, but on that calm, unruffled face was the impatience I knew so well.

The tenderness and care I used to know were nowhere left in it.

I heard my own heart, already riddled with wounds, shatter completely into dust.

The pain was so deep I could barely speak.

And in Vittoria's brimming, tearful eyes, the smugness and provocation buried beneath were exactly as they had always been. Her smile held a half-second too long, and her fingers found the pendant at her throat and twisted it.

"Adriana, it's fine if you don't grant me mercy. But I'll keep repenting, keep feeling guilty, until you accept me as the family member you have no blood ties to."

"Get out!"

I gripped the edge of the doorway hard, just to keep myself from shaking too badly.

The impatience on Lorenzo's face was plain for anyone to read.

"Adriana, why are you being so unreasonable? Everyone makes mistakes. Where's your generosity gone?"

He had watched with his own eyes as Vittoria and her mother drove me to the brink of throwing my own life away.

There was a time he would have stood between me and them, would have raised his voice in the old Castellano study until the soldiers in the hall went still.

What in the world had turned him into a man standing on the other side of the room now, shielding Vittoria like she carried his blood?

I let the pain swallow me whole, and told Lorenzo word by word:

"Unless she dies in front of me, I will never forgive her!"

A vein jumped at Lorenzo's temple, anger simmering just beneath the surface.

This was exactly how he used to look when he raged at Vittoria and her mother for me.

"Adriana Castellano! Two years across the water and you come back this vicious creature? Fine. Don't forgive her, then apologize to her. I won't have men laughing in the social clubs that my intended is a petty, poisonous shrew."

"Your mother put herself in the ground because she was weak. If she'd spared one thought for how young you were, your father would never have buried a wife and married into the Marchetti name. Don't pin all your misfortune on Vittoria and her mother. Rosa was wrong, but it wasn't a crime worth dying over. If you mean to fixate and torture yourself the way your mother did, then you deserve every nightmare you get."

He nearly spat the word nightmare through his teeth.

The disgust that flickered across his face, I caught it clearly.

So the man who once swore on his life to protect me had, in the end, grown sick of me and my nightmares.

In the end, all my misfortune and all my pain had become the blades he used to hurt me, running me through until nothing was left whole.

The man who once went red-eyed the instant he heard me cry out in the dark would never again gather me close and say:

"Adriana, I'm here. No nightmare, no monster, no demon will ever lay a finger on you."

He'd carried me out of the abyss with his own hands, and now he had shoved me back into it with those same hands.

For Vittoria's sake, he stood there and told me I deserved it.

My body trembled until I couldn't hold the doorway any longer, and I staggered backward.

Lorenzo caught me with quick hands and only then saw my knees, swollen and red.

He dropped into a crouch to look at the injury.

"How did your knees get hurt this badly?"

"Forget it. If you won't apologize, I'll apologize for you. But you can't be this rude from now on."

I tore my hand free, my face ashen, and pointed at the door.

"Get out. All of you, get out."

Lorenzo knew exactly how close to breaking I was in that moment, and reached to pull me into his arms to settle me.

But Vittoria, tears streaming down her face, bowed to me.

"Adriana, I'm leaving now. Please don't torment yourself over me anymore."

The moment the words left her mouth she bolted for the door, but she turned too fast and slammed into the frame, her whole body toppling to one side. Her fingers had been twisting that pendant at her throat, and her smile had held a half-second too long before the fall.

Lorenzo released me instantly, lunging to catch her, and the two of them went down together just past the threshold.

Even so, Vittoria's head still struck the frame, the spot flushing red at once, a thin line of blood seeping through.

Lorenzo scrambled up, swept her into his arms, and rushed for the elevator.

"Vittoria, does it hurt? I'll get you to a doctor right now."

At last the doorway fell quiet.

The hush that came after was the hush of a room after a sit-down ends badly, when everyone already knows what's coming and no one will say it aloud.

And my heart sank to the very bottom.

Ten years of knowing each other, ten years of loving each other, and in the end we'd become strangers.

I took out my phone and booked myself passage on a flight for the day of the alliance ceremony.

Seven days left. Just enough time to clear away everything from the past.

Lorenzo was right. A person has to look forward.

I pressed my thumb against the bare band of skin where my mother's ring once sat, and held it there until the trembling stopped.

From this day on, I would cut myself off completely from all the joy and all the pain of what we had been.

I threw out every piece of the alliance ceremony I'd gathered with my own hands.

This safe house had never really been mine, and now not a single trace of me remained inside its walls.

The last thing left was the slips from our covert sit-downs across the water, the ones I'd kept folded like a diary of our love.

I hesitated for half a moment, then fed them into the fire one by one.

Every slip the flames swallowed was a version of me that had loved Lorenzo.

When the burning was done, all that remained was a basin of ash and a choking column of black smoke.

It looked exactly like these ten years of love.

The next morning, the smell of cooking woke me.

"Adriana, hurry and go freshen up. I've already made breakfast."

"Eat first. I'm going to bring Vittoria her breakfast, so you don't need to come along."

"Mm."

Lorenzo's hands paused over the thermal container.

"Don't feel guilty. Vittoria doesn't blame you."

"After we eat, we'll go pick out a new stone for the pledge ring. There was a problem with the one I had cut, and it won't arrive in time for the union."

"Fine."

He liked playing his little drama, so I'd just play along.

Maybe it was because I seemed so cold, but Lorenzo, his face heavy with guilt, brought over the kit to clean the cut on my knee.

"Adriana, we've loved each other for years. Everything I do is for your sake. I don't want you standing at our union without a single soul of your blood beside you."

"You said you couldn't find anyone to stand for you, didn't you? I've already taken it on myself to have Vittoria stand at your side for the ceremony."

"Fine."

Lorenzo said it carefully, and when he saw how readily I agreed, his eyes filled with disbelief.

Then he took my hand and pressed a warm, wet kiss to it.

After he delivered Vittoria's breakfast, he didn't come back.

I was scrubbing my palm raw when he called.

"Adriana, when you're done eating, come straight down to the garage. I'm waiting in the car."

When I got to the garage, I reached for the passenger door out of habit, only to find Vittoria already sitting there.

Without a word, I got into the back seat.

Lorenzo glanced at me a few times, pleased that I knew my place.

"Adriana, Vittoria has an eye for stones. With her here, she's sure to help you choose one you'll love."

I nodded and closed my eyes, pretending to doze.

When I opened them by chance, I saw Lorenzo give Vittoria's cheek a gentle pinch.

In the rearview mirror, our eyes met, and he smoothed the lapel of his too-perfect suit with his palm before he spoke.

"Vittoria had something on her face. I was just wiping it off for her."

I closed my eyes again and kept them shut until we got out of the car.

The three of us walked into the jeweler's, a quiet front near the heart of Castellano territory, and the clerk, all warmth, addressed Vittoria, who was pressed close to Lorenzo.

"What would you like to buy your sweetheart today, sir?"

Vittoria and Lorenzo both flushed at the same time.

Lorenzo pulled me over by the arm.

"What are you standing so far away for? Come pick out a stone!"

The clerk turned bright red with embarrassment and hurriedly brought out the diamonds for me to choose from.

But Vittoria took the lead, inspecting them and offering her opinions.

"This one isn't big enough."

"This one's poor quality."

Set against the stone already on her own hand, not a single one met her standards.

The clerk glanced at me awkwardly, hesitating to speak.

Vittoria pretended not to notice, and in the end picked out a rather ordinary one.

"Adriana, just take this one. It'll do for the ceremony. Later I'll design you something with my own hands, prettier than mine."

The clerk awkwardly complimented her on her good eye.

But Vittoria, not without smugness, thrust her hand in front of my face. Her fingers found the pendant at her throat and twisted it.

"Of course it's prettier. My intended designed and had this one made just for me."

Beside us, Lorenzo just stood there quietly watching her show off to me, neither stopping her nor looking the least bit guilty, the smile at the corner of his mouth all but melting into the spring air.

"Then we'll buy the one Vittoria picked!"

He didn't even bother letting me try it on. Lorenzo had already paid.

He took out the stone and slid it onto my finger, his face blank.

No bended knee, no roses, no words spoken over a pledge.

This time the ring wasn't big. I had to force it on.

I knew Vittoria had done it on purpose.

She had an eye for stones. She could gauge a size precisely at a glance. There was no way she'd make such a glaring mistake.

I couldn't be bothered to call her out. I just pulled the ring straight off.

The girl behind the velvet counter offered, kindly, to show me another setting. I declined.

"I'll take this one. It's only a formality. No need to fuss."

Lorenzo caught the edge in my voice, and he didn't like it. A made man notices when a knife is hidden under calm words.

"If you don't like it, don't buy it. Vittoria can have one made for you later."

I shook my head.

"This one's fine."

But Vittoria's face crumpled, all guilt, her eyes welling up on cue. Her fingers found the pendant at her throat and twisted it.

"Adriana, I'll go to the workshop right now and stay all night on the design. I promise you'll have a perfect ceremony."

With that, she hurried out, past the man at the door who shifted aside without being told. She wouldn't stop no matter how Lorenzo called after her.

"Adriana, what is wrong with you? It's just a ring. What are you making a scene about?"

I couldn't help staring at him.

"What scene am I making?"

His lips pressed thin. He pulled me out of the shop, his hand at my elbow like a man steering cargo.

"There's something at the club I have to handle. We'll sit for the portraits when there's time."

"Or go ahead and take yours alone. I'll have someone paint my dress in beside you for the ceremony."

"Fine."

Whatever explanation Lorenzo had been about to give caught in his throat. He looked at me a long moment, then pulled me into a light embrace.

"Adriana, once all this is settled, I'll take you away somewhere. We'll have the portraits done then, somewhere far from the famiglia."

The escape he dangled now was nothing but an insult to me.

He'd never once found the time to cross the water and see me where Don Lombardi had given me a place at his table. Yet he'd had time to take Vittoria to the bottom of the world to watch the penguins, to the top of it to chase the northern lights.

I watched his pin drift across the map on my screen, his little marker heading straight for Vittoria's workshop. I went back into the shop and handed the ring back to the girl.

Just as I expected, Lorenzo didn't come home for two days.

Because he was at the shore, sitting for wedding portraits with Vittoria.

And he really had paid someone to paint our two faces together into a bridal portrait.

Set on running from this union, I figured I'd only come back now for my parents' death anniversaries.

I carried two bouquets to the cemetery to visit them. I added the caretaker's number too, so it would be simpler to have the plot tended from across the water from then on.

"From now on I'll pay my parents' upkeep. Refuse it if Mr. Falcone ever tries to cover it."

The caretaker checked his ledger and went still.

"Miss, your parents' plot is already six months overdue. We tried to reach the family, but the number was dead."

I remembered I'd changed my number after I left. The carelessness of it turned my stomach. To leave the dead untended is a blood-debt no man of honor lets slide. Failing it is a disgrace that follows you down into the ground.

Lorenzo didn't even love me anymore. Why in God's name would he think of my dead parents?

I settled the balance and paid ten years ahead, then walked out, hollow.

But the moment I stepped through the cemetery gate, I heard the one voice I'll never forget as long as I live.

"Lorenzo, caro, how good of you to remember today's the anniversary of Vittoria's real father passing. If the old man knew you came to share a glass with him, he'd be floating with joy down there."

I turned stiffly and saw Lorenzo climbing the steps, Vittoria on one arm and Rosa Frost on the other.

"It's the least I can do," he said.

"Silly boy, what's this stiffness? In a few days you'll be calling me Mamma."

Lorenzo laughed warmly and obliged her. He smoothed the lapel of his too-perfect suit with his palm, then called Rosa Frost Mamma.

My eyes burning, I slipped away to keep my word to my friends.

The moment we met, I said it straight out. The union was off.

They exchanged a glance, then asked me, careful as people stepping around a wired door.

"Adriana, so you already know?"

But I was confused how they knew at all.

Bristling, they laid out photographs in front of me. Lorenzo and Vittoria, walking in together to seal the pact, the paperwork already filed between them.

"Adriana, we're behind you running from this. I want to see what a joke it'll be when Vittoria tries to steal a wedding that doesn't even have a bride."

The way they put it, I almost started to look forward to it.

The day before the ceremony, Lorenzo came home with a brand-new pair of running shoes.

I asked him flatly, "Don't you hate running shoes?"

He blanked for a second, then patted my head.

"So I can run fast carrying the bride tomorrow."

The bride he meant wasn't me.

And the smile that spread across his lips wasn't for me either.

So it seemed that having me robbed of my own union in front of every family that mattered, just to prove he loved Vittoria, made him very happy.

The next day, I walked through the venue once.

The enormous poster blew up every trace of that painted portrait, my borrowed face beside his.

I took out a pair of scissors and cut my own face from it, that bright young face full of life. Then I pressed my thumb against the bare band of skin where my mother's ring once sat, and I hailed a car to the airport.

When the attendant told me it was time to silence my phone, Lorenzo's calls came flooding in.