Fucking perfect. I’ve hurt the only women I love.
I hang up and punch my steering wheel until my knuckles split.
21
VIVIANA
The past month has passed in a daze. My days have been chock-full of wedding planning. I hoped that the more money I spent, the angrier he would become. Not such luck. He went along with every decadent wish, which pissed me off even more.
My nights have been restless. Tossing and turning and cussing him out.
Cursing him for making me fall in love with him.
Cursing him for twisting our beautiful love into a power play, his deception raging hell inside of me.
Every breath I expel carries misery as if it has lodged in my being, and I carry it like a shadow I can’t shake off.
If he thinks I will ever let him fool me a second time, he doesn’t know me at all.
I can’t do anything to stop this marriage.
Fine.
I’ll marry him and make him regret every day for the rest of his life wanting me, playing with my feelings and butchering my heart.
I will marry the enemy.
So be it.
I’ve buried the residual love for him so deep inside my chest that he won’t ever be able to spark it to life again.
The only positive thing is that I will live in New York—blissful anonymity. Plus, no one in my family will ever discover the truth.
I am looking forward to teaching. I’ve got a summer position at a preschool, and I hope to continue teaching kids there starting this fall with Evie. His betrayal trumps hers. I have a sister I would do anything for too. So, after I processed the hurt, I realized it was my fault.
I was the one in a secret relationship with her brother.
I was the one who let herself be fooled.
If it’s anyone’s fault, it’s mine.
It’s the night before my wedding, and as I stare out the window of the hotel across from where the ceremony will take place, I touch the glass to anchor myself.
A few tears slide down my cheeks. Alone. In pain.
I’ve smiled with a shattered heart and a broken spirit for so long that I doubt I will laugh again without feeling this weight pressing inside my ribcage, making it hard to breathe.
My phone vibrates in my hand. Startled, I drop it. It clanks on the floor just like my heart in the pit of my stomach.
I don’t have to retrieve it to know who it is. Every day, he has called me, and although I initially wanted to block him, the desire to punish him overrode my first instinct. We have only talked when needed. I didn’t anticipate his involvement in the wedding planning. The asshole. The hypocrite.
If given the opportunity to go back in time, I would shackle myself to my dorm room desk rather than travel to New York and go to that party. But I guess you can’t escape fate, wondering what I did wrong for mine to treat me so cruelly.
I’ve caught tidbits of talk about him. It’s been a big deal in my family to marry him, the boss of the Irish American Mob and someone who’s so damn rich and powerful it’s matching the Syndicate.
He doesn’t need anyone to be a damn force on his own.
I’ve heard of his cruelty. He killed everyone around him to reach the top. No one dares to cross him, but the one tidbit that enraged me like nothing else—he never planned to marry. Lucky me.
