I wear his name like a scar.
Alessandro Rossi stole everything from me; my freedom, my future, the lie I told my father to keep him alive. He thinks I'm a tool to be used, a bride to be displayed, a Fraga to be broken. He thinks the ring on my finge...
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A knock sounded on the door.
"Come in."
Melinda slipped inside, her eyes already scanning me like she could read the chaos written all over my expression. She probably could. She always could.
"Hey." I tried for a smile. It felt more like a wince.
She crossed the room and dropped onto the couch beside me. "You haven't come out all morning. Talk to me, babe. What's going on in that head of yours?"
I opened my mouth to lie. To shrug it off the way I always did. But the truth came spilling out instead, raw and unfiltered. "I don't know if I can do this anymore. What the hell was I thinking, tying myself to this life again after running from it for three years?"
The fuller truth sat heavy on my tongue. I'd been forced into this. I'd never chosen it. But I couldn't tell her that. Not yet, or maybe not ever. So I twisted it into something smaller.
Melinda pulled me into her arms without a word. Her hand smoothed through my hair, the rhythm slow and soothing, and I let myself sink into it. "I know it's hard," she whispered. "Especially when you're in love with him."
My whole body went rigid. I'm not in love with Alessandro.
"That's not enough, Mel."
"I know." Her arms tightened around me. "But sometimes people aren't villains, Yessie. Sometimes they're just trying to survive, same as us."
Her words hit a place I didn't want them to reach. I hated how much sense they made. Hated how they chipped away at the wall I'd built to keep Alessandro on the other side. Because if he wasn't a villain, then what was I supposed to do with all this anger? Where was I supposed to put it?
"I don't even know what I'm feeling." The confession came out barely above a whisper, and it was actually the only honest thing I'd said so far.
She pulled back and looked at me, her expression gentle. "Feelings don't disappear just because you fight them. What matters is what you do with them."
"What if what I do is run?"
"Then you run." She shrugged. "But you'll still feel it. That's the problem with feelings. They follow you."
I let out a hollow laugh. "That's not comforting."
"I'm not here to comfort you, Yessie. I'm here to tell you the truth." She smiled, and it was so warm, so full of the kind of love I didn't deserve, that my chest ached. "Just promise me you'll keep your heart open. Even a little."
An open heart. Sure. Easy for her to say. She'd found Luca. She'd found something soft in the middle of all this ugliness. I'd found a man who'd threatened to kill my best friend and then kissed my knuckles at dinner like it meant something.
I nodded anyway, mostly to make her stop looking at me like that. But even as I did, the truth sat in my stomach like a stone.
