He Let Me Die for Her, So I Refused His Ring novel · Chapter 1 of 32
Chapter 1: The Ring in the Rain
Reborn on the day Massimo proposes, Livia refuses the ring in front of her sister, and tells him a man he hates will come to the gate in three days.
The night the Orsini men set Manhattan on fire, my husband ran past me and never looked down.
I was on the pavement outside the Santoro hotel on Fifth Avenue.
Our daughter was nine days old. My body was still too weak to stand.
The crowd running from the smoke had knocked me flat, and I couldn't get my legs under me.
The armored cars waited at the curb with their engines running.
Massimo came through the smoke with a gun in his hand.
His eyes went straight over my head to my sister.
Bianca stood a step behind me. I hadn't known she was there.
He picked her up and carried her to the last car.
"Livia is smarter than anyone," he said to her. "She'll have the children out already. Don't worry about her."
I tried to say our son's name, and blood came up in my throat instead.
The car door shut, and the taillights turned the corner.
That was when I understood, lying on the cold stone.
In all the years I had lived in his house, I had never once been the one he looked for.
Then everything went dark.
Then it was raining.
I opened my eyes on a stone colonnade, with water running off the roof in a sheet.
I was twenty-six. I was standing on the terrace of the Santoro estate in Riverdale, holding a folder.
Inside the folder was the medical license I had been issued that morning.
Massimo stood in front of me in a soaked white shirt, holding out a black velvet box.
In it sat the onyx ring with the Santoro crest cut into the stone.
Every heir gives it to his bride. Wearing it makes her his wife in the family's eyes, and any children his by blood.
I had taken it the first time, and I had cried when I did.
I didn't reach for it now.
"Thank you, Massimo," I said. "But no. I'm going to marry someone else."
His face went dark. "Livia, we grew up together. You finish school and you come home. It was always going to go like that."
"When did you even meet a man you'd marry?" Massimo said.
I closed the folder and said nothing.
My sister answered for me.
"You can barely talk to strangers," Bianca said. "What if you pick a man and he bullies you?"
"It would be different with Massimo. I know where all his soft spots are. If he ever hurt you, I'd deal with him myself."
She smiled, took the ring out of the box, and slid it onto her own finger.
She tilted her hand in the light to admire it.
Massimo glanced at her. "Worry about yourself first. Whoever marries you will need a search party every night."
"Better than marrying you," Bianca said.
"Then give the ring back."
She yanked her hand away and ran, and he went after her around the stone planter.
I stood there with my folder, and nobody noticed.
The first time, I would have told myself they were only like this because they were close.
But I had died once already.
Massimo had always wanted Bianca. I was the one who fit what the family expected.
He caught her by the wrist at last.
"Don't break it," he said. "If Livia won't wear it, I'll have to give it to you."
Bianca laughed and tossed the ring back into the box.
"No, thank you. I want Sicily, and Paris, and every place I haven't seen."
"I won't sit in the same assigned chair at every Sunday dinner. And I'm not having your babies."
Massimo laughed too. "Good thing Livia isn't like you."
He said it lightly, and the rain nearly covered it.
Across the road, past the iron gate, a gray car sat with its window down. A man in the driver's seat was watching the colonnade.
He had been there the first time, too. I had never asked who he was.
Massimo came back and held the box out to me again.
"Are you still angry about the yacht?" he said. "Last month, when it caught fire. I know I got Bianca off first."
The blood left my face.
He thought I was still shaken from that day on the water.
"She can't swim," he said. "She had her life jacket on before the smoke even reached the deck, she was that scared. I couldn't leave her. I'd have gone back for you."
"I know," I said. "I was in the water until the launch came."
"After we're married, I'll make it up to you."
My hand tightened on the folder.
I didn't want a ring my sister had already thrown back.
I didn't want a husband whose heart had always belonged to someone else.
"I meant it," I said.
"In three days a man is going to come to this house and ask for my hand. Wednesday, at ten."
Massimo's smile stayed where it was, but his eyes changed. "Who?"
"Adriano Corvi."
Bianca stopped moving.
Massimo set the box down on the planter's edge very gently.
"No Corvi has stood on Santoro ground since your father's funeral," he said. "If one walks through that gate, he's shot where he stands."
"Then I'll be waiting at the gate," I said.
He walked past me into the house. A moment later I heard him tell the gate captain to put four men on the road.
Across the street, the gray car started its engine and pulled away.
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