Chapter 4: Stefano's POV

Stefano's POV

I did not remember getting up from the grass.

I remembered my father's hand on my shoulder and the priest saying my name twice.

I remembered that Camille had tried to take the paper from me, and that I had not let her.

Now I sat in the back of the car with the letter flat on my knee, and I read the line again.

Seven weeks.

Seven weeks ago was the night in the lake house, when she had fallen asleep with her head on my arm and I had not moved until dawn.

She had never said a word.

She had been sick all week, and I had told the whole bridge she was a coward.

"Stefano," Camille said from the seat beside me. "Look at me."

"Don't."

"You can't blame yourself for a thing you didn't know."

"I didn't know because I didn't ask her anything. I was busy watching her on a screen."

"We were protecting the Family."

"Say that to my mother," I said. "Say it again with her handprint on your face."

She turned toward the window.

I had known Camille since we were nine years old.

I had never once wondered how much she wanted me to marry a woman who did not exist.

The car stopped at the house.

I went straight to the security room on the ground floor and sent the guard out.

"Pull the bridge footage," I told the technician at the desk. "All of it. Not the cut Camille's people made. The raw files from every camera."

"Sir, the Torrisi crew took the original cards the same morning."

Keep reading free with an account. Start His Test Was Fake, But My Death Was Real from Chapter 1, then sign up free to read the rest of this chapter.