My Fiancé Confessed to Cheating novel · Chapter 3 of 32
Chapter 3: The Same Cathedral
Saverio announces the wedding will go ahead next Saturday with Graziella as the bride and Rosaria as her maid of honor, locks Rosaria in the dome room, and slides her grandmother's ring onto Graziella's finger.
I couldn't answer him.
All I could see was his mouth on hers against my window.
My silence made it worse.
Saverio grabbed my arm above the elbow and hauled me up off the tiles.
My bare feet slid in the mess.
"Why won't you answer me? Still can't face it?"
His fingers dug in.
"I was going to stop after today. One lesson, and then we'd go back to normal. But I've changed my mind."
He leaned close.
"I'm going to make you feel every bit of what you put me through."
He let go of me so suddenly I stumbled into the arm of the sofa.
Then he turned and held out his hand to Graziella.
She took it.
"The wedding goes ahead," he said. "Next Saturday. Same cathedral, same priest, same guests."
He kissed her knuckles.
"Graziella, you'll be my Donna."
Graziella let the curtain drop.
She didn't bother to cover herself again.
"And her?"
Saverio looked at me.
"Rosaria will stand at the altar beside you. Maid of honor. She'll hold your flowers and hand me your ring."
I heard myself laugh.
It sounded wrong, high and thin.
"I won't."
"You will."
He picked his phone up off the coffee table and scrolled.
"Your father owes me four million euros. I hold the note on your parents' house. I hold the note on the boats."
He showed me the screen.
My father's signature at the bottom of a page I'd never seen.
"Two years I've carried your Family. One phone call, and my men take everything by Friday."
"You did that for me," I said. "You told me you did that because you loved me."
"I did. Now I'm doing this."
He clicked his fingers once.
Two of his men came in from the terrace.
They must have been outside the whole time.
They didn't look at Graziella.
They didn't look at me either.
"Her phone," Saverio said.
"It's in the car. It's in your car, Saverio."
"Then she doesn't need one."
One of them took the satin bag off my wrist anyway.
He opened it, found the canceled card and a lipstick, and handed both to Saverio.
Saverio dropped the card in a vase.
"Upstairs," he told them.
They didn't drag me.
They didn't need to.
I walked up the curving staircase between them with mud drying on my legs.
They stopped outside the master bedroom.
Our bedroom.
Saverio came up behind us and opened the door himself.
The room was full of gray light from above.
Over the bed, set into the ceiling, was the glass dome.
He'd had it built the winter I came home from the clinic in Cefalù.
The first time I tried to die, it was July, and Saverio was the one who found me.
He drove me to the hospital himself.
He sat beside my bed for four days and didn't go home.
When I came back to the villa, every blade in the house was gone.
The razors. The kitchen knives. Even the letter opener in his study.
The second time, in October, he found me again.
After that he didn't let me out of his sight.
I stopped sleeping.
Night after night, I lay in the dark with my eyes open.
So Saverio called a builder and had the roof over our bed cut open and glassed in.
He held me under it every night that winter.
We counted stars.
He sang the old fishermen's song his grandmother used to sing, badly, under his breath.
When I wouldn't eat, he cooked.
Pasta with sardines. Caponata. Lemon cake.
He made the same plate three times until I took a bite.
For a whole year, he made me believe I was safe.
Then he went down on one knee in this room, under that glass.
"On my honor as Don," he said, "nobody will ever do that to you again. Least of all me."
Now he stood in the doorway in his shirtsleeves.
Graziella leaned against him, wearing his wedding jacket and nothing else.
"You loved this room," Saverio said. "So stay in it."
"You can't keep me here."
"Watch me."
He took something small out of his trouser pocket.
It caught the light from the dome.
A thin gold band with a small square emerald.
My grandmother's ring.
I had left it on the armrest of his car.
Four generations of Morreale women had worn it.
My grandmother had pressed it into my palm in the hospital the week she died.
"For the right man," she'd said.
Saverio lifted Graziella's left hand.
He looked at me the whole time he did it.
Then he slid my grandmother's ring onto her finger.
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