I looked away, embarrassed. “My ex is marrying my sister this weekend.”
His face changed.
Not pity.
Interest sharpened into anger.
I don’t know why I told him everything. Maybe bourbon. Maybe humiliation. Maybe because strangers are sometimes safer than family.
I told him about Liam’s proposal, his promotion, his obsession with image. I told him about the rooftop where he ended our engagement with a glass of champagne in his hand and cruelty in his mouth.
“I need a wife who fits the life I’m building, Hazel,” Liam had said that night, Manhattan glittering cruelly behind him. “You’re brilliant, but you’ve let yourself go.”
I told Lorenzo how Liam admitted he had “developed feelings” for Chloe, as if betrayal was a flower that had bloomed accidentally.
I told him my mother said I should let Chloe have this.
When I finished, I expected Lorenzo to say something smooth and useless.
Instead, he stared at his glass as if imagining Liam’s face at the bottom of it.
“This man,” he said finally, “discarded a diamond because he was too stupid to understand pressure creates them.”
My throat tightened.
“Careful,” I said. “You almost sound kind.”
“I can be kind.”
“I’ve heard otherwise.”
“You’ve heard incomplete stories.”
I laughed softly. “And what’s the complete story?”
He leaned back. “That I am very dangerous to people who take what is not theirs.”
Something in his tone made me pause.
“What does that mean?”
Before he could answer, my phone lit up on the table.
A text from Chloe.
Hope you can come Saturday. I know it might be awkward, but maybe this will help us heal as sisters. Also, please don’t wear black. It’s not that kind of event. xo
I turned the phone around so Lorenzo could read it.
For the first time all night, he laughed.
It was low, dark, and beautiful.
“She invited you to watch your own funeral and requested you not dress appropriately.”
“She always had nerve.”
“No,” he said. “She has entitlement. Nerve is what you need now.”
“For what?”
His eyes lifted to mine.
“To attend.”
I scoffed. “Alone? So they can whisper about how pathetic I am?”
“You won’t be alone.”
The air between us changed.
I set down my glass. “Mr. Moretti—”
“Lorenzo.”
“No. Definitely Mr. Moretti for this conversation.”
Another small smile.
“You are going to that wedding,” he said. “You are going to walk in with your head high. You are going to let every person in that room see exactly what Liam Carter was too blind to value.”
My pulse kicked.
“And you’re offering to be what? My fake date?”
His gaze held mine.
“I’m offering to be the reason he understands fear.”
I should have refused.
Instead, I asked, “Why?”
For the first time, Lorenzo looked away.
“Because I know what it is to have people mistake loyalty for weakness,” he said. “And because Liam Carter owes me something.”
“What does he owe you?”
His eyes returned to mine.
“Money.”
The word dropped between us like a loaded gun.
“How much?”
“Enough.”
“Did he steal from you?”
“From a company tied to mine.”
“And you just happened to meet his ex-fiancée in a bar?”
“No,” Lorenzo said. “That was luck.”
I narrowed my eyes. “And everything after that?”
“That,” he said, “is strategy.”
A sane woman would have walked away.
A safe woman.
A woman whose mother had not asked her to applaud her own replacement.
But I was tired of being sane for people who had broken me.
So I lifted my bourbon.
“What exactly are you proposing?”
Lorenzo’s smile turned lethal.
“A wedding gift they will never forget.”
Part 2
The next five days felt like stepping into a movie where everyone except me knew the script.
On Wednesday morning, a black Maybach pulled up outside my apartment building in Chelsea. My doorman, who usually acted unimpressed by everything short of a royal procession, nearly swallowed his tongue when Matteo got out.
Matteo was Lorenzo’s right-hand man, built like a refrigerator and twice as cheerful.
Which meant not at all.
He handed me a black envelope.
Inside was a note in Lorenzo’s handwriting.
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