She Took My Wedding, So I Married the Don Chapter 14

Three months later, I parked the Alfa Romeo in my parents’ driveway.

Red paint. Polished chrome. Rebuilt from a burned, twisted shell into something that turned every head on the street.

Luca unfolded himself from the passenger seat, still moving a little carefully on his left side. “You sure about this?”

“I’m sure.”

Mom opened the front door before I knocked.

She’d gotten thinner. Quieter. Word travels fast in a town like ours, and two hundred and twelve people had filmed my toast. Half her book club had stopped calling. Ethan’s family had canceled their annual Christmas party with her -Ethan himself had moved to Ohio after his father’s firm collapsed, along with every Castellano contract it had ever signed.

Marco Castellano was awaiting trial for attempted murder, plus everything the FBI found when Luca very politely handed them seven years of evidence.

Bianca had moved out. She lived in the apartment above Sal’s garage now. She was six months along and learning to change her own oil. I’d taught her.

“Sloane,” Mom said.

“I’m not here to fight,” I said. “I’m here for Grandpa’s clock.”

She stared at me. Then she looked over her shoulder at the hallway, where the old grandfather clock stood ticking, the way it had ticked the night she gave away my wedding.

For a long moment, she didn’t move.

Then she stepped aside.

Luca carried it out like it weighed nothing. I watched him strap it carefully into the back of Rocco’s truck, and then I turned back to my mother one last time.

“I hope someday you’re happy,” I said. And I meant it. “But I won’t be waiting for you to be proud of me anymore. I’m proud of me. Turns out that’s enough.”

Her eyes filled. She opened her mouth.

I didn’t stay to hear it. Some doors you don’t have to slam. You just stop walking back through them.

The second wedding was in Nonna’s garden, under a canopy of oak trees strung with a thousand lights.

No ballroom. No two hundred guests. Just the people who’d carried me.

Gia. Nonna. Rocco, wearing a brand-new suit he informed everyone cost three grand. Sal, wiping his eyes and

pretending it was allergies. Jenny, home from Cabo and furious she’d missed everything. Bianca, glowing and round, holding a bouquet of wildflowers and crying before the music even started.

And Dad. In the back row. He’d asked if he could come. I’d said yes.

I didn’t let anyone walk me down the aisle.

I walked myself.

In a dress I’d chosen. Simple. Silk. Grandma’s pearls at my throat. A black leather jacket over my shoulders because

Gia said I’d look like me.

Luca waited at the end, in a dark suit, huge and scarred and unmistakably crying.

“Dio,” he whispered when I reached him. “Look at you.”

“Look at you. The Devil of the Docks is crying.”

“Tell anyone and I’ll deny it.”

Nonna’s priest read the vows. This time, they weren’t bored words in a courthouse. Luca’s voice shook on every single

one.

“I promise to stand in the shadows and watch you shine. I promise to carry you over broken glass. I promise,” he said, pressing his forehead to mine, “never to walk toward a door without you again.”

My turn.

“I promise to keep you running,” I said. “To fix what’s broken. And to never, ever let you keep your worst day under a

tarp.”

“You may kiss the bride.”

He lifted me clean off my feet and kissed me while our whole found family cheered and Bianca sobbed and Rocco

yelled something wildly inappropriate in Italian.

Later, under the oak trees, Luca swayed with me to music no one else could hear.

“No nightmares in three months,” he murmured.

“Told you. I fix things.”

He laughed against my hair.

Across the garden, Grandpa’s old clock stood beside the dance floor, where I’d asked Rocco to put it. Ticking steady.

Ticking strong.

My whole life, I’d come first in everything-and still finished last in my family’s eyes.

Not anymore.

Now, I was someone’s first choice.

His only choice.

And that was the only finish line I’d ever needed.

THE END