The Mafia Donna’s Bridal Escape Night Chapter 10

The Mafia Donna’s Bridal Escape Night Chapter 10

The day of the hearing, I saw Joren in the courthouse corridor.

Six months had changed him. He was thinner. Much thinner.

The shirt he used to keep immaculate was badly wrinkled. Dark circles bruised the skin beneath his

eyes.

He stood at a distance. Didn’t approach.

Only after a nurse wheeled Grandma Elise away to the restroom did he call out to me, barely above a

whisper.

“Lyra.”

I stopped walking.

His voice shook. “Just a few words. If you don’t want to hear them, I’ll go.”

I didn’t say yes. I didn’t say no.

Joren took a slip of paper from his pocket.

A note from four years ago.

Back then, he’d been in the ugliest stretch of the fight for his inheritance. At his lowest point, he’d broken down crying and asked me what would happen if he never made it.

I’d written on that slip of paper: “Then we’ll live an ordinary life. Just don’t lie to me, and don’t leave me behind.”

Two simple things. He hadn’t managed either one.

“The penthouse is sold.”

“Everything that’s yours has been transferred to your lawyers. I didn’t know what to do with the wedding dress. It’s still there.”

“Liora and I are done. Completely. And everyone who was part of that night – I haven’t intervened for any of them.”

He told me everything he’d done over the past six months, rushing through it like he was afraid I’d walk away before he finished.

“I know none of this makes up for anything.”

“Lyra, I just wanted you to know that I finally understand where I went wrong.”

“Do you?”

I looked at him calmly.

“That night in the rain, out past the city, I fell so hard I couldn’t stand. I called you seven times When you finally showed up, the first thing you did wasn’t take me to the hospital. You asked if Liora was okay. If I’d scared her.”

“The day I lost the baby, I told you it was all right. Not because I didn’t blame you. Because you were

crying so hard that I felt sorry for you instead.”

“She moved into our home. Wore my clothes. Slept in our bed. It’s not that I didn’t have limits.”

“It’s that every time I tried to say something bothered me, you told me I was overreacting. Told me I couldn’t take a joke. Told me how much you’d sacrificed for me.”

“You turned everything you ever did for me into a debt I could never repay.”

Joren’s tears finally fell.

“I’m sorry.”

“If that night… if I’d opened the door the first time you asked, would we still be getting married?”

I thought about it. “Maybe. But that doesn’t mean we would have been happy.”

“I would have just kept enduring. Until the next Liora came along, or the next person I was expected

to make room for.”

“That door just let me see the ending early.”

“Go home, Joren. We don’t need to see each other again.”