Gone After The 28th Wedding Chapter 05
Vincent’s POV
The moment I crossed the threshold of the Romano
estate, something hit me in the chest like a boot.
I went airborne. My knees cracked against the granite floor. I tasted blood before I’d registered what happened.
“Father-”
I looked up from my knees.
“You don’t need to find her.” His voice was the voice he used for verdicts. “The engagement has been dissolved.”
“On whose authority?” I grabbed for the floor and pushed myself up. “That contract was sealed with her parents‘ lives. She would never-”
“Vincent.”
My mother’s voice came from the shadows, shaking with something she was barely holding back. “She didn’t walk away because she had to.”
“This time, Cassandra ended it herself.”
The room went silent inside my head.
Herself.
The woman who showed up to a wedding rehearsal with three broken ribs. The woman who threw her body over mine when the bomb went off. That woman had looked at everything we had and chosen to let go?
Once, I would have celebrated. That had been the
whole point – twenty–eight staged accidents, all designed to break her will until she walked away and I could marry Amelia with clean hands.
Now it felt like someone had carved something out of me and left the cavity open.
“She’s lying.” I heard myself say it. “It’s a tactic. She
wants me to come after her-”
My mother slapped me across the face.
I went still. In thirty years, she had never raised her voice at me. Her elegant eyes were red, threaded with something I’d never seen in them before.
Hatred.
“You animal.” Her voice split. “How dare you ask where she is.”
“In that ambush twelve years ago, Cassandra’s mother was blown apart protecting us. Her father took twenty–seven bullets for your back. Twenty–seven.” She pressed a hand to her chest like she was holding herself together. “She lost everyone. We were her only family. And you – for a woman who lied to your face from the beginning – you tried to kill her.”
I kept my head down and let it come.
She was right. I knew she was right. I didn’t want absolution. I just needed a location.
“I’ll spend the rest of my life making it right,” I said. “Just tell me where she is.”
“Making it right.” My mother laughed – a hollow, wrecked sound. “Vincent, she came to me on her
knees two weeks ago, begging to borrow money. Do you know why?”
“Because she has kidney failure. End stage.”
The floor dropped out from under me.
I crawled toward my mother. I wasn’t aware I was crying until my vision blurred. “You’re lying. You have to be. She was standing in line for hours — she was working at the fish market – her body was—“
The words died in my throat.
Her face at the seafood market. The hollowed cheeks.
The ruined hands.
Vincent… even just part of it… I’m really sick.
And I’d stood in a restaurant and clasped an eight–million–dollar necklace around Amelia’s throat.
I’d frozen Cassandra’s account. I’d dragged her onto a surgical table and taken her kidney.
The nausea hit like a wave. I sat on the floor with my hands in my hair and made a sound I didn’t recognise.
“Tell me where she is.” I grabbed my father’s leg. “I’ll find the best doctors in the world. I’ll spend everything I have. Just tell me-”
“Get off me.”
He shook me loose. Then he nodded at the side door.
Two bodyguards dragged Amelia in and dropped her on the carpet.
“Let go of me I’m going to be the Romano wife
“She saw me and lunged. “Vincent, help me, your father’s lost his mind-
The main screen on the far wall flickered to life.
“Let’s talk about your angel,” my father said.
The footage was grainy, shot covertly. A doctor’s office. Amelia perched on the desk, a thin cigarette between her fingers, no trace of any heart condition on her face.
Across from her sat Dr. Victor – the physician who had handed me Amelia’s medical files.
“Keep it clean.” She exhaled a slow ring of smoke. “Falsify the report. Say my kidneys failed from the overdose and I need a transplant. Do that, and I’ll cover your thirty million in gambling debts.”
The doctor wiped his forehead. “But Miss Amelia… Cassandra’s kidneys are already compromised. If we operate without treating her first, she’ll die on the table-”
Amelia’s hand connected with his face before he finished the sentence.
“Then she dies. Good. One less person standing between me and Vincent.”
The room was completely silent.
I turned my head slowly and looked at the woman crumpled on the carpet. All the colour had left her face. She was shaking so hard I could hear it.
I opened my mouth. When the words finally came, they barely made a sound.
“Was any of it real?”