Chapter 13: A Ghost called Mondragon
1086 Words
~Isabella’s POV~
Like a statue caught between time and memory, I stood rooted to the gleaming marble floors of the Mondragon ballroom, staring at the man I once vowed to love forever.
My pulse pounded violently in my ears, and my breath hitched. Robert......so achingly familiar, so devastatingly unchanged. He still wore that signature smirk, the one that used to make my knees weak, now only made bile rise to the back of my throat.
His hand was still outstretched.
Waiting.
Expectant.
As though I was just another socialite he had to politely greet. And in a way, I was. Isabella Cassagrande.
A stranger. A ghost in the flesh. The very woman he couldn't bring himself to love.…and the same woman he destroyed.
My heart was screaming. You know me. You broke me.
But his eyes didn’t falter. Didn’t flicker. Just the same cold, unreadable blue I had once drowned in.
I felt myself slipping back into the spiral. Back into Melissa. The soft laughter in the ballroom grew distorted, muffled, as if I was underwater. My vision blurred, memory colliding with present, past choking the breath from my lungs.
Our wedding on these very grounds.
The night that changed everything, how the glistening lights flickering against his face when he coldly told me we were over.
“I choose her. Jodie completes me,” he had said. Just like that. As if I had been some failed project he was politely discarding.
“Isabella?” Dante’s voice, sharp but laced with concern, pulled me back. His hand pressed lightly against my back. “Are you alright?”
I blinked fast, swallowing the lump that had risen to my throat. “Yes,” I croaked, forcing a tight, glassy smile. “Yes, of course.”
My hand moved instinctively toward Robert’s, and for a moment, I wished I could slap it away. Instead, I placed mine in his.
He leaned forward and pressed a light kiss against the back of my hand.
Formal. Distant. Dead.
“Welcome to our home,” he said again, his tone devoid of any depth.
“The pleasure is all mine, Robert,” I managed, my voice a thin, reedy sound, different from the storm raging within me. The irony was a bitter taste on my tongue.
I pulled my hand back gently, fingers trembling, praying neither of them noticed. But Dante’s eyes lingered on me a second longer than they should’ve. As if trying to read between the lines of my strained poise.
Just then a husky masculine voice, boomed from the stage,
“And now, if I may have everyone’s attention!” silencing the murmur of conversations.
I turned slowly as the spotlight beamed down on the MC, dressed in a midnight tux. “Tonight, we are gathered here not only to celebrate Mr. Robert Mondragon’s success in expanding the Mondragon empire overseas, but also to officially announce the engagement between Robert and the dazzling Miss Jodie Sanchez, soon to be Mrs.Mondragon”.
Hearty applause erupted like thunder among the guests. And I felt the earth shift beneath my feet.
Engagement?
I turned sharply toward Robert, who was now standing beside her.....Jodie. Blonde, poised, radiant in a pale gold gown that clung to her like it was spun from silk and ambition. She smiled, waving delicately like royalty.
My body went cold.
Of course.
This was the reason for the night. This was why I had been brought back into this house of terrors. Not just to dance with ghosts of my past, but to watch my ex husband marry the woman he once threw me away for.
How poetic.
Dante, unaware of the chaos in my chest, leaned in and whispered, “They’re quite the golden couple, huh?”
I laughed softly. Bitterly. “Yes. Quite.”
I remembered that night again. The screaming. The crying. The way Robert refused to meet my eyes as he turned away leaving me to wallow in my pain. And the crash… the fire.
If he hadn’t ended things the way he did, I would’ve never driven out that night. I would’ve never lost control on that road. My face, my identity, my life none of it would have gone up in smoke.
I stared at him now, clinking champagne glasses with Jodie, grinning like a man who had everything. And he did, didn’t he?
A fiancée. A company. A clean conscience.
Because Melissa Mondragon had died. And Isabella Cassagrande was just another elegant nobody in a crowd of preening ghosts.
“But it's such a shame she has no idea what she's getting into”. Dante mumbled, but I couldn't decipher it's meaning.
Huh? What was that?. I exclaimed.
“Nothing, don't worry about it. Let's just enjoy the rest of the evening”. he said, brushing it off.
I clutched my glass tightly and followed Dante deeper into the ballroom. The music had swelled again, elegant violins weaving through whispered gossip and clinking silverware.
It wasn’t long before I caught snippets of conversations around me. The kinds of whispers only privileged people dared speak aloud.
“Such a tragic end for her… burned alive, wasn’t it? The poor girl. What was her name again? Mel?”.
“Melissa! Melissa Mondragon. She tried too hard, if you ask me. Never quite fit in.”
“Well, she wasn’t one of us, was she?”
A high-pitched laugh.
“Robert was always too kind for his own good. Took pity on her. She was pretty in a desperate kind of way.”
I swallowed the venom forming on my tongue. My fingers trembled around the glass’s stem. They spoke of me as though I were a character in some old, tragic play. Some foolish girl who flew too close to the sun and got burned.
They didn’t know the truth.
They didn’t know I had clawed my way back, piece by piece. Flesh by flesh. Nerve by nerve.
And now I stood here, wrapped in expensive silk, wearing the face of a stranger, watching them all from behind a mask.
They didn’t know I was still here.
That I had returned.
That the fire didn’t consume me.
It created me.
I turned to face the glittering crowd of snakes, raising my champagne glass like a queen. My smile was elegant. Perfect. Deceptive.
They buried Melissa Mondragon.
But Isabella Cassagrande?
She was going to burn this place to the ground.
And this time, she would make sure everyone watched.
- Writer
