The Romano Bride

Chapter 5

ISABELLA

We stood for a moment without speaking, listening to distant laughter that didn’t sound like ours. When we returned, the room had shifted just enough to feel like a new scene. My father had taken his seat again. The envoy had stacked bullet points into neat piles. Antonio stared holes into the varnish. My place waited, the ring winking quietly in the light.

Adrian watched me take my seat like a person noting a constellation. Not possessive; not disinterested. A cartographer mapping out his future weather.

He lifted his glass. A gesture so small it would have been missed if I were not watching him with every old nerve awake. “To clarity,” he said, and only I heard it.

I didn’t lift mine. “Later,” I mouthed, the smallest shape of a word. His gaze acknowledged it like an appointment set.

The envoy clapped twice, not loudly, the signal for the final notes. “Photographs,” he announced, and staff materialized with the bland backdrop men like him prefer: white, gray, nothing that could be misread, nothing that suggested a territory, nothing that could be used in court.

My father took the position he has always favored in pictures: slightly angled, hands light on the back of a chair, the posture of a man no one can move. My mother balanced their shape. Antonio stayed far enough to be included and excluded at once. And then they placed me beside Adrian, as if the furniture knew.

We did not touch. The space between us was both inches and years. The camera blinked. The envoy gave the smile of a man satisfied by silhouettes.

“Once more,” he said. “Closer.”

Adrian’s fingertip barely brushed mine. The camera did not catch it. I did. Memory screamed. I did not move.

The flash burned, then died.

When the photographs were done, the staff began the gentle dismantling of a performance: plates lifted, candles pinched out, doors opening to absorb conversations into hallways that would carry them elsewhere. My father murmured to the envoy; my mother spoke to a woman whose job was to make other women look composed. Antonio disappeared like a boy who believes exits can save him. Sophia hovered, then sought refuge in the shadow of a column.

Adrian remained seated, eyes on me as if neither of us had permission to leave before the scene wrote its last line. He set his glass down with care. “Ms. Romano,” he said, public voice, appropriate distance, “thank you for your grace.”

I arranged my napkin into a impossible crease, then let it go. “Mr. Salvatore,” I replied, a mirror. “You make it easy.”

His mouth tilting was not a smile. “Do I?”

“Tonight,” I said. “Tonight is easy.”

“And later?” he asked, quiet enough to belong to the space between us, not the room.

“Later,” I said, letting the word carry weight it had earned, “is mine.”

The air changed. He understood the appointment. I felt the old ache push against my ribs — the urge to ask, to accuse, to demand. I held it where it could not spill in front of my father.

From the doorway, Vittorio’s voice cut the scene cleanly. “Isabella.”

I turned. He didn’t need to say anything else. His eyes gave instructions: you will accept congratulations, you will stand for the ritual blessing, you will kiss your mother’s cheek and fold the night into a shape that can pass as peace.

I rose. Adrian rose a heartbeat later, as if conceding the cue. We moved into the doorway together, detached and tethered at once.

My father lifted his hand over my head, two fingers drawing the sign he pretended he believed. “A house is strong when its daughter is strong,” he said, and the men around him treated it like scripture.

He placed his palm lightly on my crown. The weight was more symbolic than felt. “You will carry us well.”

I did not bow. “I will carry who needs carrying.”

For a second — a flash, a glint — pride sparked in his eyes. Or respect. Or amusement that I had twisted his line and made it mine. He removed his hand. “Five minutes,” he said again, which meant I could disappear for air and return with my face intact.

I stepped away from the doorway. Adrian pivoted slightly, not to follow yet, but to mark where the path would converge later.

At the threshold, I turned back once. He looked at me like a man standing on a shore watching a storm collect out at sea, knowing it will make landfall and knowing he will walk into it anyway.

Later, I promised him in my head. Later, you will answer every question you taught me to ask.

The corridor swallowed me whole. The house exhaled. Somewhere behind me, crystal chimed; somewhere ahead, a door clicked.

**

Finally, it was just us.

The doors closed, the hum of voices fading until only silence remained. My pulse thundered in my ears, louder than the quiet between us.

“You lied to me,” I said, my voice shaking, brittle with ten years of rage clawing its way out.

Adrian didn’t move. His gaze held mine, steady, unreadable, the kind of stare that stripped me bare without a single word.

“You disappeared,” I spat, stepping closer, the floor cold beneath my heels. “You left me standing in the dark, waiting for you. Do you know what happened to me?”

His jaw tightened, the faintest twitch betraying the weight of my words, but he said nothing.

“I waited for you.”

The words broke, my throat raw, the silence swallowing them whole.

“Isabella.” His voice was low, a single word, heavy enough to stop me.

I froze. The boy I loved. The man I hated. The Don who commanded fear.

I laughed bitterly, the sound cracking in the quiet. “But that was all in the past.”

He reached for my hand, slow, deliberate, the movement precise like a man who never acted without calculation. I pulled back like his touch was fire.

“And I don’t care what you want,” I whispered, fury trembling in my throat. “You lied to me. You left me. I will never forget that.”

His silence pressed against me, heavier than words, filling the room like smoke.

“Do you know why I’m here?” My voice sharpened, cutting through the quiet. “I am here because if I refuse, Sophia will marry you instead.”

Something flickered across his face — dark, sharp, gone before I could name it.

“I would never touch her,” he said, voice flat, final, the kind of vow that sounded more like a threat.

“Then don’t touch me,” I snapped, my words slicing the air. “This is a marriage for convenience, and it will remain like that for the rest of our lives.”

The silence that followed was suffocating. He didn’t argue. He didn’t explain. He only stood there, watching me, his stillness louder than any defense.

And I realized the war between us wasn’t going to be fought with just words. It was going to be fought with silence, with stares, with the weight of everything unsaid.