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Chapter 4
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You Were Only Passing Through Chapter 7
After that, neither Brooke nor Ryan surfaced again.I knew my father had put the family's weight behind it quietly. Nobody who hurt me was ever going to walk away clean.The night of the banquet, I wore black velvet.High neck, fitted waist, floor-length skirt. The lead below my collarbone was covered completely, with only a short length of silver connector catching the light.Luca drove me. At the hotel entrance he came around and opened my door and said it low."Papa's already here. He says go in on your own.""Got it."I gathered the skirt and stepped out. Three-inch heels, and marble polished up like a mirror underfoot.The lobby of the Astoria Grand was all gold, chandeliers coming down forty feet out of the dome, bright enough to make your head swim.Two lines of attendants stood at the ballroom doors and bowed together as I came up."Miss Bellandi, this way."The room was already full when I walked in.Silver and candlesticks down the length of the tables, cigars and
You Were Only Passing Through Chapter 6
The day Brooke came to apologize, she came with a production.Her father drove her himself. A silver Mercedes pulled up at the gate with the trunk stuffed full of gifts.He was in a good suit with his hair combed flat, but the collar of his shirt was ringed with sweat.Brooke came in behind him in a plain dress, wearing so little makeup you could barely see it.Nothing like the girl I remembered standing in the middle of that hall with her arms folded, laughing.She caught sight of me the moment she came through the door and her whole body flinched.I'd changed into a high-necked velvet gown with my hair up, my face completely uncovered.The collar hid the pacing patch. All you could see was one thin lead running along my collarbone.Her father bent almost double, his voice shaking."Miss Bellandi."I've brought my daughter to apologize to you. What happened that night was ignorance on her part, and our whole family accepts the blame."He tugged Brooke's sleeve and she dropp
You Were Only Passing Through Chapter 5
On the third morning, Ryan turned up at the gates of the estate.He had on a shirt washed pale, cuffs rolled twice, hair sticking up in every direction like he'd been standing out in the wind.There was bruised skin under his eyes and stubble on his jaw.The soldati on the gate wouldn't let him in. So he stood there, on the other side of the iron, staring up at the second-floor window.I was at that window with coffee, tablet beside me, the message file I'd put together the night before up on the screen.Sixty-seven pages.Page one was our messages."Brooke says something's off about that cardiac thing. Are you faking being sick again?"Can you stop using your health as an excuse?"Brooke's pre-med. Why would she be wrong?"Page twenty-six was his birthday."Brooke's present was worth a lot more than yours. Can you stop humiliating me with that cabinet full of cheap perfume?"Page fifty-three was last month."What kind of family do you actually come from? Why can't you peo
You Were Only Passing Through Chapter 4
The whole hall went dead silent.Nobody moved. Ryan was staring at the crest on my father's lapel.Gold. An olive branch wrapped around a scepter. The Bellandi crest.If you knew what it meant, nobody had to tell you what the man wearing it could do.My father's eyes came off me and settled on the half-length of torn silk in Brooke's hand."You tore that?"Brooke took a step back, caught her heel on the step, and nearly went over."It wasn't me. I didn't.""I'll ask you one more time. Did you tear my daughter's dress?"He didn't raise his voice. It went in slow, like a knife dipped in poison, and stopped at her throat.Brooke went white and couldn't get a single word out.Ryan pulled in a breath, stepped up, and put her behind him."Sir. Don Bellandi. I'm Ryan, Alessia's boyfriend."I think there's been a misunderstanding tonight."My father looked at the two of them pressed together and laughed, low and cold."A misunderstanding."You tell me you're my daughter's boyfr
You Were Only Passing Through Chapter 3
Everything in me went cold.Making me strip in front of the entire graduating class was the humiliation. That was the whole point of it.Brooke crouched down and put her mouth near my ear, and her voice dropped to something close to a hiss."Your heart hurts, doesn't it? Look at your face. You're just about at the end of it."Your dignity or your life. You pick."I bit down on my lip and kept my head low, and I could still feel a couple hundred pairs of eyes on me.Ryan's brows pulled together again."Brooke, that's too far."She's my girlfriend. You make her undress in front of everyone, how does that make me look afterward?"How it made him look. Not whether I was telling the truth, not what I wanted.No trust. Nobody at my back.I laughed at myself somewhere down inside. This was the man I'd loved for years.Brooke's face stiffened at being told no, and then she let out another big sigh."Ryan, I'm doing this for her."She pulls a stunt like this at the graduation ball
You Were Only Passing Through Chapter 2
The whole hall went dead quiet.Panic finally hit the faces around us, and the crowd started to churn."God, she's not actually doing this, is she?""Where's her phone? Somebody call an ambulance."Ryan's whole face changed. He just stood there staring at me.It took a hard cough out of me to bring him back, and then he started walking my way."Alessia, don't scare me."He was almost to me when Brooke laughed again."Oh, that's good. That is really good acting."She got in front of him, opened her phone, and pulled up a form."I had someone look into it ahead of time. This is Alessia's health screening from this semester."Look at the internal medicine line. Heart and lung auscultation, no abnormality."She tilted her head at me, and there was something sly behind it."Alessia, if you really took a bullet to the heart and spent ten hours in the ICU, you're telling me a physical wouldn't catch that?"Ryan stopped moving.His eyes went from my bloodless face down to the re
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