Início / Saint of No Forgiveness, Sinner of No Shame / Capítulo 1 - Capítulo 10

Todos os capítulos de Saint of No Forgiveness, Sinner of No Shame: Capítulo 1 - Capítulo 10

19 Capítulos

Chapter 1

They say Don Julian Marconi would burn the world for one tear of mine.Five years ago, at the Met Gala, he spent millions to hang emeralds around my neck and swore I was his Madonna. Five years later, beneath the velvet boxes of our anniversary, I found a lace strap soaked in sin—and a fresh, crimson smear on his collar that told me exactly whose bed he’d left.I smiled. I asked him to sign a blank sheet of paper. And that meant he was agreeing to whatever I wanted.He called it love. I called it the death warrant for his empire.In fifteen days, I finalized our divorce papers. I boarded the Stella d’Oro as Serena Cole and burned Celeste Marconi to ash on the deck. Then I vanished with his fortune, his power and the one secret that would destroy him.I was the saint he worshipped.Now I am the ghost who haunts him.No groveling. No forgiveness. No second chance.Just ashes....(Celeste's POV)At the sandalwood counter of L'Ultimo Affare—an establishment that deals in finalities both r

Chapter 2

The scream pierced the morning like a shard of glass through silk.I woke to the sound of shattering porcelain and a woman's voice, ragged as torn velvet, echoing across the Marconi estate. Through the French doors, I could see the gardens of the east villa—where Julian's second cousin, Marco, kept his mistress in that gilded cage of a guesthouse. Now his wife, Isabella, stood upon the manicured lawn in her nightgown, clutching a handful of love letters, her face ravaged by a decade of devotion turned to rot."You swore before the Blessed Mother!" she shrieked, seizing Marco's lapel. "Ten years I bore your children! And now you soil our bed with that puttana from the club?"Even at this hour, the estate was stirring. Gardeners froze with pruning shears in hand. The capo's men, usually invisible as shadows, shifted uneasily at the perimeter. Marco—a man who controlled three unions and a slice of the waterfront—looked desperate to drag his wife indoors before the famiglia's dirty laundry

Chapter 3

No one expected Julian to draw blood so quickly.The dining room at the Westchester estate fell into a silence so profound I could hear the grandfather clock swallowing seconds in the hallway. Julian stood with his napkin crumpled in his fist, his posture relaxed but his eyes flat and dangerous—the expression he wore when deciding whether a man lived or died."Try her again," he said softly to his mother, "and you try me. There will be no Sunday dinners. No christenings. No deathbed vigils. You will be dead to me, Madre, as surely as if I put the bullet in myself."Donna Isabella's pearls trembled against her throat. "Eat," she finally whispered, defeated.The meal proceeded like a funeral banquet. Silver clinked against porcelain in a rhythm of mourning. Isabella's glances cut me like shards of glass—sharp, cold, intentional. The fork tines scraped the plate."Other things we can overlook," Isabella said, setting her utensils down with the precision of a judge's gavel. "But blood, Ju

Chapter 4

The Long Island estate materialized from the fog like a mausoleum lit from within. Julian went to stable the Phantom in the garage—a ritual he never allowed the staff to perform, claiming the act of parking his own vehicle grounded him after the blood-pressure of the city.I entered through the service door, slipping off my heels on the marble. The silence was wrong. The great house should have been dim, hibernating, yet I detected light from the salon—firelight, and the sound of television laughter turned too loud, as if to mask other noises.Gia reclined upon the velvet divan, wearing a silk slip the color of bruised plums. She held a bowl of pomegranate seeds—the fruit of the underworld, I thought absurdly—and fed them to herself with fingers that trembled slightly. Not with cold. With aftermath.She did not rise when I entered. Instead, she stretched, cat-like, and the silk rode up her thighs to reveal the lace tops of stockings. Not the polka-dot torn scraps I had found in the car

Chapter 5

I spun too quickly, the heel of my pump catching on the carpet.The phone in my palm felt like a live grenade. I thumbed the end call, the click obscenely loud in the silence.Julian was upon me before I could breathe, his fingers vising around my wrist, his eyes wild, searching. "Celeste," he rasped, his voice cracking. "Who was that? Who is leaving?"I forced my face into stillness, a mask of porcelain serenity. "A friend from finishing school," I said, my tone light as chiffon. "Bianca. She's relocating to Paris, wants to say goodbye before she goes. A final luncheon."He stared at me, his chest heaving. His fear was a physical thing—a smell, sharp and metallic, like blood in water. He had not suspected me capable of deception. In his cosmology, I was the fixed star, the constant, the one element that did not shift.He crushed me against him, his heart hammering against my ribs like a man trying to break out of a coffin. "I thought it was you," he whispered into my hair, his voice r

Chapter 6

"Still," a third chimed in, cautious but cruel, "risky, no? Playing both roles. One slip, and the Madonna finds out.""She won't," Vincenzo snorted. "We've got it handled. The music, the guards at the door. She sat right there, eating almond tarts, while he was... occupied. Not a clue. These society wives, they see what they want to see. She thinks he's a saint. We know he's just a man with a man's needs.""Needs," the scarred one repeated, savoring the word like a fine cut of meat. "Yeah. And Gia's been meeting those needs since spring. Conservative little thing upstairs—probably sleeps in a nightgown with a cross around her neck. Meanwhile, downstairs..."They didn't finish the sentence. They didn't need to. The world tilted. The sconces on the walls bled into one another, gold becoming red, red becoming black. I had thought I was the only fool. I had thought I was the only blind one.But no.They all knew. Every man who had bowed to me, who had called me Donna, who had served me ta

Chapter 7

The day of my discharge from the Marconi Medical Center coincided with the anniversary of my birth—or rather, the anniversary of the woman I used to be. Julian had commandeered the Rainbow Room, that art-deco cathedral perched atop the Rockefeller empire. The walls were draped in black velvet shot through with silver, the color of our family crest. The guests were not merely friends, but soldiers, captains, the elder statesmen of the famiglia.They brought gifts. A Cartier tiara from the Columbo family, emeralds from the union bosses, a vintage Beretta from Vincenzo, its pearl handle engraved with my initials. I accepted them with the smile of a queen receiving tribute from conquered territories, though I felt nothing. These were the same men who had laughed in the wine cellar. The same men who had turned the music up while Julian defiled our sacrament downstairs.I stood at the center of the room. Julian never left my side. His hand rested upon the small of my back, burning through t

Chapter 8

The Long Island estate materialized from the twilight like a mausoleum waking from sleep. I had barely stepped through the French doors when the telephone began its shrill, insistent scream.I lifted the receiver. His voice came through."Celeste," he said, and I heard the exhaustion, the guilt, the terrible tenderness that he mistook for love. "Forgive me. Gia is... unwell. She requires observation, and I—I gave her brother my word. My oath. I cannot abandon her."I stood in the foyer, looking up at the chandelier that had witnessed our wedding waltz, the crystals now catching only the dying light. "I understand," I said, my voice a calm sea. "Stay with her, Julian. Care for her. You have all the time in the world now."All the time you stole from me. All the time you will now spend in the hell I am constructing for you.The line clicked dead.Then my phone buzzed—a notification, a video file from an unknown number. Gia. Of course. She could not resist the final pirouette.I opened it

Chapter 9

The Stella d'Oro groaned against the swell of the Atlantic, a leviathan waking from slumber. I sat in the narrow cabin, the porthole casting a coin of moonlight upon the writing desk—a circle of silver so sharp it could have been cut by a blade. My hand hovered over the stationery provided by the shipping line, heavy cream paper embossed with golden anchors.I should have been sleeping. Serena Cole required rest, required the strength to step onto foreign soil and build a cathedral from ash.Then, the ship's satellite phone buzzed.I had given the number to only one person. Not Julian—never Julian—but Maria, the housekeeper who had taught me to shoot a Beretta and who had wept when I gave her the pearls. She had promised to wait three days before contacting me, unless—Unless the house burned.Unless he died.Unless she came.I lifted the receiver. "Maria?"Static. Then her voice, hushed, cracked, the sound of a woman whispering in a mausoleum. "Signora... he has returned,yesterday—no,

Chapter 10

The kiln in Positano was extremely hot, its interior glowing like a furnace. I stood in a coarse linen apron, working as a ceramic artist rather than the wealthy woman I once was. I had been digging clay from the Amalfi cliffs and shaping it into vessels.I was making a vessel. Not an ordinary vase or bowl, but a hollow form shaped like a womb. It was the third piece in a triptych I had conceived in the sleepless hours between midnight and dawn: The Madonna, The Whore, and The Empty Womb.Then, the phone buzzed.Not the satellite phone this time, but the encrypted line I had established through the Swiss account—a number only Maria had, and only for documents.I wiped my hands on the linen, leaving ochre smears like old blood. The screen showed a PDF attachment. No message. Just a title, typed in Maria's hesitant English: From the desk of Gia Carbone.I opened it.It was a photograph of a receipt. CVS Pharmacy, Lexington Avenue, dated four months prior. "dated eight weeks ago... Octobe

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