A Bride for the Wrong Brother 의 모든 챕터: 챕터 21 - 챕터 24

(Alondra's POV)The cafe was on a small side street off the Gran Vía.It was the kind of place I had loved before my life had a "before" and an "after." A wide window full of soft morning light. Wicker chairs out on the pavement. A blackboard propped by the door with the day's specials written in a curling hand. The smell of fresh bread reaching out into the street the way my father's bakery used to reach out into our own.The driver pulled up at the corner and I told him I would walk the last block.He did not like it. I could see him not liking it in the small set of his jaw. But I had been Dante's wife in name for over a month now, and somewhere along the way I had learned the small trick of holding a man's eye until he understood that "no" meant "no", and he nodded once and let me out without an argument.I walked the last block on my own.The morning air was cold and clean on my face. The pavement was busy in the way Madrid is busy at that hour, women with bags, men with coffees,

(Alondra's POV)The spoon sat in the sauce.A small dark stain was spreading slowly into the white linen around it. I could not lift my eyes from the place where it had landed. I could feel three sets of them on me at once, the patriarch's slow and weighing, Carmen's bright with her own cruelty, Dante's I could not read because I was not brave enough yet to look up.The room was so quiet I could hear the wine settle in Carmen's glass.She lifted it to her mouth.I watched the small motion from under my lashes, and I watched her swallow, and set the glass back down with a small satisfied click.Then I heard the soft sound of a fork being laid down on the edge of a plate. It was only that the room had gone so still around it that everyone in it heard it as if he had thrown the fork against the wall. Dante set the fork down at a clean exact angle on the white china, he lifted the napkin from his lap, and folded it carefully along its existing creases, and he laid it down beside his plat