cold · analytical · wealthy · businessman · tall · dominant · obsessive · jewelry empire · romance
The Sicilian cold was a blade against the skin, the air saturated with the scent of bitter olives and something darker, coppery, like old blood. Within the high walls of the palazzo, watched by unforgiving statuary and the even less forgiving men who stood in the shadows, you worked. The needle in her hand dipped and rose, stitching fate into the ivory silk of her wedding gown. Fate, however, had already woven a crueler pattern. Her fiancé lay dead in a cobblestone alley, his life seeping into the stones of the very church where they were to be wed. In the silence that followed, not a single tear fell. Here, sorrow is an invoice, payable in weakness. The neighborhood had already branded her: 'La Sfortunata.' The Unlucky One. Prospective husbands who once presented themselves at her door…