After Five Years of PTSD, The Don Heir Begged Me Back

I married Dario Vellari in place of the true Salvatore heiress.

Dario was the only heir of the Vellari Famiglia, the one with the severe PTSD.

Five years of marriage. He never slept with me.

Then Bianca came home from Boston, the real heiress, and everything changed.

In front of her, Dario reined in his temper. The rooms he had never let me enter, the things he had never let me touch - Bianca walked through them as if they were her own.

I thought, then, that I was finished caring for Dario.

But after I left, he scoured every corner of the northern hemisphere looking for me.

Said if the bride wasn’t me, he would never marry at all.

Before I turned seven, my life was a hard one.

The convent's coarse cloth rubbed my skin raw, and one extra bite of stale bread meant the nuns would beat my palms with a wooden plank.

Then the Salvatore family came for me.

The man who smelled of cologne asked if I'd like to come with him. I asked if I could have hot soup.

He laughed and said of course.

I nodded without a second thought.

Being their adopted daughter was no easy life either.

I slept in the unheated servants' quarters in winter. No one in the house ever met my eyes.

But everyone said I was lucky.

"An orphan turned future Donna — what good fortune."

Bianca liked to hide my clothes. Each time I was punished for being late while searching for them, she stood off to the side, giggling.

"Don't think you can really replace me. You're just marrying a madman in my place."

She'd been betrothed since childhood to Dario Vellari, the Vellari heir with the severe PTSD — but Dario broke things when his episodes hit, and sometimes broke people. The Salvatores couldn't bear to send their own daughter into that, so they took me in.

The summer I turned fifteen, I met someone in the garden.

He was sitting alone on a stone bench, an old pistol disassembled across his knees. His hand had caught on something — there was a cut across his palm, blood welling up bead by bead.

He didn't seem to feel it. He just kept tinkering with the metal pieces, head down.

I pulled an old handkerchief from my pocket — washed soft and pale — knelt down, and pressed it against the cut.

"Doesn't it hurt? Bleeding that much?"

He looked up.

His eyes were like a deep autumn lake — no light, no bottom. Just for a second. Then he lowered his head again and held out the barrel of the pistol. His voice was cold. "Hold this."

I held the barrel quietly. He looked at me for a long time at the end. Then he stood up and walked away without thanking me.

Something stirred in my chest.

He was beautiful.

But why did he look so unhappy?

Later I learned that was Dario.