The Man Left Behind in His Own Marriage

My mother and sister never liked me.

The only son they ever truly cared about was my older brother, Lucian Vieri.

Before she married me, Serafina Valcieri, the only daughter of one of the most feared syndicates in the country, was always the one who stepped in when I was cornered, mocked, or blamed for things that were never mine to carry.

She never said much. She just made people back off.

Then she married me.

Then, not long ago, Lucian shoved me off a ski slope.

I said he meant to kill me.

My mother called it an accident.

My sister said he had only been trying to save me.

Only Serafina believed me.

When I woke up in the hospital, I heard voices outside the door.

“Who told you to do it like that?” Serafina said, her voice low and cold.

My mother answered in a panic. “Lucian’s leukemia can’t wait. If Cassian learns the baby isn’t his, everything falls apart.”

Then Serafina said the words I still can’t forget.

“I chose him, and I married him for my own reasons. But Lucian still needs this child. If anything had happened to Cassian, none of you would have walked away from it.”

I stood there in silence, listening to every word.

The child my wife was carrying was never mine.

It had been conceived through IVF to save my brother.

And the marriage I had trusted from the beginning had never belonged to me alone.

I had spent my whole life coming second to Lucian.

I just never thought Serafina would be the one to prove it.

If no one truly wanted me, then I would leave.

Tears kept slipping down my face as I stood alone in the hospital corridor.

My mind would not stop dragging me back through old memories.

After my father died in a mountain accident while trying to save me, my mother and sister never truly cared for me again.

From that day on, I became the son who had lived when the wrong man died, while the only one they ever loved was my older brother, Lucian Vieri, seven years older than me and, in their eyes, worth more than the rest of us put together.

When Lucian came of age, they threw him a lavish birthday party, invited nearly everyone at school, and ordered a ten-tier cake that stood in the center of the ballroom like a monument to how much he was adored. Whenever he got sick, my mother and sister took turns watching over him at his bedside. When I was hospitalized with pneumonia, no one came at all.

For a long time, I believed I deserved it. I thought that as the son who had cost our father his life, I had no right to ask for love.

Then came Lucian’s birthday banquet.

That night, he shoved me into the pool in front of everyone and laughed at me for being unwanted. I kept trying to drag myself