Page 126 of Wrong Marriage. Right Groom
I couldn’t see his face, but I could hear it in everything—the way the past still sat in his throat like broken glass.
“I remember my father looking at me,” he said. “He told me to be strong. My mother... she was crying, but she still whispered to me. She said they were about to die—but if I survived, I had to protect my younger brother.”
A pause.
Longer this time.
“Bruno was ten.”
The name softened something in his voice, just for a fraction of a second—enough to make it more painful.
“Our family was mafia,” Rafael continued, harsher again, like he hated the softness. “Yes. That’s the truth. But I had never watched anyone die before that day. Not like that. Not helpless.”
The car turned. I felt the shift in motion.
“I tried to run to them,” he said suddenly, voice rising. “I screamed until my throat tore. I fought the men holding me—bit at their hands, their grip on my shoulders. I begged them to let me reach my parents.”
His hand tightened briefly somewhere near the steering wheel—I could hear it in the leather creak.
“Your father’s men held me down like I was nothing. Like I was an animal they could restrain and forget.”
My chest tightened painfully.
The silence that followed was full of something I couldn’t name.
Grief. Rage. Memory still bleeding after twenty years.
I sat frozen in the passenger seat, blind eyes open but seeing nothing, as the man beside me drove through the night carrying a past I had unknowingly stepped into.
And for the first time since this marriage began—
I realized I might not be trapped with a stranger.
I might be trapped with someone who had been broken long before he ever met me.
The car surged forward, faster now, the engine’s growl deepening into something almost angry.
I tightened my grip on the door handle until my knuckles ached.
The world outside was nothing to me—only motion, vibration, and the suffocating certainty that I was trapped in a sealed space with a man who harbored deep, unforgivable hatred for my parents.
My blind eyes stayed open anyway, as if forcing them to see could make sense of the darkness.
Rafael’s voice continued, low and carved from something raw.
“I offered myself,” he said. “I told your father to kill me instead. I said I’d do anything—anything—if he let my parents live.”
His voice hardened again, like he was forcing himself through it.
“But... he just laughed.”
My stomach twisted violently.
“I watched the life drain from their faces,” he said. “My protectors. My entire world. Gone in minutes because of your father.”
I pressed a hand to my mouth, swallowing hard against the nausea rising in my throat.
My chest felt like it was collapsing inward, every breath too small to fill the space inside me.
