Refusing to forgive Elara wasn't about being petty. He was the one who took me to the hospital back then. He knows better than anyone how deeply I loathe my stepmother and her daughter, what Vittoria and Elara did to me in the years behind my father's back. Yet he chose to fall in love with Elara and align himself against me.
When Ansel reached out to take my hand, trying to broker peace with Elara, I slapped his hand away.
"Ansel, what gives you the right to ask me to forgive them?" I asked sharply.
Behind my father's back, they abused me, tricked him into despising me. And after Don Valente's passing, they didn't even bother with the funeral rites. In this world, that alone was an act of dishonor that should have severed every tie between our families permanently.
Ansel looked at the back of his hand, now red from where I had slapped him, and frowned in confusion and discontent.
"Serafina, I'm trying to help you. You're without parents now, and Vittoria and Elara are the only family you have left. Why hold on to the past and continue to suffer?"
"You need to move forward, don't you?"
Ansel's words were meant to be comforting, but the impatience I knew so well was already showing through his otherwise calm and composed face. But there was no longer the familiar tenderness and care in his voice. He spoke the way he spoke to soldiers who had disappointed him. Measured. Already finished with the conversation before it ended.
I could feel my heart, already battered and broken, shatter into dust. The pain was so intense it left me almost speechless.
Elara's eyes, brimming with feigned sorrow, held a glint of the same smugness and provocation as before. She stood in my doorway like she belonged there, in the compound that had been built on my father's treasury, wearing a ring from the man who had been promised to me.
"Serafina, it's alright if you can't forgive me. I'll keep repenting and feeling guilty until you accept me as your family."
"Get out."
I gripped the hallway wall to keep myself from shaking too violently.
Ansel's impatience was unmistakable.
"Serafina, why are you being so unreasonable? Nobody is perfect. Where has your tolerance gone?" He raised his tone, the way a man accustomed to obedience raises it when he doesn't receive any.
He had witnessed me being driven to the brink of suicide by Elara and her mother.