The Mafia Princess He Abandoned Became An Art Queen Chapter 07
The next day, he came again.
This time, he left a bouquet of red roses outside my door.
I saw them on my way downstairs. I didn’t pick them up.
On the third day, it was white roses, with a card that said, “I’m sorry.”
I bent down, picked up the card, folded it in half twice, and dropped it in the trash.
I left the flowers.
Fourth day.
Fifth day.
He showed up at seven every morning without fail.
I treated him like a ghost.
One evening, I met some classmates for a book club in the Latin Quarter. He followed me from twenty paces back the whole way.
I sat in the bookshop for two hours. He stood across the street in the wind for two hours.
When I came out, I glanced at him. His lips were blue from the cold and his collar was turned up, but he still smiled at me.
I turned toward the metro.
He didn’t follow.
That night, I saw him again from the balcony.
Under the streetlight, hands in his pockets, head tipped back toward my floor.
I closed the curtains, turned off the lights, and went to bed.
Friday evening, I was walking home from class when he stepped into my path.
“Ten minutes,” he said quietly. “Just ten minutes.”
I checked my watch and nodded.
The wind along the Seine was fierce.
The surface of the river was shattered into strips of light, and the lamps on the bridge in the distance scattered gold across the water.
Mario pulled a red velvet box from his coat.
He opened it. Inside was a diamond ring.
“Come back with me. Let’s start over.”
I looked down at the ring.
The diamond winked under the streetlight. Bright enough.
“Mario.”
He looked up.
“What exactly is it that you love about me?”
His lips parted, then closed again.
The wind tugged at my scarf.
I looked at him and said, one sentence at a time,
“I have social anxiety. Crowded places make it hard to breathe.”
“I’m allergic to shellfish.”
“I have to sleep on my left side, or I won’t sleep at all.”
“I don’t like going out in the rain. And when I’m sad, I don’t want to talk.”
“Which of those did you know?”
Mario’s hand tightened around the ring box. It was shaking.
“You never loved me. Not the real me.”
“Go home.”
I turned and walked away.
A few steps later, I heard something metal hit the ground behind me.
A clear ring against the stone.
I didn’t look back.
Back in my apartment, a string of messages from Melissa lit up my screen.
“Mario’s company stock is down twenty percent. The press is digging into his role in the fraud scandal. Many longtime partners are considering pulling out.”
I sent back an okay emoji, set my phone down, opened my sketchbook, turned off the light, and went to sleep.
A few days later, I was in the library going through reference materials when my phone lit up with an alert.
The official longlist for the Venice Biennale.
And there, on the screen, plain as day:
Rossella Conti, The Undercurrent.
I stared at it for a long time.
The library was quiet, filled only with the rustle of pages and the faint hum of a distant copier.
I stood up and walked to the window.
Outside, Paris was buried under low gray clouds, but their edges were lit gold.
And suddenly I thought of that predawn morning three years earlier.
The rented apartment had been freezing. The kitchen ceiling had been leaking.
I was wrapped in a thick sweater, hunched over the easel, listening to the steady drip of the water as I laid the first gray-blue wash on the first canvas of The Undercurrent.
Mario had still been texting me on WhatsApp back then.
He’d said, “When you finish the first one, make sure I’m the first to see it.”
The corner of my mouth lifted.
I didn’t let the tears fall.
My phone started buzzing wildly.
Melissa sent twenty screaming emojis, followed by: “ARE YOU SEEING THIS?”
I replied: “Yes.”
Seconds later, she called.
The moment I answered, her voice was shaking with tears.
She was talking too fast for me to catch all of it.
But I heard her say, over and over, “Rossella, you did it.”
“You really did it.”
After we hung up, I stood by the window for a long time.
Outside, a fine rain had started, blurring the glass.
I lifted a finger and drew a smiley face on the window.
Then I sat back down and returned to my books.
Once the news reached the States, the frenzy started all over again.
Melissa forwarded me screenshots.
The press had dug up my old wins from my anonymous “Brightness” days, the young artist prizes I’d won before anyone knew my face.
Someone had even found a covert video of Irene at the gala, introducing me with that condescending little smile as a new painter who hadn’t officially entered the scene yet.
The comments were full of “Rossella slay”.
“From being humiliated by her own family to making the Venice Biennale longlist. That’s a queen.”
“The Contis must be regretting everything now.”
I skimmed a few comments, then turned off the screen.
That night, I got a text from an unknown number.
“Rossella, I saw the news. I’m so happy for you.”
There was no signature.
But I knew who it was.
I dropped the number into my block list.