After I moved into my new apartment in SoHo, my best friend Chloe came over to help me unpack.

The moment I saw her, I couldn’t hold back my pain anymore. I threw my arms around her and sobbed.

“Chloe, the ring I spent six months designing… that bitch wore it.”

She comforted me, patting my back while cursing them out with every F-word she knew.

“It’s okay, it’s okay. It’s just a ring. I’ll get someone to make you a new one, covered in diamonds, how about that?”

After crying for a long time, I finally calmed down.

The new apartment was a mess. I wiped my tears and started to unpack.

The inside of my safe was a jumble too. My jewelry was all knocked around. My eyes landed on the engagement gift Damian had given me. It was shattered into pieces.

It was a priceless emerald bracelet, perfectly clear and brilliant green. It was a Moretti family heirloom, passed down to the matriarch of each generation. Now, it was broken.

Just like our alliance.

It was Damian’s mother, Sophia, who had pushed for us to be together.

My family and the Moretti family had been business partners for decades, and my mother knew Sophia well.

From the moment Sophia met me, she adored me. She would joke about me becoming her daughter-in-law and made Damian spend time with me.

The Vances were wealthy, but in the New York underworld, we had none of the power the Morettis did. My mother urged me to get close to Damian, to win his favor. But he was always so cold and distant. Most of the time, we would just sit in the same room in silence, each doing our own thing.

But as a young girl, I fell for that handsome, cold boy.

I thought he would always be like that, cold to everyone. Until he turned seventeen and met Sabrina.

They had a wild, passionate romance in high school.

It was hard to believe that Damian, who had been raised since birth to be a ruthless heir, would get into fights and skip school for a girl.

His father threatened to send him to Sicily for “re-education” to force them to break up.

But Damian stood his ground. “Sabrina is the light of my life,” he said. “I don’t want anyone but her.”

But Sabrina’s background was a problem. Her mother was the mistress of some small-time Brooklyn mobster, and she was his illegitimate daughter.

There was no way the Moretti family would allow a woman with such impure blood and a complicated past to marry into their family.

So, Sophia made a move. She gave Sabrina three million dollars and a ticket to Europe, on the condition that she break up with Damian for good.

Sabrina took the money and left without a second thought.

And Damian hated his mother for it ever since.

He fell apart for six months. Then, just before he started college, he suddenly pulled himself together and became that cold, ruthless Moretti heir once more.

He just never became close with his family again.

When I was twenty-three, for reasons I never understood, he suddenly agreed to our families’ proposal of marriage.

From there, everything fell into place. We dated, got engaged, and moved in together.

Now, he was the one in charge of the Moretti family. His old flame was back in town. Of course, he couldn't wait to rekindle things with her.

Tears streamed down my face.

I picked up the shattered bracelet and threw it into the trash.

If you don’t cut your losses, you’ll only suffer more.

It was better to make a clean break.