Thirty Days of Sin by Tessa Kelwyn
Thirty Days of Sin
Description
She left the devil for a good man. Now the devil wants her back. On the morning she's meant to marry safety, Arianna is still trying to convince her reflection that she chose the right man. She left behind a world of blood-stained loyalty and obsessive devotion for something clean, simple, normal. But when her fiance disappears hours before the ceremony, Arianna knows this isn't cold feet. It's a message. And there is only one man ruthless enough, powerful enough, and obsessed enough to send it. Her ex. Dante was never safe, he was possession disguised as love. She left him once, built a new identity far from his empire and the arranged marriage that secured his throne. But when the evidence leads straight back to his family crest, Arianna is forced to return to the estate she barely escaped. Behind iron gates and watching eyes, old lovers become enemies, enemies become something far more dangerous, and the lines between protection and captivity blur. The man she left is married now-but he still looks at her like unfinished business. And he is not the only one. Because Dante's charming, reckless brother has been watching her for years. Because loyalty in this family is complicated. Because one man's obsession can become three.
Chapter 1
Mar 6, 2026
Arianna's POV
I’m not going to let my ex destroy my wedding day. Not even a memory of him.
I chose the safe man on purpose, but the bride who has to force her smile is already answering a question nobody asked.
I know this. I'm watching it happen in the full-length mirror in the bridal suite of a chapel outside Naples — a stone building tucked between olive groves and wild lavender — and I search for the joy that's supposed to live in this moment.
The dress is ivory silk, fitted through the bodice, falling clean to the floor. I chose it because it felt like me, and right now, me is a woman gripping her own reflection like a ledge.
I still remember the day Ethan proposed on a park bench. No spectacle, no orchestra, no ring at the bottom of a champagne glass where I might choke and die before I could answer.
A Tuesday evening, the sun sinking, and a velvet box he pulled from his jacket with fingers that shook.
"I don't have a speech," he said. "I just know I want every morning to start with you."
The ring was modest and perfect, and I said ‘yes’ before he finished the sentence because the relief of being chosen — openly, without conditions — flooded through me so fast my knees almost buckled.
The man in finance. The ‘golden retriever.’ The one who texts "thinking of you" instead of "where are you" at 2 AM. The man whose idea of danger is forgetting to file his taxes on time.
The man who will never, ever look at me the way he did—like I was something to conquer, something to own, something to burn through until nothing was left but ash and wanting and lust.
I tell myself the same line I've been telling myself for the last two years: This is what love is supposed to look like.
Clean. Simple. Safe.
No blood under the fingernails. No late-night calls that make your stomach drop. No men with dead eyes standing guard outside your door. No waking up at 3 AM to find him watching you sleep with an expression somewhere between devotion and threat.
I left that world. I clawed my way out of it with nothing but a suitcase and the kind of fear that rewires your nervous system permanently.
And then, when I'd scraped enough distance between his world and mine, I did the hardest thing: I built a new life from the wreckage.
I joined a book club. Got a plant. I went on dating apps and swiped past anyone with sharp jawlines or dark eyes or that particular quality of stillness that predators wear like cologne.
I swiped right on nice. On stable. On men whose biggest red flag was being boring.
And then I found Ethan.
Fourteen months ago, I sat in my car outside the café where we'd agreed to meet for the first time, keys in the ignition, trying to convince myself to walk through the door.
The man I'd left — the dangerous one, the consuming one, the one whose name I still can't think of without my pulse rearranging itself — had ruined me for simplicity. Every kind word felt like a setup. Every gentle touch felt like the opening move of a game I'd already lost.
But I walked in, and Ethan was sitting by the window with two menus and a smile that wanted nothing from me but my company.
He holds my hand gently, fingers laced, without the possessive tightening that turns affection into ownership. He pulls me into his lap while I'm reading and kisses the curve of my neck until the sentence dissolves and I'm laughing and pushing him away and not meaning it.
He never asks about my past — not because he doesn't care, but because he trusts me to bring it when I'm ready.
This is what normal people get. This is what love looks like when it's not laced with violence.
This is healing. He is the antidote.
So why does my reflection look like it's attending a funeral?
"You're doing that thing again." Sofia's voice pulls me back to reality.
I find her reflection in the mirror — crouched near my hem, a pin between her teeth, dark curls escaping the clip she fought into them this morning.
My best friend. My maid of honor. A nurse. A woman who saves lives for a living and has no idea how many times she's saved mine just by being normal.
"What thing?" I ask.
"That thing where you look at yourself like you're searching for proof of life."
"I'm admiring the dress."
"You're dissociating." She stands, brushes her palms on her sage-green dress, and tilts her head. "I've seen coma patients with more present expressions."
A laugh escapes me—sharp and surprising. Sofia reaches up to adjust my veil, and fixes me with those warm brown eyes that see too much and ask too little. Her fingers are careful and expression softens with a smile.
"Ethan is going to lose his mind when he sees you. And I'm going to lose my mascara watching him lose his mind. The whole thing is going to be a beautiful catastrophe, and I need you to stop auditing your reflection and enjoy it."
"I am enjoying it."
"You're clenching your jaw."
"That's my joy face. Very misunderstood expression."
She laughs — bright and real, the kind of laugh that loosens the tightness in my chest by a single, necessary degree. I take her hands and hold them, anchoring myself to the person in this room who has never once required an explanation from me.
She knows nothing. Not really.
Not about the Serratore family or what it means to be loved by a man whose name makes grown men go quiet. Not about the luxury apartments that felt like cages or the designer clothes that doubled as a uniform.
To Sofia, I survived a "really toxic relationship." The details stay buried. The nightmares stay private.
She asked only once why she never met him—two years together, and I never let her within a mile of him. I changed the subject with the practiced ease of someone who learned deflection from a master manipulator.
"You're happy," she says, and the word carries just enough lift at the end to make it almost a question.
"Deliriously happy. The kind that makes single people nauseous."
The kind everyone understands. The kind I'm supposed to want. The kind that doesn't wake me up at 3 AM with my heart racing and his name on my lips like a prayer or a curse, I can never tell which.
"Good." She squeezes my hands. "Then go marry that man."
I reach for my phone on the vanity. No messages.
Ethan should have arrived an hour ago — his groomsman Leo was driving him from the hotel, and they should have been here before the florist finished the altar. I type a text to loosen my growing anxiety.
Me: Running on time? I'm the one in white. Can't miss me.
I wait, but the screen stays dark. Then I call. Four rings, then voicemail, and Ethan's recorded voice — warm, unhurried — says, "You've reached Ethan. Leave one and I'll find you."
"He's not picking up," I say, keeping my voice level.
"Cufflink crisis," Sofia says immediately. "Leo once spent forty minutes on a pocket square. Men disintegrate at formal events. It's biological."
But the unease has teeth now, small and precise, pressing into the soft tissue beneath my ribs. Ethan is never unreachable. He texts back within minutes, calls when he says he'll call. His reliability is so absolute I've built a future on the architecture of it.
Sofia's phone rings and she frowns at the screen, holding up a finger. "One sec."
She steps into the hallway and the door clicks shut while I stare at my reflection and count the seconds. Seven. Eight. Nine.
When she comes back, the color has drained from her face so completely she looks like a different woman. "Sof?"
"You should probably sit down."
"What is it?"
"Arianna, please sit…"
"Sofia Greco." My voice drops to a register I haven't used in years — low, controlled, and promising violence. "Tell me what happened. Right. Now."
Her hands are trembling as she laces her fingers tight, pressing them together like a tourniquet, and the words spill out in a rush.
"That was Leo. He went to pick up Ethan, but the room was… destroyed. Furniture overturned, his phone in pieces on the floor." Her voice fractures on the next sentence. "There's blood on the doorframe. The police are already there. Ethan is gone."
The room tilts. The dress suddenly feels like a costume on a stage set for a play I'm no longer performing. Because I know exactly what blood on a doorframe means.
I know what it means when a man disappears on his wedding day.
I know who makes people disappear.
He found me?
Thirty Days of Sin
30 Chapters
30
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