Not that it mattered. Second thoughts were a luxury for women who actually had a choice.
The dress was exquisite—Marchesa, ivory silk that moved like water when I walked, hand-beaded lace climbing fromthe bodice to my throat in a pattern that mimicked the roses surrounding us.
"Smile," my father murmured beside me. His voice was pleasant. His grip on my arm was iron. "You look terrified."
I stretched my lips into something that hopefully resembled happiness from a distance.
The music swelled. We began to walk.
Each step felt like a small death. The click of my heels against the marble floor. The whisper of my train trailing behind me. The weight of three hundred gazes pressing against my skin, assessing the cut of my dress and the set of my shoulders and the carefully constructed composure I was holding together through sheer force of will.
I cataloged the faces as I passed. The Gambettis in the fourth row. The Rossinis near the back. Enzo Valenti, seated on the groom's side despite being no friend to anyone in this church, his pale eyes tracking my progress with that patient, predatory attention I remembered from a decade of nightmares.
I didn't let my step falter. Didn't let my smile slip.
Then I looked at the altar, and everything else fell away.
Dante.
He stood at the front of the church in a tuxedo that made him look like something out of a painting—dark and severe and impossibly beautiful. His hands were clasped in front of him, his posture perfect, his jaw tight with a tension I could see even from twenty feet away.
But it was his eyes that made my breath catch.
He was watching me with an expression I couldn't read. Intense. Almost pained. Like he was seeing something that hurt him, something he hadn't expected, something that had reached past all his careful control and grabbed him by the throat.
No one had ever looked at me like that.
Not my father, who looked at me and saw useful. Not Enzo, who had looked at me and seen prey.
Dante was looking at me like I was a person. Like I was the only person in the room.
I almost stumbled.
My father's grip tightened, steadying me without missing a step. The aisle stretched endlessly ahead of us, narrowing the distance between who I'd been and who I was about to become. With each step, I noticed new details about the man waiting for me. The way his chest rose and fell with deliberately measured breaths. The slight crease between his brows, like he was solving a problem he couldn't quite work out. The way his dark eyes never once left my face, even as the guests murmured and shifted around us.
His hands, I noticed, were very steady. Large and capable and perfectly still at his sides, the hands of a man who had learned to control every visible part of himself.
But something in his expression was far from controlled.
We reached the altar. The priest smiled benevolently. My father turned to face me, and for one wild moment I thought he might say something—something fatherly, something kind, something to acknowledge that this was hard and he was sorry and he wished things could be different.
Instead, he simply lifted my hand from his arm and placed it in Dante's.
Transaction complete.
But Dante's fingers closed around mine, and everything I thought I knew about this moment shattered.
His palm was warm. His grip was gentle—so gentle it shocked me, this careful handling of my hand like it was something fragile, something precious. His thumb brushed once across my knuckles, a touch so brief I might have imagined it.
I looked up. Found his dark eyes waiting for me.
Something passed between us in that moment. I didn't have a name for it. Couldn't have explained it if someone had asked. It was like recognition, except I didn't know him. Like familiarity, except we were strangers.
The priest began to speak.
I heard none of it. The words washed over me—beloved, gathered, holy matrimony—while I stood there burning from the point where our hands joined. Dante's shoulder brushed mine. I could smell his cologne, something expensive and woodsy that made me think of cold mornings and warm sheets. His fingers stayed curved around mine, that same impossible gentleness, like he was afraid of breaking something.
When it was his turn to speak, his voice came out rough.
