Chapter Fifty-Four Vows, Freely Given
Dante arranged the ceremony without telling her what it actually was, insisting only that she wear something simple and meet him in the garden at Larkspur Row on a mild spring evening, string lights woven through the trees in a way that reminded her, achingly, of the wedding they'd never properly chosen.
"What is this?" she asked, finding a small gathering already assembled — Sofia and her husband, Marco and his wife, Antonio and Carla, even Isabel, hesitant but present, standing near the back beside a man Elena didn't immediately recognize until she saw the way Isabel's hand found his.
"Nico came," she breathed, delighted.
"They found their way back to each other," Dante said quietly, following her gaze.
"Slowly. Imperfectly. But they found it.
" He turned to face her fully, taking both her hands in his.
"I wanted to give you a wedding you actually chose, Elena.
Not the courthouse. Not the debt. This — everyone who matters, gathered because we asked them to be here, not because a crisis required it. "
A quiet officiant — a family friend of Sofia's, Elena would learn later — stepped forward, and Dante, unprompted, began to speak, his voice steady despite the emotion plainly written across his face.
"I met you as a transaction," he said, "and I have spent every day since trying to earn the right to call you a choice instead.
I promise you, in front of everyone who matters to us both, that I will keep choosing you — not out of debt, not out of obligation, but because you are, simply and entirely, the best decision I have ever made.
I will burn down anything that threatens you.
I will learn softness, however clumsily, for as long as you'll have me.
I love you, Elena. I will keep proving it, every ordinary morning, for the rest of my life. "
Elena's vows came out thick with tears she didn't bother hiding.
"I came into this marriage terrified," she said, "certain I was losing everything that mattered to me.
I didn't know, standing in my father's study, that I was actually walking toward the truest thing I would ever have.
I promise you, Dante — I will keep choosing you too.
Even the parts of you that frighten me. Even the parts of this world I never asked for.
Because underneath all of it, I found someone worth every bit of fear it took to get here. "
They exchanged rings they'd already been wearing for over a year, the gesture entirely symbolic and no less powerful for it, and when Dante kissed her beneath the string-lit trees, surrounded by found family and blood family both, Elena understood, fully and finally, that this — not the courthouse, not the debt — was the wedding that had always actually mattered.