Chapter 6
Gemma
More white roses. They were everywhere. Thousands of them, cascading from every pew and pillar, their petals catching the candlelight until St. Boniface glowed like something from a dream. Or a nightmare. I couldn't decide which.
Three days ago, I'd stood in this same church watching a casket lowered toward the ground. Now I stood at the entrance in a wedding gown, my father's arm locked through mine like a shackle wrapped in silk, and watched three hundred guests rise to their feet in a single rustling wave.
My heart was pounding so hard I was certain they could all hear it. A bass drum keeping time with the organ music, announcing to everyone assembled that the bride was terrified. That the beautiful sacrifice was having second thoughts.
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 from the 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.
"I do."
They were just two words.
But the way he said them—like a true vow, like a promise he intended to keep—made something twist in my chest.
Then the priest turned to me.
"And do you, Gemma Maria Moretti, take this man to be your lawfully wedded husband?"
The church held its breath. Three hundred witnesses, waiting for the words that would bind me to this man, this family, this life I had never chosen.
I looked at Dante. At his tight jaw and his gentle hands and his eyes that saw too much.
"I do."
My voice came out steadier than I expected. Clear and sure, ringing through the silent church like I meant it.
The priest smiled. The congregation exhaled.
"You may kiss the bride."
My heart, the traitor, pounded in my chest. The rhythm was frantic. I turned to face my husband—my husband, God, that word—expecting what I'd seen at a dozen society weddings: the perfunctory brush of lips, the polite performance of intimacy for an audience that didn't really care.
That wasn't what happened.
Dante stepped closer. His hands came up, and for one disorienting second I thought he was reaching for my shoulders, steadying me the way someone might steady a nervous horse.
Instead, he cupped my face.
Both hands. Warm palms against my cheeks, his fingers sliding into my hair, his thumbs brushing my cheekbones with a tenderness that made my breath catch.
No one had ever held me like that.
I had one second to register the heat in his dark eyes—the way his pupils had blown wide, the way he was looking at me like he needed me—and then his mouth found mine.
The kiss was supposed to be nothing.
But it was everything.
His lips were warm and firm and impossibly gentle, moving against mine with a patience that felt almost reverent. Not demanding. Not taking. Asking. Offering. This soft, careful exploration that unraveled something in my chest I hadn't even known was knotted.
I gasped against his mouth.
A tiny sound. Involuntary. Swallowed by the kiss before it could escape.
His hands tightened on my face.
Not hard. Not painful. Just—more. Like my gasp had broken something loose in him, like he'd been holding back and now he couldn't quite manage it anymore.
His thumbs pressed firmer against my cheekbones.
His mouth slanted over mine at a different angle, deeper, and a shiver ran through my entire body.
The church disappeared.
The three hundred guests, the priest, the white roses and the candlelight—all of it dissolved into nothing.
There was only this: Dante's mouth moving against mine.
His breath mingling with my breath. The shocking intimacy of being held like I mattered, like I was something to be savored rather than consumed.
My hands found his chest without my permission. My fingers curled into the lapels of his tuxedo, holding on, because I was suddenly certain that if I let go I would fall.
The kiss went on.
Too long. I knew it was too long. Somewhere in the fuzzy distance, I could hear murmurs rippling through the congregation—the scandalized whispers of old women, the knowing chuckles of men who thought they understood what they were seeing.
A wedding kiss wasn't supposed to go on this long.
Wasn't supposed to leave the bride flushed and breathless and clinging to her groom like she'd forgotten how to stand.
I didn't care.
Heat pooled low in my belly, unfamiliar and terrifying. My skin felt electric everywhere Dante was touching me, and he was barely touching me at all—just his hands on my face, his mouth on my mouth, and yet I felt claimed in a way I'd never experienced.
Recognition. That was the closest word I could find. Like his body already knew mine. Like we'd done this a thousand times before in some other life.
When he finally pulled back, he looked stunned. Dark eyes nearly black, fixed on my face with an intensity that made my stomach flip. His breathing was uneven—short, sharp exhales that matched the rapid rise and fall of his chest beneath my fingers.
I stared at him.
My lips tingled. My cheeks burned where his hands had been. My entire body felt like it had been rewired in the space of thirty seconds, every nerve ending suddenly attuned to a frequency I'd never known existed.
He was still close. Close enough that I could count his eyelashes if I wanted to. Close enough that I could see the slight tremble in his jaw, the effort it was costing him to pull himself back together.
"Gemma." His voice was rough. Scraped raw.
I didn't trust myself to speak.
The priest cleared his throat. Someone in the congregation laughed nervously. The moment broke, and Dante stepped back, releasing my face, becoming once again the controlled, composed don who commanded rooms without raising his voice.