Chapter Forty-One Christmas at Larkspur Row
Their first Christmas together fell just after the Salvatore threat had finally quieted, and Elena found herself, for the first time since her wedding, decorating a home that finally felt entirely like her own to shape.
"We've never really done this properly," Dante admitted, watching her direct the staff on where to hang garlands he clearly found excessive but hadn't the heart to refuse her. "My mother loved Christmas. My father tolerated it, at best, for her sake. After she died, we mostly ignored it entirely."
"Then we're doing it properly this year," Elena said firmly, hanging a final string of lights along the main staircase, past the watching portraits of Moretti men who had never, she suspected, seen their home look quite this warm.
"Your mother would want that, I think. Something soft, in a house that's spent too long being only about strength. "
They hosted a small, informal dinner on Christmas Eve — Antonio and Carla, awkward but genuinely trying, seated across from Sofia and her new husband, Marco included at Elena's insistence despite his initial, quiet protests that staff didn't dine with family.
"You're not just staff," Elena told him firmly, setting a place for him herself. "You're family, Marco. Sit down."
The evening unfolded with an ease Elena hadn't quite expected — her father laughing, genuinely, for the first time in longer than she could remember; Sofia teaching Carla a card game that dissolved quickly into helpless laughter; Dante, unguarded in a way she still found remarkable, pulling Elena onto his lap by the fire once the meal had ended, humming some half-remembered carol against her hair.
"This is what I wanted," he murmured, watching the small, warm chaos of found family scattered through rooms that had once felt only cold and formal. "I didn't know how to ask for it, until you showed me it was possible to have."
"You just had to let people in," Elena said softly, watching her father's unguarded laughter across the room. "That's all it ever takes, Dante. The hardest part is always just the letting."
Later, once the guests had gone and the house had settled into quiet, Dante presented her with a small, carefully wrapped box — inside it, a delicate bracelet set with pale blue stones, the exact color of a winter sky.
"I noticed you like that color," he said, fastening it around her wrist with careful hands. "Since the day I first walked into your sitting room."
"You remember everything," she said, laughing, blinking back sudden tears.
"Only the things that matter," he said simply, and kissed her beneath the mistletoe Sofia had insisted on hanging, the first Christmas either of them had properly celebrated in years, built entirely out of the found family they'd both, without quite meaning to, assembled around themselves.