CHAPTER SEVENTEEN #2
"Where did you just go?" Cassia asked, her voice losing its sarcastic edge, replaced by an observant curiosity. "What are you thinking about so deeply?"
Dante looked at her. He didn't have his guard up. His mind was still tangled in the emotional lifting of the past ten minutes, and before he could engage the polished, smooth filter of his charm, the raw truth slipped off his tongue.
"I was thinking about Flora," Dante said.
The moment the words entered the air, Dante’s stomach plummeted.
Panic, cold and hard, spiked instantly in his chest. He had just invoked the name of his dead, beloved fiancée in the middle of a perfect afternoon with the woman he was actively trying to court. It was a catastrophic, idiotic blunder.
He opened his mouth to immediately backtrack, to desperately explain, but Cassia beat him to it.
She didn't flinch. She didn't look wounded, and she certainly didn't look jealous.
Cassia leaned back in her wrought-iron chair, crossing her arms over her chest. She leveled him with a look of pure, dry, unadulterated irreverence.
"Are you really sitting here," Cassia asked, her tone so deadpan it belonged in a morgue, "thinking about your dead fiancée while on a date with me?"
Dante winced visibly. The panic flared higher. "Cassia, no. That isn't—"
"Because if you are," Cassia continued smoothly, raising a single, perfect eyebrow, "I can call a taxi right now.
I have a backlog of patient charts sitting on my kitchen counter that I could be updating instead of watching you spiral into a romanticized existential crisis over a plate of prosciutto. "
"I am not spiraling," Dante insisted rapidly, leaning across the small table, his heart hammering against his ribs. He reached out, his hand hovering near hers but not daring to touch. "I swear to you, that is not what was happening. I am present with you. I am right here."
Cassia looked at him. She looked at him the exact way she often did—like he was being unnecessarily slow, missing the painfully obvious diagnosis right in front of his face.
She let the silence stretch for a long, agonizing moment, watching him squirm, before she finally let out a soft, exasperated sigh.
"Then what was going through your mind, Dante?" Cassia asked plainly, dropping the sarcasm demanding the unvarnished truth.
Dante swallowed hard. He looked at the fierce, pragmatic woman across from him, and he decided to give her the honesty she demanded.
"I was thinking about the differences," Dante explained, his voice dropping into a low, register.
He kept his eyes locked on hers, ensuring she understood the gravity of his words.
"Flora was innocent, Cassia. She was pure.
When I was with her, I had to hide half of my existence.
I had to lock the violence and the reality of my life in a box so it wouldn't touch her.
And I was just sitting here wondering...
if she had lived, if we had married... would I have spent the next fifty years living two separate lives?
Constantly hiding from my own wife to protect her? "
Cassia listened, her expression unreadable, her arms still crossed.
"And then," Dante continued softly, the vulnerability stripping him bare in the middle of the crowded café, "I looked at you.
And I realized that I don't have to hide a single thing from you.
You know what I am. You know the blood. You know the danger.
You aren't soft, Cassia. But sitting here with you...
being with you... it feels like home. I don't have to pretend.
And I was just wondering if... if Flora and I were always doomed.
If the world I built would have eventually broken her anyway, no matter how hard I tried to shield her. "
He stopped, the confession hanging in the crisp autumn air. He waited for her to judge him, to tell him he was heartless for questioning the sanctity of his past love.
Cassia didn't judge him. She didn't recoil.
Instead, she uncrossed her arms, resting her hands on the table. She looked at him with her usual, grounding practicality, dissecting the emotional knot he had tied himself into with the steady hands of a surgeon.
"It is human nature, Dante," Cassia pointed out, her voice calm, devoid of judgment or sentimentality.
"The person you are at twenty, or twenty-five, is fundamentally not the same person you become a decade later.
You were a different man when you were with her.
You hadn't assumed the full weight of the empire yet.
You were still holding onto the illusion that you could keep your hands clean. "
She picked up her wine glass, tracing the rim with her thumb.
"The partner someone chooses at that younger age," Cassia continued, her logic flawless and piercing, "might perfectly fit the person they are in that moment.
But they might not be the same partner they need once they have grown into who they are actually meant to become.
It isn't a betrayal of the past to acknowledge that. "
Dante stared at her, captivated by the unapologetic wisdom she wielded.
"She was sweet, and she was innocent, and that was what you needed when you were twenty-five," Cassia said, holding his gaze.
"But you aren't twenty-five anymore, Dante.
You are thirty-eight. You are the Don. You have accumulated experience, trauma, and a perspective that has reshaped how you see the world.
I am not suggesting that anything was wrong with Flora, or that there was anything wrong with you for loving her.
It is just the nature of growing older."
She set her glass down, leaning slightly closer across the table. Her pale blue eyes pierced directly into his soul.