The Devil’s Bride

A Ruthless Dinner

Elena’s chest tightened. Dinner. On its own the word was harmless. But in the hands of Dante Marino it was sharp edged.

To refuse was her immediate thought. But something in her digestion said no. You could not refuse Dante.

“Fine,” she said flatly. The guards walked away.

Alessia helped her dress. The dress was smooth, fashioned to be a second skin. It was a message. Elena looked at herself in a glass—the high neck, the curve-hugging shape, the manner in which the material glowed as the light struck it. She did not look like a prisoner, she looked like a woman walking into battle.

And perhaps that was what she was.

The dining hall was long and endless. Dante sat at the extreme end of the table. Alone.

There was something perfect in his posture, something inexpressible in his expression, as though he had been set here to rule.

Guards lined the walls. None of them stirred as Elena entered. One of the servants drew up a chair opposite Dante. She sat slowly, as all the muscles of her body stiffened.

The room was quite still, interrupted briefly by the slight clink of Dante picking up his wine glass. He drank, with his eyes never going off her.

“You’re late,” he said finally. His was a calm, though not a casual voice. Each word was calculated, as a test.

“I had not known I was on your agenda,” Elena replied and could not check herself.

One of the guards grunted with a tightening of the jaw. The air thinned.

But Dante’s mouth curved. Not quite a smile. More like the faintest shadow of amusement.

The servants started to come with food-trays of roasted lamb, dishes of fresh pasta, plates of glass, olives and cheese. It ought to have been a gorgeous spread fit to spread in a royalty. But Elena was not able to taste beauty tonight. Not with his eyes on her.

She took up her fork, and had to keep her hand steady.

Dante sliced his meat with a scalpel, each move well-timed, and frigid. The men in the walls kept silent, and looked on only him. As he laid aside his fork they loosened. They aped when he raised his glass. He was conducting, they followed.

Elena noticed everything. How silence was round him like a mantle. How respect—or fear—hung from every man in this room like a noose.

At last Dante laid aside his eating-knife and leaned back a degree, his eyes fixed on her. “Tell me, Elena. Do you feel your father remorseful about it?

The question drove into her heart. Her fork was suspended in the air.

The tone of her voice was flat. “My father,” she said.

“Yes.” His voice was smooth, cutting. “Do you suppose he is sorry to have sold you? Or was he glad to see the burden of you off his hands?”

The fork in her hand dug into her palm. Heat flared in her throat. He wished to see her c***k, to see her bleed anger.

But she wouldn’t give him that.

She lifted her chin. “You would be waiting long before I managed to start crying on his behalf. He made his choice. And so did you.”

The tip of his mouth went up a little. The guards changed, passing glances like they could not believe what they had just heard.

“Interesting,” Dante murmured. He sipped his wine slowly. “Most women in your situation would now be begging me to have mercy on them.”

Elena bent forward, and her voice shook not at all, in spite of the fact that her heart was pounding. “Probably you never had a woman like me.”

It came as a surprise to him.

Dante studied her, with dark, piercing eyes, as though he were trying to discover what was beneath her flesh.

“You talk big as though you’re not a powerless person.”

Not me, Elena, said in her heart. “I have nothing left to lose. That is much more dangerous than you imagine.”

A pause. His glass stopped halfway to his mouth. Elena met his eyes, and would not look away. And with this first eye to eye contact, his face was changed—not with amusement, but with curiosity.

He set the glass down.

Then gradually Dante drew himself up, with a sparkling look in his eyes. “Probably,” he said, with the smoky voice, “you are not so breakable as they all said.”

The meal continued. He questioned her—not in a kind manner, but poking. About her childhood, her studies, what she thought of loyalty, of power and of fear.

And always Elena surprised him.

At one time he said, Fear is weakness, cutting into his food.

Fear is to live, she argued. It makes you live when pride kills men.

One of his men literally choked on the audacity, by coughing it in his fist. Dante didn’t reprimand her, he merely threw his head back, and wondered.

At the close of the meal the air between them had changed, it was much different than the first. She was no longer just prey.

Servants swept the table, and the space between them was quiet again. Dante was staring at her.

At last he rose, “You are mine now," he said, and the tone of the words was low, the same sound as that of the assertion he had made in the car “But perhaps…” His gaze lingered upon her face, “You can be more than mine.”

He faced and slid his coat against the marble floor, and walked toward the door. The guards followed.

Elena stood paralysed, her heart pounding. She was supposed to have felt small before his eyes and oppressed by his words. Rather, this time she experienced power after her world shattered, the first time in a long time.

She had made him look at her, not as property, not as a prisoner but as a woman.

Elena did not touch the locks on the windows that night as Alessia helped her back into her room. She never cursed revenge in the night.

Rather, she recreated the dinner in her head, every word, glance and second of his curiosity.

She could use this, she would use this.

Since power was everything that Dante admired, and in case she could obtain even a bit of it, it could be the weapon she needed.

She is on the point of falling asleep when her door opens once more. This time, it isn’t Alessia. Footsteps, heavy, over the room, and the voice of Dante breaks the darkness:

“Wake up, Elena. We’re not finished.”