Love's Inferno

Chapter 25- One Command

Dante

Every breath of hers, shallow and light, felt like it was choreographed to exacerbate my anguish. I didn't know how much longer I could last on one knee, but for her, I'd happily attempt an infinity. Waiting for her was a delicious kind of torture. And wait, I did, her hand wet with sweat in mine, the box dainty and beginning to levitate with my need in my other. Her face as ever was beautiful, a delicious mirage of emotion; justifiable hesitation, subdued panic but most apparent a tentative hope. I didn't want to sully the moment, having finally been able to order my words properly around her - so I kept quiet. I watched the look in her eyes, the soft light dancing on her features, pulled in surprise with bated breath.

Slowly, so faintly I almost missed it - she nodded.

"Shi?..." I couldn't help it, the way her name slipped out my mouth with a sigh of relief.

She nodded again, more perceptibly, before holding up a finger.

"Uh... on one condition?" Her request was strained, painfully, and unusually tentative.

"Name it." I needed her to agree. I needed to hear her agree to be mine because I was already hers. I had already promised to give her anything she'd ask, there's nothing I would deny her.

"We get an annulment..." Anything but that. I could give her anything but that. I could feel my face falling. She was, and would probably always be, the most singular woman I had ever met. In keeping with our madness, no part of me could've predicted this request. Nor did I understand her motivations surrounding it, considering the surmountable danger she was in if we didn't marry... but I couldn't bring myself to clip her wings. I couldn't bring myself, even then, to deny her despite knowing that it would ultimately wreck me to agree.

"Please..." Her eyes were pleading, open and true - not knowing that she had won already. "Would... would you like to stand?"

"Absolutely not."

"To the standing or the annulment?" Ideally, I'd respond with both, but if agreeing to this was the only way I could keep her...

"The standing."

"Okay..." She looked away, her face coloured with guilt.

"You still want an annulment?"

"Uh... yes."

"Why?" I needed to know.

"Because... all my family seems to die." She'd never spoken to me about them, not really, not in this way. "And I know you've said such beautiful things but... you wouldn't be marrying me if you had a real choice, but since we're here - both tied into this one... I just, I'm giving you an out. So... an annulment." I could see she believed every word, how I had no idea. How nothing I'd said had shifted her mind away from her reservations and closer to me was a complete mystery. She was a mystery and a challenge that I'd gleefully take up. I'm a painfully persistent man.

"Okay..." Relief diluted her stress, exhaling a held breath. "On one condition... we're married for a year."

"They'll never grant an annulment after a year Dante." Her eyebrows drew closer together in quiet skepticism, as if I was trying to trick her... and I was. Despite being more devout than me, her ideas around an annulment were medieval. Consumation of a marriage, or lack thereof, was not sufficient grounds alone for an annulment but I wasn't going to tell her that. I was going to seduce her in every way a man could a woman, beginning with her mind, infiltrating her heart, and finally, once I was so enmeshed in her life that there'd be no other way to communicate with me than with her body. I knew I could seduce her in a year by the glint of hope in her eye when she looked at my nonna's ring or I'd die trying.