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EIGHT
Dante
Elysa looked beautiful but unhappy.
Had I spent too much time with Lucia? I had, but she wanted to discuss some time-sensitive work matters. So, I was glad that she wasn’t sitting next to me. I needed a break from talking about contracts and court cases—and I, as always, enjoyed my time with Elysa.
She was speaking to Susanna Colombo about the wine, and I found myself unexpectedly charmed by how well she knew the obscure Italian red being served.
It was an excellent wine—a rare varietal likely first planted by Roman monks centuries ago—and she spoke about it with the ease of someone who understood and appreciated wine.
Of course, it made sense. Her father was a winemaker in Piedmont.
But from what I had seen, she wasn’t close to him. At our wedding, he had barely acknowledged her, more interested in sucking up to Nonno than paying attention to his own daughter. It was what had led me to believe that her family vineyard was part of the marriage contract—a trade, a business move, nothing more.
I knew that Elysa wasn’t close to her mother either—a deeply religious, conservative woman who, from what little my wife had mentioned, had never been particularly warm.
It occurred to me, unsettlingly, that I had never really asked her about them. And that despite being married for a year, there was so much I didn’t know about my soon-to-be ex-wife.
That moniker didn’t sit right with me either.
Nonno loved Elysa. He told me that she’d been the apple ofhergrandfather Elio's eye. Elio and Elysa maintained a long-distance relationship as best they could, which meant that my wife had one person in her life who truly cared for her. He died before she turned fifteen.
She had once told me that she’d had to raise herself.
I could relate to a point.
My parents hadn’t paid me much attention, busy with their lives as Signor and Signora Giordano until they died in a plane crash on their way to Turin during the ski season fiveyears ago.
During his life, my father had done fuck-all for the company. He just used it as a way to live a luxurious life. I’d had to clean up his messes, and I’d built up the Giordano Hotel Group to what it was today, one of the fastest-growing chains in the world.
Nonno had always been proud of my achievements, but he worried that I worked too much, that I had no balance, no real life outside of the empire I was building. He believed I needed to settle down, to have something—someone—to come home to.
Once he was diagnosed with terminal cancer, he pushed harder, determined to see me married before he was gone. And he’d decided that Elysa was the right choice.
Probably because, like me, she had negligent parents. Because she had been close to her grandfather, just as I had been close to mine. Maybe he thought that kind of loss, that kind of understanding, would bond us.
Nonno had raised me. He was my person, the only one whose approval had ever truly mattered. In the end, I couldn’t say no to him.
But that didn’t mean I hadn’t resented Elysa for my inability to turn down Nonno.
I’d resented her presence, her role in the arrangement, her mere existence as proof that I had given in. And a part of me had wished—selfishly, unfairly—that she had found a way out ofthis.
Because if she had, maybe I could have had one too.
Elysa then laughed at something Susanna said. The sound was light and effortless, pulling me out of my thoughts—not with sentiment but with the sharp jolt of desire that always seemed to spark when she was near.
No matter how much I tried to ignore it, there was something about being around her that unsettled me in ways I wasn’t prepared to admit, especially since my cock went steel hard and my hands itched to touch her.
I knew what she wanted. A real marriage. A normal one. She had told me as much and had worked—patiently, persistently—to give us that.
Dinners as a couple. Movie nights on the couch, curled up together.
I had indulged her when it suited me. But, in truth, I had resisted. I had controlled the pace, the boundaries, giving in only when I felt like it—on my terms.
And now, sitting here, watching her laugh at something that had nothing to do with me, I wondered—had she finally stopped trying?
Guilt pinched at my conscience.