All Chapters of Venom & Vows : Chapter 41 - Chapter 50

55 Chapters

Chapter 40 (Dorian)

"Dante," I say. "How long until we land?"He does not look up. He is on his second shoe, tongue between his teeth, working the lace with the focused intensity of a man defusing something. The hint is entirely wasted on him."Twenty minutes," he says.The pilot comes over the speaker and requests landing preparation.The plane touches down.Dante goes sideways off his seat with a sound I will not describe, and simultaneously, from inside the bathroom, comes a thud followed by Enzo's voice saying something in Italian that I choose not to repeat.Nico, belted beside me, looks at his own suit and then at the chaos and gestures broadly. "We have been dressed and ready for over an hour. Just noting that."Enzo emerges from the bathroom rubbing the side of his head, glaring."You hogged the bathroom," he says to Nico. "All three of you. For an hour.""Age has its privileges," Nico says pleasantly.Dante throws his untied shoe.Nico catches it. Sets it down. Keeps laughing."I still need to u

Chapter 41 (Dorian)

"No," I say.Dante stares at the Rolls Royce sitting on the driveway with the reverence of someone encountering a religious experience. "Just one. A black one. You would never even see it on the —""No."He exhales from the back seat like something mortally wounded. The sound travels the full length of the SUV and arrives at my ear with considerable dramatic force."One day," I say, "you will make your own money and buy it yourself.""Can you show me how?"I look out the window at the number of cars already filling the driveway and note with private resignation that we are significantly late. "Why," I say, "do the two of you always come to me to be taught things? I am not your friend. I do not operate as a mentor in anyone's life. I have stated this multiple times.""Teaching them something useful," Marco says from beside me, with the reasonable tone he uses when he is about to make a point I do not want to acknowledge, "would make them less irritating. Statistically.""Reducing their

Chapter 42 (Dorian)

"Dorian Alessio." My father stands as we approach, arms open, voice carrying the warm register he performs for rooms full of people. His eyes, directed specifically at me, say something entirely different. "Finally.""I would like to move forward with the proceedings," I say. "I am not staying long."Leander's eyebrow goes up from across the table. "It is your own engagement party.""I am aware of that," I say. "Business does not pause for parties. New York requires my attention." I redirect my gaze to my father before Leander can continue. "The sequence. Walk me through it."My father gestures toward the far corridor. "Office first. Sign the contracts. Return, put the ring on her finger, take the photographs." He pauses, offering the closest thing he produces to generosity. "After that, you are free."He leaves the table without waiting for my response, pausing only to press a kiss to Viviana's cheek with the ease of a man who chose his wife and lives accordingly. I watch him go and f

Chapter 43 (Sera)

He is an hour and a half late to his own engagement party.I sit with this fact through the appetiser course and most of the main and by the time he arrives I have assembled a fairly complete internal catalogue. Arrogant. Deeply unpleasant. Disappeared the moment the marriage was announced and left me to navigate three weeks of preparation entirely alone, and then walked in with his brothers and his cousins and his collective wall of hostility and announced, within thirty seconds of sitting down, that he was not planning to stay long.I do not turn around when he arrives. I finish what is on my fork and I do not turn around, because I am not going to be the one to look first.When I finally stand and face them, I receive five expressions simultaneously, none of which could be described as welcoming. The youngest brother, Nico, produces the most concentrated version. He is two years younger than me and he shoved me at a party in New York and his glare communicates that he remembers thi

Chapter 44 (Sera)

The door closes behind our fathers and I spin around."Are you satisfied?" I ask. "With what you have done to both of us?"He looks at me the way people look at things they find tedious. He is leaning against the edge of the desk with his arms crossed and his jacket still immaculate, and there is something about the particular cadence of his accent when he speaks that is deeply and irritatingly compelling, which I note and immediately discard because it is entirely irrelevant and I refuse to give it any space."You ran to your father," he says."I did not run to anyone. My father found out because I nearly killed someone in a public ballroom when your actress threw champagne on me, which you paid for." I take a step toward him. "That is not running. That is consequence. There is a difference."He scoffs. Starts to say something. Stops himself.I use the silence."If you had not been two hours late to the compound," I say, "we might have had a chance to stand together against this befo

Chapter 45 (Sera)

"Do you have a problem with the mistress clause?" he asks, with a smirk that tells me he expects a specific reaction.I look around the office instead of back toward the party. I have no desire to go and perform happiness with him any sooner than necessary."No," I say.The smirk shifts slightly. He was not expecting that."As long as you are not publicly visible about it," I continue, "I have no objection to who you sleep with. My reputation is the concern. Not your behaviour."He studies me for a moment. "So I can sleep with anyone.""Within the parameters I just described. Yes.""Do you have a sister?" he asks. "Someone with your appearance and considerably less of your personality.""If I had a sister," I say pleasantly, "she would carry the same personality as a family trait. She would hate you with exactly the same intensity and you would find her equally impossible to charm.""I can be persuasive.""Your head is buried so deeply inside your own ego," I say, "that I am genuinely

Chapter 46 (Sera)

The photographer lowers his camera and the families begin moving off the stage, and Dorian and his brothers start making their exit with the coordinated efficiency of people who agreed on this plan before they arrived.Massimo stops them."You are not returning before the wedding," he says to Dorian. A statement, not a question."No," Dorian says."There are events leading up to the day that will require your presence. I will send the list."Something passes between them in the silence that follows, a look that carries the full weight of a conversation they have been having for weeks without resolving, and Dorian's jaw does what it does when he is containing something. He breaks the look first, scanning the room until he locates Enzo and Dante at the dessert table, both of them moving through the selection with the focused dedication of people who have identified their primary purpose at this event.Massimo says something in Italian, softer than before. An attempt at something warmer.

Chapter 47 (Sera)

Six weeks later…"You look extraordinary," Caspian says from the doorway.I look at myself in the hotel mirror and say nothing for a moment.Six weeks. That is all it took. One moment I was watching Dorian walk away from me down a marble hallway in Sicily, the fake ring warm in my palm, and the next I am standing in a Sicilian hotel room in a wedding dress with six minutes until the car arrives. The same unit of time that once stretched through an entire summer of childhood has apparently become capable of disappearing without leaving a single recoverable trace. Six weeks. Gone. Condensed into a sequence of practical tasks and suppressed feelings and mornings where I woke up and had to remind myself that this was real."I know," I say.Caspian crosses the room and stands behind me in the mirror. He is in his suit, his tie straight, his expression doing the thing it does when he is managing something on my behalf internally and has not yet decided whether to share it."How are you doin

Chapter 48 (Sera)

"Do not look at me like that," I say, the moment I see their faces. "Both of you. You promised I would not cry."Caspian and Leander are standing in the doorway of the suite's bedroom in full designer suits, flowers pinned to their lapels, and they are looking at me in my dress and veil with expressions I cannot afford to receive right now. Leander forces a smile that does not reach anywhere near his eyes. Caspian does not attempt one.I know what both of those faces mean. This was not the marriage any of us set out to find for me, and all three of us are holding that knowledge in the same room, and it is making the air considerably heavier than it was before they knocked."I brought you something," Caspian says, crossing the room toward me with a small black box in his hand.My mood shifts immediately at the word something. It is embarrassing how quickly it shifts and I do not care.He opens the box.The ring inside is silver, intricate, detailed in the way of something chosen with s

Chapter 49 (Sera)

"It is time," Leander says, and presses a kiss to my temple before stepping back.The word lands differently than I expected. Not like a scheduling note. Like a door closing.I turn back to the mirror one final time.The bun is deliberately undone, loose curls pulled out around the face, the rest gathered and pinned with the specific imprecision that takes considerably more effort than anything actually neat. Minimal makeup, glowing rather than heavy. And the lipstick, matte, specifically matte, chosen over every gloss option in the case for a reason I have not said aloud to anyone in this room.There will be a kiss. In front of hundreds of people, at some point during the ceremony, there will be a brief and public and entirely performative kiss, and I am, in every meaningful romantic sense, still entirely a virgin in that department, and the thought of leaving a gloss print on Dorian Valenti's mouth in front of two hundred witnesses is the specific form of mortification that kept me

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