Old Flame: Dante’s Story by Sam Mariano

2

Colette

Your wedding dayis supposed to be the happiest day of your life.

I’ve imagined mine lots of times—usually with a different groom, a different dress, a different guest list… a different everything. I wanted a simple wedding on a beach in Greece, not a Catholic ceremony in a big, beautiful cathedral. I wanted the only guests to be a few criminals in casual wear—my future husband’s immediate family, of course. I wasn’t even sure I’d invite what’s left of my own, because Dante is like a beautiful, seductive natural disaster; he meets you, likes you, erodes the landscape of your life until he can change it to suit him, and before you know it, you become less of who you used to be and more of who he wants you to be. His will is greater than anyone I’ve ever met, everyone I’ve met. By the time I was ready to marry him, I was so hopelessly lost under his current, it wouldn’t have even occurred to me to object if he told me no one in my family was invited to my own wedding.

Brutally hypnotic, that was Dante Morelli. I didn’t know it was happening as it did because it wasn’t hard or painful; it was easy, like falling into the pages of a well-woven fairytale. Anyone who suggested he was too good to be true wasn’t long for my life anyway, and the damndest thing is, I barely noticed.

I barely noticed a lot of things until ignoring the harsh, scary reality all around me became impossible. Until I woke up and realized my fantasy was a nightmare, my prince was a monster, and I needed to escape if he’d let me and never look back.

I guess I’m the fool for believing he actually let me go.

I didn’t believe it at first. I was paranoid, always looking over my shoulder. I was on edge every time the bell rang at my shop, alerting me to a new customer. Each time a well-dressed man walked through the front door, my stomach would sink and I would think that was the day Dante had come back for me.

For years I lived like a fugitive on the run from him. Then, finally, I allowed myself to move on. Finally, I recovered from him enough to let someone else into my life, into my heart. Finally, I let myself have some comfort instead of the self-imposed loneliness that resulted from constantly running from a monster who wasn’t even chasing me.

I convinced myself that I had been overly dramatic all that time, overestimating my importance to him. Monster or not, Dante Morelli has a lot to offer a woman, and there was never a shortage of women who noticed. Surely Dante had picked out another one once the bruise on his ego faded. Surely he didn’t even think of me anymore. Surely by then I had become just one more woman in his past—at least, that’s what Declan assured me on the nights when fear would overtake me, when something innocuous like the wind blowing a branch against the window terrified me, when I couldn’t focus on what we were doing, when I became unhinged in my mission to double check all the locks and look out each window to make sure he wasn’t outside. To make sure he hadn’t come for me.

When I was with Dante, he was my fairytale.

After I left him, he became my nightmare.

The line between the two is much thinner than people think. For me, it was so thin I couldn’t even see it until I accidentally stepped over it.

Today, on my wedding day, I feel like the last character alive at the brutal end of a ghastly horror film, almost numb as I look around at all the destruction I have wrought.

Because make no mistake, I wrought this destruction.

Deep in my heart, I knew Dante wouldn’t leave me alone. Deep in my heart, I knew he would never be done with me, but I let clueless people who didn’t understand that life convince me otherwise. I’m so helplessly angry at them for feeding me that reassuring bullshit, but I’m angrier at myself for listening. Those people didn’t know Dante. They meant well. They believed all their reassuring, stupid, wrong words.

But I knew better.

I knew him.

This is all my fault.

I dared run away from the devil and start a life without him, and now he’s going to burn me for that unforgivable sin.