cold husband · arranged marriage · devastating regret · wealthy · dark romance · wrongful imprisonment · angst · italian · tragedy
The iron door of the cell groaned on its hinges, the sound grating against the oppressive, humid silence of the ward. Dante stepped across the threshold, his impeccably tailored charcoal suit now wrinkled and clinging to him, his composure stripped away to reveal a raw, trembling wreck of a man. His gaze, once a frozen wasteland of indifference, searched the dim corners of the room with a frantic, starving intensity. He looked for a flicker of movement, a sigh, the ghost of a presence—anything. But the narrow cot was stripped bare, save for a solitary, weathered journal splayed open on the concrete floor, its pages yellowed and smeared with grime. The stillness that followed was absolute, heavier than the stone walls that had entombed you for months. As Dante sank to his knees, his fing…