This Violent, Velvet Love

Arianna

I first saw her at my father’s winter gala. She wasn’t a guest. She was an acquisition.

Her name was Isolde Valentine, and she was the payment for her father’s foolish debts. A world-class cellist, bound by contract to the Moretti family, her art a beautiful, respectable veneer for our less than respectable enterprises. She was, for all intents and purposes, a piece of property. The most beautiful piece of property I had ever seen.

She sat on a small, elevated stage in the grand ballroom, a solitary figure in a sea of sharks and sycophants. The spotlight illuminated the dark parts of her deep purple velvet dress, the pale yet luminous outline of her slender neck, and the black waterfall of her hair as she bent over to play the cello. The instrument was tucked between her knees, and as she drew the bow across the strings, a sound emerged that silenced the entire room.

It was a sound of profound, exquisite sorrow. A caged bird is singing about the sky it will never be able to see. Its song is like a mournful melody.

And I, Arianna Moretti, the family’s mad, beloved princess, fell instantly, pathologically, in love.

It was not a gentle, blossoming thing. It was a claiming. A sudden, violent certainty that this creature, this beautiful, sad instrument of music, belonged to me. Not to my father. Not to my brutish brother, Dante, who looked at her with the same avaricious gleam he reserved for a new sports car. Mine.

Her performance ended. The room erupted in polite, soulless applause. Her eyes, the color of a twilight sky, flickered across the crowd, empty and distant. Until they met mine.

I didn’t smile. I didn’t applaud. I just watched her. And I let her see it. The raw, undiluted hunger in my gaze. The absolute, unshakeable conviction of my obsession.

I saw the flicker of recognition in her eyes. The faintest widening of her pupils. She saw me not as Arianna Moretti, the spoiled princess. She saw me for what I was: another, more dangerous kind of cage.

That night, my plan was born. My father and brother saw her as an asset, a tool to be displayed. They were fools. You don't display a masterpiece in a public gallery for lesser men to covet. You lock it away in a private vault, where you are the only one who can bask in its light.

I would not just possess her. I would save her. I would build her a paradise, a beautiful, perfect cage where the only predator allowed inside would be me.