Chapter 10
She knew that Mafia marriages were rarely happy, but she’d held naive hope that she’d fall in love with her intended. She was a Rain, the most agreeable of the elements, and she’d held some futile hope that she’d have a storybook romance.
That was quickly and quietly squashed when her engagement to Xanxus di Vongola, head of the Varia, was announced.
She met him, and it was plainly obvious what he wanted out of her. A couple of heirs, a quiet docile wife who ran the household as she should and left him and his well enough alone.
She’d long since perfected the socialite mask, so as she walked down the aisle when all she wanted to do was cry and lock herself in her room, and maybe break a couple things, she was perfectly polite and demure and sweet. She saw the sneers on his Guardian’s faces, and knew that however long she lived before she got assassinated wasn’t going to be very fun.
She was pretty, she knew, with her long dark hair and gray eyes. She probably looked stunning in her dress. She wouldn’t know, she couldn’t even look at herself in the mirror for fear of ruining her makeup.
There was a part of her that was bristling, that was saying she was letting herself be tied down, that she needed to stop them and kill anyone who dared try to bind her.
She ignored it, ruthlessly filling her mind with her Rain flames, overpowering anything else that might be there that she’s done such a good job at suppressing since she graduated the academy and her parents made it known she was going to be nothing more than a bride.
And she knew that she could be dangerous, that she was dangerous. That she was talented with her flames and one helluva shot, that her skills were the only reason she out of everyone in the Alliance was chosen to marry the head of the Varia. Well, that and the fact that her family was known to be fertile.
She also knew there was every possibility that her new husband wasn’t going to allow her to train more than her marksmanship, lest she get the idea the way out of the unhappy marriage was to kill her way out.
So she pasted on a smile, did her duties, and hid herself away in her rooms. Once a week she was supposed to go to Xanxus’s rooms so that they could. You know. So that she could get pregnant. She did all the right things in all the right places, went with his lead, waited for him to fall asleep and then vomited in the bathroom like clockwork. Pregnancy tests weren’t really necessary when any half-decent Flame Active person would be able to sense life growing inside them and so and she was excited to have a child solely for the reason of not having to have sex for a while.
She knew postpartum was going to hit her. Hard. And if she knew her husband at all he wasn’t going to be much help in the child rearing department. She hoped she got a little bit of recovery time between children.
She was lucky that he hadn’t kept her from training and seemed to encourage it, even if it was a different kind of disservice to her. His lighting ran her training. His lightning didn’t like her. At all.
If she wasn’t pregnant she was half sure she would’ve had a ‘training accident’ by now.