Bad Company (Seven Deadly Sins #1) ✅ Completed

Chapter Twenty-Eight: The Devil's Always in the Details

The Devil’s Always in the Details  

Celeste stood in the same spot without so much as a flicker of emotion on her ragged face. Anyone who saw her right now wouldn’t think she was worked up at all, but then that person wouldn’t have known her very well. She was about as worked up as a long-tailed cat in a room full of rocking chairs as her daddy used to say.

Celeste never thought in a million years she’d lose him. Never thought that anyone would be able to come in and drive a wedge between them – it was their final promise to each other. And now here was her great grand niece, doing just that.

For the first time in her exceptionally long life Celeste was scared that Dante would actually get in the way of her task. He could never leave her, but keeping her from keeping her end of her agreement with Asher was tantamount to stabbing her in the heart. Actually, it was worse seeing as how the second she died she would become a new plaything for Asher in the deepest bowels of hell. That was part of the deal – a deal she’d willingly agreed to all because of him in the first place.

Celeste walked over to her favorite shelf. There wasn’t much on it except for an old photo. No one would ever recognize the pretty young girl in it but the startling handsome boy bore an eerie resemblance to the young man downstairs manning her shop floor.

She gazed at the old black and white photograph. Actually, since modern photography was still a ways off it was really a daguerreotype. It was taken the first year they’d met.  

She’d met Dante the summer she turned fourteen, and it was love at first sight. Well, at least it had been for her. The second her eyes fell on him at the railway station, she knew he was the man she was going to spend the rest of her life with. He was something different - something special. When he smiled at her and found his way to their train car, she knew he knew it too.

It didn’t take long for her parents to fall under his spell. By the end of their voyage, her father had hired him as a stable hand, even though he’d sold all their horses paying for their train passage. Still, if anyone could make it out west, it was her father. He’d been one of the best stable managers and horse trainers in five states. When he decided to move the family westward, he’d used every penny he’d earned to pay for their tickets and have a little left over to start up his own ranch. It wasn’t much, but he always said all a man needed to succeed was two strong hands, the good Lord’s blessing and the courage to get back in the saddle when you got knocked off your horse.

Within two years he’d had his own dream ranch, along with some of the best horse stock just north of the Rio Grande. Dante was a considerable help since he had a good way with beasts and seemed to know what he was doing right from the start. Before long he was just another part of the family; always the first up along with her father, always the last to go down so he could make time for her. Her parents never discouraged the time they’d spent together, so long as all the work on the ranch came first and nothing improper went on. Dante honored both. 

As Celeste grew up, he made it a point to teach her a great variety of things whenever they were alone: how to look past the surface of things to the world just beneath our own. He taught her how to interact and manipulate it. He was also the first one to show her how to wield the magic she’d been born with but was too afraid to ever use. She’d never told anyone about what she could do – not even her own parents, but Dante had known. She was pretty sure he’d known since the day he saw her at the rail station.

She was no fool, not even back then. Celeste knew he’d thought to use her for his own personal gain. But it hadn't taken her long to figure out that he was also very lonely, and something about spending time with her and her family eased that loneliness inside him just a bit. Pretty soon he’d fallen for her too and all was as it should be.