I stepped out barefoot, taking off my heels because outside was a bit stony and I didn’t want to fall face-first. The skirt of the co-ord set I wore brushed against the floor as I walked. Wind slapped against my face, and for the first time since I’d arrived, or been kidnapped, here, I breathed, not like a survivor but like a woman remembering what air used to taste like before it was filtered through someone else’s lungs.
Freedom is not the absence of walls. But is the moment your body forgets it was ever caged.
I stood at the edge of the Cliffside, wind screaming and the sea below roared.
And for a moment, I was infinite.
Before I felt the last digit of infinity on my waist.
I jumped, startled, heart lurching into my throat, and eyes wild. I turned with a jumpy squeal only to find my destroyer.
Zagreus Vitale.
Bare-chested, hair ruffled as if he’d just woken up from war. My eyes lowered to find him wearing slippers instead of the leather boots he normally wore. Slouching grey joggers hanging sinfully low, giving a lewd view of the V-line that disappeared into his joggers. There were some scars on his torso and chest, yet they beautifully enhanced his allure.
A lazy trail of hair disappeared below, mocking gravity with the way it begged the eyes to trace further. I’d never seen him like this. His abs were sharp and toned, sculpted like a sin he never had stone for. Broad shoulders and a hard chest. I couldn’t decide where to look because every part of him demanded attention.
Veins curled down his arms like lightning frozen mid-strike; long, strong, and calloused fingers dug lightly into the dip of my waist, possessive without permission.
And his stormy grey eyes, glinting with shattered ice, scanned me as if I was a prey he was too tired to chase, but still wouldn’t let escape.
Zagreus Vitale didn’t need armour to look like a weapon. He just needed to wake up.
And the fucking scar on his face, a clean, brutal gash across his cheek, just below the eye. He always hid it with his tailored perfection. Now, it made him look less like the devil in thousand-dollar suits and more like an angel punished for loving too recklessly.
I looked away. God, I looked away because his gaze was too much to hold.
My cheeks flushed with memory of last night.
“Don’t act shy now, Dolcezza,” he murmured with that familiar venom-sweet drawl. “You’ve had me inside you more times than I can count. And I’ve heard you beg for it, remember?”
He tilted his head, mouth twitching like a wolf half-amused. “No need to blush over seeing your husband half-naked.”
I said nothing. My spine stiffened, and my eyes burned and focused on something else entirely. Two shotguns behind him. On a stool. And there were some linen cloth and oil.
He turned and crouched by a wooden bench and began cleaning the guns. Slowly and methodically. Like violence calmed him more than prayer.
To be honest, he was hard to read.
His back arched, muscles flexed, and I swallowed, watching his bruised knuckles, tensed shoulders, and I hated how my eyes drank it all in like a sacrament.
‘Why?” I finally said. “Why are you out here playing with guns while I rot inside your gilded hell?”
He didn’t look up. Didn’t even bother to regard me.
“Peace looks different to everyone, Dolcezza.”
My breath caught. The way he said it. Like he meant it, and I strangely felt it deep in my bones.
“You said I’d see her. My mother.”
That made him pause. The silence was loaded like the gun in his hand. He finally looked up, cold or resigned.
“You will.”
“When?”
He stood abruptly. And I instinctively took a step back. “When you’re ready.”
