“I… I…” She looks up at me and closes the gap, pulling my face towards hers. “I just… need a minute.”
My heart clenches, but I nod, stepping back to give her a second to process my request.
If she says no, I might break.
But if she says yes, I definitely will.
Then I’ll let her rebuild me into whatever goddamn man she wants me to be.
Chapter 15: Dahlia
Istandinthecenter of the cabin, two steps from Bam and three steps from the door, trying to keep my bones from vibrating out of my skin.
He said he wanted to claim me, but only if I said yes.
As if consent matters to people like us.
My hands are shaking. I hide it by clutching the edge of my shirt. The fabric is stiff with blood and dirt, and when I pull it tighter across my chest I feel every scrape and bruise that the last three hours left behind. I press my fingers into my ribs until the pain centers me, then let go. It’s the only thing that feels real rightnow. My other hand loops around the fresh clothes Julian gave to me.
I replay Ciro’s warning, the words he left behind before everything changes:Love is a liability. Nothing good comes from loving a thing you can’t control.He said it with the calm of a man who’d seen the inside of too many coffins, who knew that the best you could hope for in our world was a quick death and a long memory.
Papa would agree, if he ever admitted to feelings. In his mind, loyalty and love are the same coin, but one side is worth more. He didn’t raise me to be happy. He raised me to survive, to be smarter than my enemies and colder than my lovers.
He would say that letting Bam touch me was an act of war.
He would be right.
A shiver tracks up my leg, but I ignore it.
I run my thumb over the seam of the clean leggings, feeling the tight weave of the fabric, and wonder what it would be like to start over. To not be the Bonaccorso princess with a target on her back and a graveyard in her eyes. I wonder if these clothes could make me invisible, or if I’d still cast the same kind of shadow no matter what I wore.
Taking a deep breath, pain shoots through me, sudden and all consuming. Lifting my shirt, there’s a purpling handprint across my sternum where Bam held me in the greenhouse, and when Itouch it my stomach twists. The pain is bright, almost clean, but the memory is dirty—his mouth on mine, the taste of blood and spit, the way he told me to run and I did.
Maybe I was never running from him. Maybe I was running from what he saw in me.
I catch my reflection in the window. The girl looking back is sharp around the edges—cheekbones too high, eyes too gold, mouth too stubborn to pass for anything soft. I see the Bonaccorso in her, and the mess she’s made of herself. I see the echo of my mother, the outline of my father’s ambition, the ghosts of every warning Ciro ever gave me. I see all the ways I’m broken, and all the ways I’m still dangerous.
I turn away from the window and meet Bam’s gaze. He doesn’t flinch. He just straightens, hands loose at his sides, posture half-predatory and half-exhausted.
“You still thinking?”
I nod, not trusting myself to speak. My throat is raw, and if I open my mouth I’m afraid something alive and ugly will crawl out.
The room is so quiet I can hear the clock in the kitchen, ticking down to whatever comes next. Maybe I’m supposed to go to him, let him finish what we started in the greenhouse. Maybe I’m supposed to run again, or scream, or hit him until my hands break. I don’t know. There’s no script for this.
I look at Colton, still passed out but alive. About the war my world brought to the Academy. About the corruption within it’s walls, the rot eating it from the inside out.
Maybe I don’t want either life.
Maybe I want something that burns everything else to ash.
“Lia,” Bam says, voice softer this time. “You don’t have to decide now.”
I hate that he’s giving me the out. I hate that he thinks I need it.
I take a step toward him anyway. My feet are still bare, cruised and cut, the wood icy under my arches, but the cold just wakes me up. I stop a foot away, close enough to see the small flecks in his eyes.
He looks at me like I’m a solution to a problem he’s been working his whole life to solve.
