I close my eyes and press the stone to my chest. Say it again, I tell myself.Ask. Promise. Leave.My hands stop shaking a fraction. It’s not healing. It’s a map.
When I leave the suite, I walk slower, like someone who’s learned there are places in the world that won’t cut her. Raf waits in the living room. He doesn’t ask if I’m okay; he knows the question is useless. He hands me a glass of wine, and when I take it, our fingers brush. The brush is small and everything.
We sleep in his room now. The one he said he had designed with me in mind. I still can't believe he built an entire house for me, filled it with things he thought I would like. It should probably scare me that he got ninety-nine percent of it right. He knows me better than I ever thought anybody ever could. Heseesme. He seesme. The real me. Not the one I show my father, or the one I show my friends, or the one I show in public. There are so many Sophias, so many facets to me that I was never aware of. Raf sees them all. He accepts them all. And that… that makes my heart speed up and my stomach flutter. It reawakens the old crush with a vengeance and something more.
I sit on the edge of the bed and say the thing Esther told me to say out loud—three things he does that keep me here and breathing. “You ask. You keep promises. You leave when I say leave.” Saying them is like handing him a key.
He watches me the way he always does, quietly, as if he’s cataloging where I start and where I end so he never crosses the line.
“That’s true,” his voice is rough and soft. “I asked Esther, too. She told me to be useful, not theatrical. I like useful.” He smirks, and the corner of his mouth lifts in a way that should be infuriating but instead makes something inside me loosen.
I laugh, a little short. “It felt like I was learning the alphabet,” I say.
He kneels in front of me like a man making no big show of knighthood. He takes my hand and kisses the inside of my wrist, a touch so small it would be nothing on paper, but it’s everything in real life. “You aren’t learning the alphabet,” he says. “You’re learning how to speak your name again.”
My chest flips in that way it does, like someone opening a book you thought you'd never finish. “I don’t want to be a coward,” I tell him. “I don’t want to confuse safety with… hero worship. I don’t want to need you because I’m weak.”
“You’re not,” he says. His hands are steady on my knees. “You survived a war. You’re not weak for wanting a shelter. You’re allowed to want softness.”
The honesty of it knocks something loose. I look at him, the scar along his jaw, the way he holds his left shoulder like he’s used to armor. “I think I’m falling in love with you again,” I say, the words ridiculous and reckless andexactly right. “Not because you’re a hero. Because you choose me, you ask me.”
His face changes. Not softens—no. Something steadier: a reverence I’d only expect in prayer. He slides his hand up to the nape of my neck, thumb resting under my ear. “I love you,” he says, and it’s not a shout or an offering; it’s a fact he’s set into the room.
He leans in and kisses me slowly, giving me every chance to push him away. That thought lights a fuse inside me, hot and feral.
He’s putting me first.
Always.
Everything he’s done has been to save me, to make me feel safe. Not for a prize. Not for leverage. Because he loves me. Because he’s always loved me. The truth slams into me like a hammer: he loves me in a way no one else ever has.
My mother loved me because I was her daughter.
Marcello loves me because I’m his sister.
But Raffael loves me for me. Because of me. In spite of me. He takes all of me—the ugly, the broken, the sharp edges—and he doesn’t flinch.
I fist my hands in his shirt and pull him closer. His breath hitches, the smallest sound, and I feel it everywhere. He kisses me deeper, careful and steady, a question he keeps asking with his mouth and his hands: yes? yes?
“Yes,” I whisper against his lips, and I feel him exhale like a man unclenching a lifetime of fists.
His forehead rests against mine. “Tell me if you want me to stop.”
“I’ll tell you when I want you to stop,” I say, and then I’m kissing him again, greedy now, tasting the patience he’s offered me for years. He answers with a low sound that thrums through my bones, a warning and a promise. His palms bracket my waist, firm but reverent, and the world finally falls quiet. For a moment, there’s nothing but us and the steady thud of his heart under my hand. It’s faster than he wants me to know. It makes me braver.
“I kept trying to forget you,” I admit, breathless. “I tried to make myself fit into the life they planned. But every time I closed my eyes, it was you.”
His jaw flexes like the words cost him. “You deserve music and sunlight, princess. Not shadows and men like me.”
I slide my fingers to his throat, feel the heat of him, the truth of him. “You pulled me out of the dark. You taught me what it means to be chosen.”
His eyes soften, the blue gone dark and tender. “Then hear me,” he says. “I don’t want your father’s approval. I don’t want your brother’s permission. I want you. On your terms.”
“My terms?” I echo.
“You say when I touch you. You say when I stop. You say how far.” A beat. “And if you say wait, we wait.”
The feral thing inside me hums. Not because he’s holding me, but because he would let go. For me. The kind of power I’ve never had with any man, least of all in my own house, settles into my bones and rethreads my spine.
