He pauses. “So one day… I killed him.”
A sharp, molten jealousy surges through me. I bite my upper lip hard enough that the skin pales beneath my teeth. When I swallow, the emotion goes down like hot coals, leaving a trail of heat that burns all the way through me.
“After that, she couldn’t even look at me without flinching,” he says, voice thinning, fraying at the edges. “She said I disgusted her. She broke up with me, told me I needed help. Icouldn’t let her go—I didn’t understand how she could let go so easily. So I started following her. Everywhere. And then I found out she’d been having an affair. Long before I ever touched her stepbrother.”
My lips part, and my head shakes before I realize I’m doing it. The pain in his voice is muted but relentless, the emotion seeping out of him like rain through a cracked ceiling—steady and unavoidable against the roar of distant thunder.
“I messed with the brakes, Estella,” he adds. “But I didn’t know she’d decide to take a drive with him that night.”
The pieces slide into place, one by one, clicking with quiet inevitability. I watch him, the panic beneath his skin buzzing like a live wire. A bead of sweat gathers at his temple, trailing down despite the freezing air pressing against us. The catacombs do nothing to cool the fever of his fear.
It’s not fear born from guilt that coils inside him. It’s the quiet, insidious fear that hisses he won’t be accepted after this—that I will look at him the way she once looked, with revulsion, with disgust carved deep into my bones.
I close my eyes, struck by a brutal, precise comparison. I remember what I did to the man who was my first love—how tightly I held him, how my love wrapped around him like a noose he couldn’t escape. I loved him until he couldn’t breathe. I loved him until he killed himself.
We love too hard. We obsess, we possess, we consume.
And betrayal is the one sin we will never, ever forgive.
“You’re not broken, Dante,” I murmur, stepping into him, cupping his face with both hands. His skin is warm, feverish under my palms. “You don’t need to be fixed. If someone couldn’t accept your love, that doesn’t make you a monster.”
His brows knit together, the anxiety melting into something darker, something fierce and hungry. He grips my hands as if anchoring himself to me. “I will kill anyone who even looks atyou,” he says, voice low, shaking with conviction. “Do you hear me?”
A sharp, electric fear slices through me—the kind that doesn’t repel but drags heat lower, pooling thick and molten in my stomach. It makes me tremble as I lick my lips, tasting the intensity of his words and the quiet, mad obsession he has with me.
“Yes,” I breathe.
“I don’t care how innocent they are, or what they have,” he says, the words rolling out low and deliberate, like the slow draw of a blade. “You aremine. And I amyours. I’d die before I let that change.”
The pull in my core tightens, sharpens, coils like a fist clenched around a live wire. My bottom lip slips between my teeth, pressure blooming against the skin as I let every syllable he just spoke sink into me.
It lands like a claim. Like a promise.
Like possession wrapped in fire.
A goddamn threat that burrows into my bones, settles there, and feels better than anything else in this world.
Because I, without hesitation, too, will do anything for him.
Somewhere deep in the night,something rough skates across my arm, moving to my wrist. The touch drags my mind upward, piercing slowly through the thick cloud of sleep. The heaviness clings to me, as if I’m wrapped in the clutches of a fog that doesn’t want to let me go.
The coarse texture slips to my other wrist. A soft groan lodges in my throat when something warm and wet presses againstmy lower stomach. The sensation is fleeting at first, blurred by the lingering haze smothering my awareness. But then it comes again—clearer this time—and the fog begins to thin.
Blinking my sleep-riddled eyes open, I squint into the darkness, trying to peel away the blur. My body tries to shift instinctively, but the moment I move, tightness bites into my wrists, forcing me back onto the mattress.
Another groan rises, this one scraping free, but it’s crushed against something sealing my mouth—sticky, firm, muffling even the vibrations of my breath.
The world slides into focus in fragments: the faint hum of the city outside, the dim spill of streetlight through the balcony doors, the breeze dragging its fingers across my skin. Awareness floods in, washing away the last traces of sleep.
Then I feel it fully. Rope coils around my wrists and ankles, all knots fixed to the bedframe. My arms are stretched above my head, my legs spread just enough to make my pulse trip.
A wave of panic surges through me, sharp and electrifying. The room suddenly feels colder, licking at every exposed inch of skin. I’m still in my silk pajama dress, but the thin fabric might as well not exist. The absence of my usual blanket lies beside me in a crumpled heap, and the nakedness of that emptiness sends a chill up my spine.
Goosebumps scatter across my arms. My nipples tighten into hard, aching peaks. I pull against the restraints, ropes digging in with merciless certainty.
I freeze when a large shadow leans over me, blotting out part of the thin light spilling through the window. His face is mostly hidden, carved out only in edges and silhouette.
But the shape. The presence. The warmth.
