My throat tightens. “It’s good. We’re getting along.”
“Look,Dante,” he begins, putting weight behind my name, shaping it like a warning. “You have potential. That’s true. Both Estella and I see it.”
My facial muscles clench before I force them to ease, letting the meaning of his words settle.
Estella thinks I have potential?
Something traitorous stirs inside me—a stupid smile threatening to tug at the corners of my mouth, a twitch I have to suppress with all my strength.
“But you need to stop it,” he goes on, the shift in his tone immediate and unmistakable.
I frown. “Stop what? Getting along with her?”
He exhales slowly, fingers weaving together as he leans his elbows onto his knees and studies me like a problem he can’tsolve. “Do you think I didn’t notice? The way you look at her, the way you react when I say her name.” His lips press into a thin line. “And I get it.”
He rises and steps toward me with deliberate calm. I stay perfectly still, eyes locked on his, trying to understand where he’s steering this conversation and why it feels like I’m being herded toward an edge I didn’t see coming.
“She’s a beautiful woman,” he says. “Funny, sharp, unpredictable, magnetic. And yeah, it’s not exactly easy to stay indifferent to someone like that, is it?”
My throat works around another swallow, dry and rough. This is a trap, a test, or both. I can’t yet tell which answer he’s waiting for, or which one will detonate the entire room.
“Don’t look so stunned, Dante,” he says with a low chuckle. “I’m not shocked you started catching feelings for her. Not even a little. And I’m sure it seems like she might feel something back. Doesn’t it?”
A cold, razor-thin thread snaps in my gut. “What did she tell you?” I ask, voice careful, slow, too aware of how easily this could tilt into disaster.
He inhales sharply, nodding as if my unease fits the exact narrative he already built in his mind. Whatever Estella said to him, I only understand fragments. I don’t yet know the whole story, or how much ground I’m standing on before it gives way beneath me.
“I know you might think I’m trying to trick you, or that there’s some game here, and you’re being cautious, which is smart,” he begins, deflecting with a casual shrug. “I’m not the kind of person you can trust, not really, and I own that. But right now, I need an honest answer. There’s no point in hiding from me, I already know. Estella told me enough.”
“It does,” I admit finally. “It does feel like she feels something, yes.”
His eyes close for a moment, and his tattooed hand rises, fingertips brushing lightly over his lids as if to massage away a lingering thought. “Now, listen to me,” he says, straightening, forcing his focus entirely on me. “This… this is just an innocent beginning, right? You feel something, she feels something. Completely normal.”
I doubt anything about us or our feelings is normal or innocent, but I let the comment slide.
“I’m going to walk you through what will happen next,” he continues, words measured but carrying an edge, a weight I can’t ignore. “Not because I think you’re special, not because I care about you—but because I know Estella. I know everything about who she was, what she’s done, and I can’t stand to see your potential wasted, ending up gutted somewhere, like filth in the sewage at the finale of it all.”
A thrill snakes up my spine, creeping into my veins, setting my blood ablaze with heat and anticipation.
“So, the feelings will bloom first. Then, while you’re still caught in the same currents, her feelings will start to sprout, to twist into something more. It’s like—” he pauses, snapping his fingers as if hunting for the right metaphor. “It’s like having a tiny body with a massive black heart inside, beating and bleeding, filling you so completely that you slowly start to lose the ability to breathe. That heart doesn’t stop; it grows and grows, until eventually it becomes too much. Too heavy. Too powerful. Too alive for your body to contain.”
His hands slice through the air, painting the shape of that invisible heart, of the mounting weight pressing into me. His voice rises, eager, urgent, like failing to make me understand this would be catastrophic. He leans in slightly, eyes burning with the insistence of someone who cannot accept incomprehension.
“You will eventually try to cut that giant heart out. Which is completely logical. You’ll start searching for ways, clawing for any relief. And at some point, when the pressure becomes unbearable, you’ll perform a homemade surgery on yourself. You’ll take the biggest knife you can find and start carving into it, slicing through its black, slick surface.”
“But I won’t survive it,” I finish for him, tilting my head, trying to follow the twisted road he’s laying out. “That’s what you’re saying, right?”
He snaps his fingers again, triumphant. “Bingo. You won’t survive it. You’ll die in agony—physical, mental, every kind of pain you can imagine. Is that what you want, Dante?”
“Why are you so sure this is how it ends?” I ask quietly. “What if Iwantthat black, bleeding heart inside me?”
The corner of his mouth twitches, his brief triumph draining away. “You don’t understand what you’re talking about. Trust me. I know how this goes.”
He drags a hand through his hair, leaving it messy, exhaling a long, worn-out sigh. Then, he reaches under his coat, catches the hem of his T-shirt, and lifts it just enough to reveal a thick, brutal scar carved across his torso.
“Look at this,” he says. “Estella loves me. And this is what she did.”
My gaze follows the line of the scar, narrowing at the way the stitches once held him together. Cane is waiting for my shock, but what rises instead is…intrigue.
