Love, for me, has always been a transaction paid for in blood or silence.
I have never seen a future I didn’t have to steal.
And now I’m standing on a porch that smells like fresh paint and coffee, bruises turning yellow beneath my skin, a man inside who would burn down the world before he let anyone touch me again—
And I am fucking terrified.
Not of the next threat.Not of the next torture.
Of this.
Of the possibility that this is real. That I might finally get everything I ever wanted—and not have to run the moment it shows up.
A breeze slides along the porch, crawling up my arms in gooseflesh. I should go back inside. The floor is warm there. The couch is soft. Blankets still tangled from the few stolen hours before dawn, fully clothed but so close I felt every rise and fall of his breathing.
Instead, I stay.
I listen to the boards whisper beneath my bare feet. I count the pines lining the drive. I scan the tree line the way trauma taught me I’m allowed to.
Nothing moves.
No headlights.No men with guns.
Just me and this quiet that dares to be real—and the weight of a future pressing against my spine.
“I don’t know how to just… live,” I whisper into the open air. My voice sounds too raw on a morning this beautiful. “I don’t know how to be the woman who gets a house in the woods and a man who loves her and mornings that don’t end in blood.”
The railing doesn’t answer.
Coward.
Behind me, the front door clicks open.
I don’t have to turn to know it’s him. The air shifts. My body recognizes him before my mind catches up—the familiar heat at my back, the scent of soap and sleep and something feral and dangerous that is just Santino.
Bare feet cross the porch boards.
“You’re up early,” he says, voice rough with sleep.
A shiver tears through me that has nothing to do with the cold.
I turn.
He stands in the doorway in gray sweatpants and a black T-shirt clinging to his chest, hair pushed back with careless fingers, shadow dark along his jaw. No collar. No stolen holiness.
Just a man.
My man.
The thought punches the air out of my lungs harder than any broken rib ever did.
“I couldn’t sleep,” I say.
It’s only part of the truth.
I slept for maybe an hour before the dream came—hands on my face, water in my lungs, a voice telling me to scream louder so God could hear.
I woke up with my fingers twisted into his shirt and my mouth at his throat like it was the last safe place left on earth.
