When he finally looks at me, his expression is unreadable.
“It means,cara, that I swapped your pills for placebos when we first began having sex.”
Cara.He calls me that while admitting he tampered with my body. My choice. My future!
It feels like cold water slamming into me, knocking the air from my lungs.
“Why?” My voice trembles, weak in a way I hate. “Why would you do that?”
He doesn’t blink.
“To keep you,” he says simply.
Three words that destroy us.
My stomach drops. “Keep me? By—by getting me pregnant? Without even asking me?”
He tilts his head, studying me like I’m the one being unreasonable. “You were going to leave. I couldn’t allow that. This”—he gestures between us, to the bed, the sheets, the intimacy—“was never temporary to me.”
I can barely breathe. “So you decided for me?”
“No,” he says quietly, stepping closer. “I decided forus.”
For a moment, I see the truth beneath the controlled, elegant monster he’s always been. Obsession dressed as devotion. Possession disguised as love. A man who would burn down the world to hold onto what he claims.
My heart squeezes painfully.
“You can’t just trap someone into staying,” I whisper.
He touches my jaw, thumb ghosting over my skin with devastating tenderness. “You say trap. I say anchor.”
“Lorenzo—”
“You love me,” he says softly, almost triumphantly. “And I love you. I’m simply making sure you don’t forget it.”
The words hit me like a blow. It’s beautiful and violent all at once. He loves me.
I shiver, but not because I’m cold. From the awful, breathtaking realization that loving a man like Lorenzo Conti was never going to be simple. Or safe. Or survivable.
This should be the moment everything feels right—two people saying what they’ve been circling around for weeks. That we’ve fallen in love with each other. But instead it feels like the ground is splitting beneath us, like we’ve chosen the worst possible moment to tell the truth.
His world is so far from mine. Mine is already in pieces. And somehow, in the middle of all this wreckage, he is looking at me like I’m the one thing he refuses to lose.
My throat tightens.
Loving him feels like standing in the center of a storm and pretending the lightning won’t hit me.
And yet I don’t step away because I need to know the rest.
“Were you ever going to let me go when the month is up?” I ask, even though the answer is already clawing at the back of my throat.
He actually laughs. Quiet. Certain.
“No.”
One word. One syllable. And the entire foundation of us fractures.
“Francesca is pregnant,” I hiss, fury tasting like blood on my tongue. “She is giving you everything you want. And what? You expect me to stay here as your mistress so our child will grow up a bastard?”
