“You deserve better than this,” he whispers, his thumb grazing my jaw before returning to my waist. Thorns split open the hollow spaces inside me, rooting where I swore nothing would ever grow. Because how can I make him understand?
I don’t want better.
Rowe would piece me back together, but I don’t want to be whole. I want to be unmade. I want hands that bruise and lips that leave me gasping, a fire that doesn’t warm but devours. I crave the hunger that never quite kills me but leaves me aching for the relief of destruction.
“And I suppose you know what I deserve?” I snap, the sharpness born of desperation, not disdain. I need the sting of distance before I cave to the pull in his voice. “Someone like you, perhaps?”
Rowe’s fingers press firmer against my spine, then he draws me closer—past propriety, past sense, into the gravity of something neither of us will define.
“Someone like me,Starling?” The name lands soft, but it sinks deep, burrowing beneath my ribs where I’ll never be able to dig it out. My heart hammers against my chest as old feelings threaten to surface.
The orchestra swells, strings pulling tight around the silence between us, stretching it thin and fragile, but we’ve stopped moving. Rowe’s gaze flicks over my shoulder, and for the first time tonight, something in him splinters. He brushes the corner of my mouth, a touch so light it comes across more like a wish than a caress.
“You deserve someone who doesn’t make you bleed just to feel alive,” he says, voice low enough to hollow me out. “Someone who loves you in a way that doesn’t leave you clawing for air.”
The words fall from him like scripture written for a heaven that has already crumbled. A devotion spoken into the void with no promise of return. He lays his heart at my feet—a sacrifice without altar, a worshiper without God—offering me something holy in a world that has only ever taught me to pray with broken hands.
My lungs seize and chest knots under the weight of it, stripped bare by the way he sees through every defense I’ve crafted. This isn’t what I want—this gentle unraveling, this faith in a goodness I stopped believing in long ago.
“Mind if I cut in?” Dom’s voice slithers between us, curling around my throat like a velvet noose I willingly step into every damn time. And that smile—gods above and below—that smile could burn entire cities to ash and make you beg to be the first thing it consumes.
Relief surges, sharp and sick. Dom’s presence is a lifeline thrown into Rowe’s sea of devastating honesty. Rowe’s hand falls away. Hisfingers graze my arm as he steps back, and the loss carves deeper than it should.
“She’s yours, Blackwood.” His voice is quiet. “She always was.”
His eyes meet mine once more, full of everything we almost were, before the crowd closes over him, as inevitable as dusk swallowing the day.
Dom’s fingers skim acrossmy waist as a slow, mournful melody threads through the air. His touch burns with familiar heat, but even that is too much after tonight.
“I’ve missed this dance of ours, darling.” His breath ghosts over my ear, coaxing a shiver I don’t have the patience to suppress. “You, playing the temptress.” His hand drifts lower. “Me, waiting to remind you who you belong to.”
I try to focus on the steps, on anything but the ghost of Rowe’s gentle touch still burning against my skin. “There is no game tonight, Dom.”
Something flickers across his face, so slight most would miss it, but I’ve spent years learning the tells that give Dominic Blackwood away. He laughs, but the sound is thin, off-kilter. His fingers tap an uneven rhythm against my spine, betraying the storm beneath his practiced veneer.
“Sweet, honorable Rowe. With his careful hands and trembling heart. The way you looked at him when he—”
“Stop.”
For a heartbeat, his beautiful nightmare of a face freezes. Then panic floods his eyes before he can catch it. “Aria—”
“I need to go.” I move, but his hand closes around my wrist. His pulse races beneath my fingers, matching the frantic cadence of my own.
“Wait.” The playfulness is gone, replaced by desperation. “I’m sorry.” The words sound foreign on his tongue, like he’s excavating them from some long-buried place inside himself. “That night you came to me, when the grief was eating you alive . . . I should have known how to help. Instead, I just . . .” His jaw clenches. “I tried to fix it the only way I knew how. I thought if I could pull you closer, distract you, protect you,something, it’d stop the way you were breaking. But I wasn’t what you needed and that scared the shit out of me.”
“You saw me falling apart and you just froze.” I don’t sugarcoat it.
“I know.” His eyes dart around the room, checking for witnesses to this unprecedented display of vulnerability. A muscle pulses in his jaw, and something about the way he holds himself reminds me of a cornered animal, dangerous but terrified. “Come with me.”
“What are you—”
“Trust me.” A reckless request, coming from a man who ruins things so beautifully. “Please.”
Dom guides me through a hidden door into what appears to be a coat room, though it’s more like stepping into another world entirely. Crystal sconces flare to life at our presence, their enchanted flames casting shadows that writhe across antique mirrors and blood-red velvet walls. The space resembles a confessional booth crafted by demons—claustrophobic, dangerous, designed to hold sins that leave permanent marks on your soul.
“If you think we’re having some dramatic reconciliation against these walls—” I start, but the words die the moment I see his face. There’s an edge to him, like he’s fighting some internal war I can’t begin to understand.
His laugh cuts through the charged silence. “Please. We both know it’d take more than a coat room to absolve me.”
