My hand still braced against the wall, my body angled toward the hallway, but my head slowly turned back toward him.
Exhaustion weighed heavily on my features now—visible in the droop of my eyelids, the faint tremble of my lips, the way my shoulders barely held themselves upright.
He stood where I’d left him.
Watching me. Reading me.
“The rule I set,” Vincenzo said, his voice dropping into that dangerously quiet tone, “coming to my bed by ten every night — it no longer applies.”
Confusion flickered through the haze of pain.
I parted my lips to speak, but he cut me off before a word could form.
“You’re no longer worthy of sleeping in my bed.”
His gaze raked over me with open disdain.
“From now on, you’ll lie in the dark by yourself, night after night, remembering exactly what you will never have.”
“No warmth. No comfort. No love. Just you, alone.”
“You’ll spend the rest of your miserable life knowing the only man who owns you has decided you’re unworthy of even the basic comfort of his body next to yours.”
“Sleep alone, Elena. Get used to it. Because that’s all you’ll ever have.”
Something in my chest twisted sharply, like a blade had been driven in and slowly turned.
For a moment, I couldn’t breathe.
The air caught somewhere between my lungs and throat, refusing to move as the weight of what he’d said settled deep.
The door behind me remained open.
A dark rectangle framing the empty hallway.
I stood there for one long moment.
Staring at him.
At his eyes—cold, steady, unbothered.
At the way he held himself, as if nothing he had just said carried any weight at all.
As if it cost him nothing. As if I cost him nothing.
My chest tightened.
My throat worked, trying to form words that refused to come together.
They were there—I could feel them pressing against my teeth, pushing at the back of my tongue—but the moment I tried to give them voice, they fell apart.
Disintegrated into something too fragile to exist.
My throat closed.
Constraining.
Swallowing everything back down into that hollow place in my chest where all his words had gone to live—and rot.
