He tilted his head slightly, as if weighing my defiance.
Then his words came, slow and menacing:
“It already took everything I have to make sure you wake up at all. You are alive because I allowed it,” he growled, teeth clenched. “So sit the fuck down!”
The velvet in his tone barely hid the steel beneath.
It pressed against me, demanding compliance.
I stiffened.
My chest tightened painfully.
Forcing myself to move, I slid to the edge of the bed, hands gripping the sheets.
I sat, but my gaze never left him, defiant and questioning, every nerve on fire from the mix of fear, and disbelief.
“Today, you become my wife,” Vincenzo said, his dark gaze boring into mine without a flicker of hesitation.
“Legally. Irrevocably. I do not give a damn how foreign that word is to you.”
The words sank slowly, like iron being pressed against my chest.
“You are mine,” he continued, each syllable deliberate. “To command. To punish. To break. To destroy. To end... if I so choose.”
My breath hitched.
“That woman whose place you took at the altar today... she is my first love,” he said, voice low.
“Violet,” he breathed the name, a flicker of something softer passing through, then vanished as his tone hardened.
“She was supposed to stand beside me today. Take my rings. Become my wife.”
“She was my first kiss,” he added, almost casually, as if reminiscing over a trivial memory. “My promised future.”
My stomach churned.
A future. One that I had clearly... disrupted.
“I refused to wed Violet,” he said, his voice dropping to a growl that seemed to vibrate through the air itself.
“Even though she stood there, dressed in white, ready to become my wife—the life she begged for... I denied her. Not because I hated her.”
He stepped closer, and the shadow of his immense frame swallowed mine. “Far from it. I denied her because you belong to me. Here. Under my roof. Under my gaze. And I will break you, piece by piece. I will make you hurt—vehemently, completely—and every moment of it will happen while you are trapped... entirely in the palm of my hand.”
The words struck me like a fist.
My pulse raced, my breath caught in ragged, shallow gasps.
“What have I done to deserve this?” I demanded, my voice rising, trembling with rage and disbelief. “I wasn’t cruel to you in that cave—not in any way.”
My heart pounded, confusion and anger tangling until I couldn’t tell one from the other.
“Why... why would you want to break me?” I added, my voice cracking. “Why marry me if it was only to ruin me?”
For a long, suffocating moment, he said nothing.
Did nothing.
