The door behind me is still open.
I could go.
I stand there, and I let myself actually think about what that would mean. Going back to my room. Maintaining the careful distance I've built since that first day. The distance that has been shrinking week by week without my permission, but shrinking nonetheless. Going back to the version of this arrangement that was just a matter of survival. Just endurance. Just counting down to the six-month mark and the exit clause and the life I'd rebuild after.
I could do that.
However… I am finally, in this doorway, being honest with myself and the problem is… I don't want to.
I don't want to go back to my room. I don't want to pretend tonight didn't crack something open in me that I can't seal back up. I don't want to be the woman who stands at the edge of something real and chooses the safe version because the real version is complicated and dangerous and belongs to a world I never asked to enter.
I have spent my whole life being careful. Sensible. I read about adventurers and wrote careful book reviews about their journeys, and went home to my apartment and my routines andtold myself that a quiet life was a good life. And it was. It was a fine life. A safe life.
A small life.
This man, this infuriating, dangerous, impossible man, saw me and decided I was worth burning everything down for.
He is not a good man.
But he is, somehow, becoming my man. And that is the most terrifying, most honest thought I have had since the night in the parking lot when everything changed.
I could leave.
I'm not going to.
The decision settles into my bones, quiet and absolute, the way real decisions do. Not with fireworks but with the particular stillness of a thing that was already true before you said it out loud. I'm not leaving this room. I'm not leaving this house. Not in six months, not ever, if the alternative is going back to a life where no one looks at me the way he does.
I'm not running anymore. I close the door behind me.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Salvatore
“I’m never getting married.”
That’s what I said.
To myself. To my brothers. To any woman who ever tried to fall in love with me.
Marriage was never part of the plan.
Not for a man like me.
It wasn’t that I was incapable of love, at least, that’s what I told myself. The truth was simpler than that.
Love was a weakness.
A liability.
In my world, the second someone owned a piece of your heart, they owned a weapon they could use against you. And I had spent my entire life making sure no one ever had that kind of leverage over me.
So I built my life carefully. Methodically. Like a fortress.
Women were for pleasure. A distraction, nothing more.
They came and went, beautiful faces, expensive perfume, soft laughter echoing through rooms paid for with Vitale money. But none of them ever stayed long enough to matter. I never let them.
And if I’m honest… not sure any of them ever really wanted to.
