Page 67 of Take Me Darkly

I stepped back out into the courtyard, pulling the heavy double doors shut until the latch clicked into place, then I texted Zeke.

12:45 PM

Me: Have the lobby feeds cued up. I want to see every frame of what Owens was recording.

The private parking garage where my Volvo XC90 sat wasn’t far, but I paused at the threshold of the courtyard, looking back one last time. A thin, brilliant ribbon of amber light bled from beneath the studio doors into the morning shade. The fire in her eyes had returned, and I had put it there.

I might not be able to voice my true feelings for her, but I could show her.

For now, that would have to be enough.

Chapter Twenty

Serena

* * *

I stood motionless in the center of the studio long after the heavy wood door clicked shut, listening as Anton’s measured footsteps faded across the courtyard. Then the silence closed in, broken only by the steady, deep hum of the main furnace.

Mine.

The word took root in my chest, heavy and surreal, as I pressed my palms flat against the cool steel of the marver table. I exhaled a long, shaky breath, letting the sensation wash over me. It had been an eternity since I’d stood in a space that felt entirely my own. I had almost forgotten what ownership tasted like. The studio carried a clean, intoxicating scent—a blend of mineral dust, dry heat, and fresh timber, underlying the metallic bite of high-end equipment. I breathed it in until my lungs burned.

A sudden, overwhelming tide of emotion rose in my throat. Tears of relief should have fallen, but they didn’t. Too many competing forces were warring inside me. Gratitude came first—staggering and complex—because accepting a gift of this magnitude from a man like Anton Romano felt like stepping onto a gilded precipice. I didn’t how to accept a gift like this from someone like him.

Then came the sharp, bittersweet ache for my destroyed workshop in Lucca, bringing with it the phantom scent of rain on cypress trees along the Tuscan hills—followed instantly by the crushing grief of knowing it was all reduced to ash.

Yet beneath the heartbreak, something that had been dormant since the night I was shot stirred back to life—an undeniable, burning urge to create.

I pushed off the table and began moving through the space, learning the layout with my hands. I ran my fingers down the custom iron tool rack, counting blowpipes by feel, testing the balance and weight of the punty rods. The annealer was positioned flawlessly, offering generous clearance on both sides so I could maneuver without restriction when handling molten glass. I laid a rod flat across the marver table to check its level.

Absolute perfection.

Whoever had sourced this equipment had done their research. I thought about the care Anton must have put into this, and that dangerous, secret warmth flared in my chest again.

I checked the temperature gauge on the furnace. The reading sat just above working temperature, the interior radiating the kind of dry, forceful heat that I’d always found absurdly comforting. While I waited for the temperature to stabilize, I tied my dark hair back, pulling on the elastic I always kept around my wrist out of habit, and thought about what I wanted to make.

Commission work is what had occupied my hands most in the past. It was generally easy, as the client almost always had a vision in mind. But commission work was often boring, and it was not what I needed. Today I needed something that belonged only to me—something I chose without reference to anyone else’s vision.

My thoughts drifted to the Serpent’s Disciples and the stylized, aggressive cobra symbol carved into stone and tattooed into Cade’s skin. A dark knot tightened in my gut, and then my mind shifted—as it so often did—to my father.

In his usual scrupulous way of delivering a lesson without ever announcing it, he had once lectured me on the iconography of the ancient world. The Egyptians, he’d explained, understood the cobra intuitively. The rearing uraeus worn on the headdress of every pharaoh wasn’t merely an ornament of vanity; it was an absolute declaration of divine protection, solar authority, and sovereign power.

It was the mark Cleopatra wore when she ruled an empire. And when Rome finally came to strip her of her crown, the cobra had been her final, unyielding act of defiance.

“The Romans were masters of erasure,” my father’s voice echoed in my memory. I could almost see him sitting across from me in his sunlit study, looking over the bridge of his reading glasses, the air thick with the scent of aged leather and decaying parchment. “They erased pharaohs who inconvenienced them, hacked royal faces off stone monuments, and rewrote history to favor the victors. Cleopatra presented a dangerous problem because she was formidable—intelligent, ruthless, and an absolute threat to Roman dominance. Rome had every reason to reduce her to a footnote, a cautionary tale about foreign temptation. And they largely succeeded.”

He had paused, turning an old coin over in his fingers before saying, “But physical objects outlast political propaganda, Serena. They survive in the dirt, giving us a grander, more accurate truth than the narratives written by tyrants. That is why our work matters. Not because we can unearth every secret, but because we recover enough truth to question the lie.”

I let out a slow breath and reached for a blowpipe, a vision of what I should create coming into focus.

I gathered the first mass of molten glass from the furnace with practiced precision, feeling the familiar, heavy pull of the material as it coiled onto the head of the pipe. The glowing mass was closer to liquid amber than glass, radiating intense heat. I rolled it rhythmically against the steel marver, shaping the core into a smooth, dense cylinder, then blew my first breath into the pipe. The glass responded instantly, yielding to my air with a subtle, elastic resistance.

I brought the piece to the glory hole to reheat, building the form in controlled stages, stretching the glass to establish a sleek taper. A snake was never static. Even trapped in solid crystal, it needed to pulse with latent movement.

On the second gather, I applied color. I rolled the hot glass through crushed color rods—a deep, fiery amber laced with threads of metallic gold that caught the light like sun beating down on ancient stone. To Cleopatra, gold was never a mere decoration. It was the color of the sun, a physical manifestation of divine right.

As the glass moved beneath my hands, my focus shifted to Anton.