Page 68 of Take Me Darkly

I was completely out of my depth when it came to what I felt for him. Pure, physical desire was simple—I had wanted him from the moment his dark gaze locked onto mine outside the Met Gala, even when I tried to fight it. Carnal hunger was easy to categorize. But what was taking root inside me now had no boundaries, no logical defense, and the sheer depth of it terrified me.

He had built me a studio, and creating a space as detailed as this was no easy feat. There had to be weeks of planning and sourcing, and he did it all while keeping it a secret from me. I hadn’t told him I was struggling—that I’d been missing this important element in my life. I hadn’t told anyone, but he had seen it anyway. Anton seemed to see everything about me, and the more time we spent together, the more I realized that was how Anton showed he cared. He wasn’t one for words, much to my frustration at times. Instead, he just paid attention.

“You haven’t been permitted to leave. To a man like me, that’s a cage. I’m just giving you room to breathe.”

He’d said it so simply, and something in me had broken open. He recognized captivity because he carried its scars, too. I kept turning his actions over, searching for a hidden motive or a calculated price. But no matter how hard I looked, I came up empty. He hadn’t built this to chain me—he had built it to give me back my soul.

I worked the head of the cobra using steel jacks to carve the jawline, narrowing the snout and angling it upward to project cold alertness. The rearing curve drew directly from the uraeus illustrations in my father’s texts—hood flared, supreme in its authority. I breathed that same unyielding power into the glass.

During a reheating cycle, my eyes caught a sleek Bluetooth speaker mounted on the wall near the tool rack—yet another detail Anton hadn’t overlooked. Setting the pipe into its rest, I stepped over and synced my phone, launching a random stream just to fill the quiet with sound.

The opening notes of a song filled the space, stopping me in my tracks.

It was Miley Cyrus’s “More to Lose.” Her raw, smoke-laced vocals cut through the hum of the exhaust hood, carrying an ache that hit entirely too close to home. It was the anthem of someone coming to terms with caring too deeply—of arriving at a place where having something real meant suddenly having everything to lose.

My chest constricted as the lyrics resonated through me. I left the track playing.

Returning to the bench, the music shifted the energy in the room. The rhythm grounded me as I shaped the snake’s lower body, pressing the hot glass against the marver and using a wooden block to guide the glass into a tight, fluid spiral. The coil required unlimited patience—a fraction too much pressure would ruin the symmetry, while working too slowly would allow the glass to cool past the point of pliability.

My mind drifted back to the cedar box sitting in my dresser drawer upstairs.

The three Brutus Denarius coins remained hidden inside, a secret kept from every museum and institution that would have cataloged them away. When my father handed them to me, he had stressed the significance of the number three—the sacred balance of past, present, and future. They were the final legacy he had entrusted to me.

Papa would have liked Anton.

The realization arrived without warning, bringing a sharp sting to my eyes. But it was true. My father would have admired Anton’s unyielding nature and his refusal to be ordinary. He would have grilled Anton over a bottle of wine, watching his reactions, testing his intellect—and Anton would have met his stare without flinching.

I had been contemplating giving Anton one of the coins for days. As a master collector, he would treasure it. But I also knew giving one or all of them away wasn’t something I could take back.

Yet Anton had handed me an irreversible gift first. By building this studio, he had restored the piece of me that had died in the flames in Lucca. He had given me back my art, my purpose, and a fragile, beautiful spark of hope.

I’ll give him a silver one.

The decision locked into place with finality.

I sat with it and focused on the final details, rotating the cobra through the heat, monitoring the glass by its shifting amber color. I used small metal tools to impress scale textures along the spine, deepening the gold concentration at the base of the hood. When the piece was complete, I carried the blowpipe to the annealer, carefully detaching the sculpture and resting it onto the insulated floor.

The cobra stood thirty centimeters tall from the base of its tight coil to the tip of its flared hood. Inside the dark, heated chamber, the amber glass glowed with a rich, internal fire, the gold veins catching the heat in a way that made the serpent look alive. The head was angled slightly sideways—vigilant, proud, and dangerous.

I closed the annealer door.

It would cool slowly over the next twenty-four hours, solidifying its strength. It was the most raw, personal piece I had forged in years.

Releasing my hair from its knot, I stood before the small glass viewing window, hypnotized by the warm, steady radiance of the cooling sculpture.

Rimasta.

The name arrived quietly and unexpectedly in my mind, Italian for she who remained.

Cleopatra, stripped of her kingdom by Rome, had remained immortal in memory and myth. My father had remained, too, in the maps and the journals and the lessons he gave me.

But most of all, I had remained—after the fire, after being shot, and after living in an unfamiliar place with no clear picture of what came next. I was still here, and I was still myself—even if a part of my soul had changed shape.

Rimasta was all of us.

A sharp growl from my stomach broke the spell. I pressed a hand to my waist, realizing I hadn’t eaten since yesterday. Untying my heavy leather apron, I hung it beside the door, offered one last glance at the glowing annealer, and pushed open the heavy barn doors.

The cool courtyard air hit my warm skin as I walked toward the private elevator. My body demanded food, but my heart felt lighter, anchored by the creation cooling in the dark—and by the dangerous, extraordinary man who was my protector.