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I’ve heard some variation of “Really? Bella Drakos?!” about eleven hundred and forty-seven times since it all came out, followed closely by “to a man?”

Weird way to find out I've been giving off gay vibes, but okay.

Then there’s my personal favorite: “And he’s still alive?”

I mean, rude.

I haven’t even attempted to kill Damiano since the night we found out we were getting married.

Progress should be celebrated, people.

My cousins are still sulking and making vague threats about “fucking Damiano up if he steps out of line”. But it just sounds like macho chest-thumping at this point. And I’m sure Achilles is only grumpy because Uncle Ares hid it from him.

Adrik, no surprise, is not a fan. He told me he thinks Dame is a good boxer, but that he gets “serial killer vibes” from him and that it “wouldn’t shock him” if Dame turned out be a necrophiliac.

I told him that’s how we first met…without mentioning which bit…and he dropped the subject after that.

Kirill, weirdly, has barely given me any shit at all, which is almost alarming. But there’s clearly something going on with him, because he’s been all emo and moping around for weeks, like a love-sick puppy.

I will be investigating this as soon as I figure out my own disaster of a life.

Anyway, campus gossip aside, the cottage is sweet. There’s only two downsides.

The first is our new next-door neighbors, a super weird couple named—wait for it—Kyle and Kylie. Their families are both involved in the Kansas City mafia, which I didn't even know was a thing.

They’re both aggressively blonde, overly friendly, and I’m ninety-nine percent sure they’re either going to ask us if we’re swingers or try to get us to join a cult . Also, they’re not an arranged thing. They’re just psychos who voluntarily got married at seventeen because they’re “just so in love.”

Barf.

The other downside is the fact that the cottage, given that it's designed for a married couple, has exactly one bedroom, with one bed.

It’s not the lone bed that’s the problem. That should, theoretically, be great. Damiano and I have already had sex, thoroughly and, objectively speaking, spectacularly.

People like me don’t really do relationships. Not real ones, anyway. Those require all sorts of deeply uncomfortable shit like “trust” and “vulnerability”, AKA handing another human being enough information about you to maybe ruin your entire fucking life. So hard pass.

Sex, though?

That, I understand.

And sex with Damiano is, as it turns out, fucking fantastic.

So when I discovered our adorable marital cottage came with exactly one enormous bed, I figured there were significantly worse forced-proximity problems a girl could have.

Except Damiano slept on the couch our first night here, and again last night.

I am extremely put off by this.

I think it’s incredibly wasteful to have a six-and-a-half-foot, outrageously attractive homicidal Italian sleeping on a couch when there’s a perfectly good mattress upstairs that he could be railing me into.

There’s been this weird little…change between us ever since the hospital. It’s nothing overt. We still insult each other. He still looks at me like he’s calculating how difficult it would be to dispose of my body every time I leave something where he thinks it doesn’t belong.

But he’s more careful with me now, which I honestly don’t really know what to do with or how to handle.

I know what to do with Damiano when he’s being a dick. I definitely know what to do with him when he looks at me the way he did over the carnage of that VIP room, right before we crashed together and had mind-blowing sex.

But, I have no idea what to do with the version of him who looks at me like I’m suddenly delicate. Or, worse, the version of him who apologizes to me.

That guy is fucking dangerous.