Page 173 of Modern Romance December 2025 1-4

Or shrines.

It was only after I accepted that he was, without question, the most spectacular man I’d ever laid eyes on that I noticed that there was no weapon in his hand.

Not that this made him seem any less dangerous, but it was surprising.

This was not the first time that someone had attempted to get to my father through me. I didn’t really like to think about the man who’d jumped on the hood of our car one day with me and an earlier stepmother in the back. When I did remember it, what played through my head was all her screaming in Hungarian and me staring straight ahead as the man pounded his fists and that vicious-looking knife in his hand against the windshield.

If he’d been serious,my father had told us disdainfully, later,he would have come prepared to shoot.

I had been seven.

The man in my bedroom, this angel of death, didn’t have to wave knives or guns around. I could see at once.Hewas the weapon. Possibly the scariest weapon I’d ever seen.

I could feel this as clearly as if he’d shot me where I sat.

I felt as if he already had.

He was so still as he regarded me that I began to wonder if I was dreaming.

Then he spoke. “I beg your pardon?”

His tone suggested that he’d taken a very long time to answer me because he didn’t quite believe that I’d spoken in the first place. That I’d dared.

“That voice doesn’t make it any better,” I told him, recklessly.

I thought of my mother. How she’d seen her moment and taken it. This was not necessarily the moment taking me, but I felt that rush of adrenaline all the same. And I understood something, with intense clarity.

Demureandmindfulare tactics we employ when we need to live, want to live, to make the living more comfortable.

They had no place here.

His gaze moved over me like a caress, at odds with his preternatural stillness. “What does my voice have to do with anything,baggiana?”

What indeed? I thought. It was… Velvety. Cold, like the rest of him, but it seemed to bathe me in fire.

Especially when he called me that name. I didn’t have to know what it meant. I was pretty sure I didn’twantto know what it meant. It still seemed to burn through me like the alcohol I’d drunk only once, in secret. It lit me up and rolled through me, setting brushfires.

Everywhere.

He studied me like I was an experiment. Or he was conducting one.

“Ruxandra Emilia Ardelean,” he said, pronouncing my name like it was a secret password. An incantation.

“Yes,” I agreed, though agreement felt a little too much like complicity. Even surrender. “Though my friends, if I was allowed any, would call me Rux.”

His dark gaze seemed to light on fire.

I followed suit.

I felt theroarof it wash over me, through me, then seem to gnaw its own place deep inside me.

“Then that is what I will call you,baggiana,” he said, his voice rougher, then. Lower. Velvet after dark.

As if he was my friend in any capacity. But somehow, I didn’t have the nerve to be quite soreckless as to saythatout loud.

He was still leaning against the far wall and his very nonchalance seemed to set off a dark, dangerous rush of sensation within me. All he did was study me and I felt myself shaking, from the inside out.

As if the trembling was starting deep inside me, down low in my belly, rising like a swell of a song the longer we shared the same air. The same ferocious silence.