Page 174 of Modern Romance December 2025 1-4

I didn’t dare look away from him to check the clock on my nightstand but I could tell that it was late. Very late. My father had insisted that I accompany him and my stepmother to another party, and the two of them had gotten into one of theirmoodson the way back. In other married couples, it might be considered a fight. But Katarzyna didn’t fight with my father. No matter how insulting he was, or cruel, she responded to him in the same deadpan, literal way.

As if he was really asking her questions. As if he was really in some confusion when he asked her things like what kind ofthisorthat—and it was always something insulting—she thought she was.

All the other stepmothers had screamed or cried or come apart. If I could remember my own mother, I imagine she would have done the same, much as I’d like to think otherwise.

Katarzyna was, in many ways, my hero.

I tried to channel her now. I tried to arrange my features into that mask of placidity she always wore. As if it could not possibly matter what this stranger in my bedroom said or did. That he was worth as much notice as a spider that made its way onto my ceiling one night. Nothing I wanted to see of an evening, and something I would like very much to remove from my vicinity, but without any need for theatrics.

I don’t know what he saw when he looked at me, but something shifted. I saw it, but couldn’t make sense of it. “You must know, of course, what happens now.”

I was certain I did.

“Do I get to know your name?” I asked instead of dwelling on what was coming.

Maybe that was a kind of weapon, too.

That odd, gleaming light in his gaze that made me think of liquid gold, gleaming there in all that darkness. “Why should my name matter?”

“It’s only sporting to know the name of one’s executioner,” I pointed out with great bravado. “Surely we can agree that it’s a matter of honor.”

Something changed again, then. I couldfeelit before I saw anything to suggest it. A moment later, barely a breath, he tilted his head to one side.

“Do you think that will save you?” he asked, his voice quiet and mild, and far more dangerous for it. “It is only a name, after all.”

“It’s only polite,” I replied.

That tilt of his head seemed to intensify. So did his gaze. “You can call me Jovi,” he said, in that accent of his that spoke of warmer climates, olive trees, warm sunshine—

That was what the gleam in his gaze reminded me of, I realized. It was that kind of gold. It was the endless summer of a perfect, Italian afternoon. The kind I’d only seen in movies, because I’d never been farther south than Bratislava.

He lifted a hand, and I tensed. And it wasn’t that I’dforgottenthe situation I was in, or my peril, but the reality of it all came flooding back then.

Hard.

I was expecting to see something ugly and violent in his hand—but it was only his hand.

My heartbeat didn’t seem to note the difference.

“Come,” he told me, and it was an order. “We will leave this place.”

I did a quick calculation in my head. My father and Katarzyna would either be fast asleep or otherwise occupied. If history was any guide, my father always preferred to get his own back in their bed if he couldn’t get a rise out of Katarzyna otherwise.

A daughter didn’t like to think about these things, but it was unavoidable. It wasn’t as if the man had any shame.

Jovi—and it should have introduced me to more shame than I already felt, the lilt I felt inside when I thought his name—could not have come in through my windows. They were facing me. Even if I somehow hadn’t seen him come in, the windows themselves would have made noise. At the very least I would have seen him move across the room to face me the way he was now.

He had to have come from outside this room, having found a way into this fortress of a house that my father always bragged was impregnable.

And if Jovi had come in somewhere else in the house, that likely meant that he would want to retrace those steps. But I wasn’t sure how he planned to do it when there were so many guards in the house. To say nothing of my father himself. Just because he didn’tliketo do his own dirty work didn’t mean hewouldn’t. And he had been known, even on nights of excess, to find his way back to his study.

To count and stroke his money, I had always supposed. As far as I knew, it was his only joy in life.

“You can try to escape me,” Jovi told me, as if he was there inside my mind. As if he’d found his way in, no matter how hard I tried to convince myself that, like Katarzyna, I was unreadable. Unknowable. “But as in all things,baggiana, there are consequences.”

“Meaning you’ll kill everyone in the house? You’ll burn it into the ground? You’ll torture me later? I’m afraid you’ll have to be more specific.” When his eyes seemed to widen, very slightly, I lifted a shoulder, then dropped it again. “My father is a very unpleasant man. I imagine you know that, since you’re here. I’m conversant in consequences. I’m just wondering if yours are different.”

“You hold the lives of everyone in this ugly house in your hands. Is that a departure for you?”