Page 178 of Modern Romance December 2025 1-4

When that was done, I felt him kneel behind me. I glanced down, because there was something about his position. There was something about a big, scary man, sculpted and beautiful, kneeling there beside my bed with his hands on my body—

It took me long moments to realize that what he was doing was tying my ankles together, too.

He turned me around, but I was off-balance now. I found myself slumped back against the side of my high bed. My hands were bound, but reached out and gripped onto the coverlet behind me, as if that might ground me. That last little bit of something familiar.

Because the man standing in front of me was death. I knew it. I could see it.

What I couldn’t understand was this simmering thing inside me that wanted to glory in that. In him.

Maybe it was what I’d been trying to tell him tonight—or explain to myself out loud while I was at it. All of the men my father had presented to me had death in their eyes. All of them were violent, brutal.

I didn’t have to know anything about them to know this. It was obvious at a glance.

The fact that this one was also beautiful felt like a gift.

Then again, it was possible I was just looking to make a gift out of the usual shit show that was life as Boris Ardelean’s daughter. Maybe it didn’t really matter either way.

“Last chance,” Jovi said in that cool, pitiless voice of his. Even with his warm accent, he sounded like what he was.

Deadly.

“To save myself?” I asked. “But without my hands or the use of my legs? I’m not sure what that would look like.”

“I can put you to sleep,baggiana,” he told me. Then he reached over and fitted his hand around my neck.

At first it was gentle. As if he was learning the shape of me and feeling my pulse in his palm. But then his grip tightened.

Just a little.

Then a little more.

Then more still, until I felt my mouth drop open, my breath escape me, and that ripe weighted softness between my legsbloominto a hectic kind of blaze.

“Then,” he told me, his voice almost something like a croon, “you can cling to the notion that this is something that is happening to you only. And that you have no choices. That you are nothing at all but a hapless victim, caught up in the clutches of dangerous men.”

“That’s exactly what I am.” But my chin lifted up of its own accord. “But I’ve come to terms with my lot in life. Do you really think I didn’t expect to see you one of these days? You or someone like you. The angel of death at my bedside. One way or another, it was always going to be like this for me.”

“It was always going to be ugly,” he agreed, though when his fingers flexed against my throat—just enough to get my attention—I thought I’d hit a nerve. Somewhere in there, very deep. “But tonight, it turns out, it is me. And I have a different aesthetic than butchers like your father.”

“Art is in the eye of the beholder,” I managed to get out, that hand tight enough that I wasn’t entirely certain he was going to let me keep breathing.

I wondered if this had been all an elaborate setup on his part, making it seem as if I would have more time when he knew if he would snuff me out, just like this. Making it seem like talking to him worked, or might work. Making it seem like this was anything other than what it was. The execution of an asset, to be used as leverage against a more important player.

Maybe what he really liked was toying withhope.

“Don’t worry,” I managed to squeak out. “I promise to give you an excellent review.”

Once again, the dark ferocity in his gaze seemed to…thicken.

Jovi didn’t squeeze his hand tighter. Instead, he let go of my throat, and before I could truly process that, he was tying first one strip of ripped pillowcase over my mouth. He secured it tightly enough so that it pulled between my lips and made me have to think entirely too much about the placement of my tongue.

But he wasn’t done. He took another strip and tied it over the first, this one wide enough to cover the lower part of my face entirely.

Then he stepped back, checked his work with a few quick jerks of his fingers, then moved back again—this time to cast his cool gaze around the room, letting it land on the bed.

“Now, I’m afraid, I need your blood.” And I was sure that I saw something like a smile in his gaze when I jerked at that. “Calm yourself, Rux. I only require a little. We need to leave a message, you understand.”

And I didn’t know what he was going to do. What I knew was that I wanted to make the decision. This might be nothing more than false hope I was selling myself, this might be a farce all the way around—but if I chose it, it was mine.