Page 187 of Modern Romance December 2025 1-4

That blink echoed in me like a revolution, so I didn’t want to pay too much attention to it. I didn’t want him to hide it if it happened again.

What I wanted was for him to keep looking at me the way he was doing now, with fire everywhere and that answering kick of flame inside me. Because I had the strangest notion that these last moments of my life were the first and only ones I was actuallyliving.

That all the rest of it had been empty pantomime on my father’s nasty little stage, but this was the real thing.

Life was supposed to be messy. It was supposed to contradict and complicate, hurt and leave marks.

I’d read about these things.

But until tonight, I’d never experienced them.

I decided that it wasn’t the strangest thing in the world that I wanted more. As much as I could get before it ended. It didn’t make me broken or questionable or any of the other things people would say if they could look into this room and see us like this.

It made me a whole grown woman, not the little doll my father and his cronies had been bickering over for the past few years. It made mealive.

“What do you think having a life means?” Jovi frowned at me, but I took that like a victory. Any change in him was a triumph.

Anything that reminded me that this was a man, not a sculpture.

Or at least, that’s what he was for me.

I wanted to believe that he had the same catastrophically intense reaction to me as I did to him.

Okay, I already believed it.

“Having a life is not being locked up in convents or my father’s house,” I told him, sitting up a little straighter. “It’s…being able to walk down any avenue in any city I fancy, and doing as I please as I go. Being able to eat what I want, when I want, and have to explain myself to no one. Not having to ask for permission or forgiveness for what I wear or think or say. To make some money that is only mine and spend it as I like. Is that so hard to imagine? To me it seems quite simple.”

“This is what you’re missing?”

There was something wrong about the way he asked that, I thought. It resonated in me, jagged and sharp.

He moved closer, so that once again he was nearly standing between my knees, and I had to tilt my head back and look far, far up the length of his torso to see his face.

I thought he would reach out to take my chin in his hand once more, or something like it—

But he didn’t.

And the fact that he didn’t make me feel something perilously close toundone.

“What small, insignificant things these are to bother wanting,baggiana.” He sounded particularly dark and I felt my cheeks go hot, as if I’d exposed myself. “Where is it you think that people are living these uncomplicated lives you imagine are so fulfilling? I have been everywhere, and I will tell you, they do not exist, these lives.”

I could not pull my gaze away from him. “They must.”

“They cannot, becausepeopleare not simple,” he argued, that dark gaze seeming to wind its wayinsideme as he gazed down at me. “People are desperate and complicated, wicked and grasping.”

“Is that what you are?” I asked him, and it felt like the most dangerous question I could possibly have dared utter.

Jovi shook his head, and for a moment I thought he looked like he was in pain.

“Most people scuttle about this planet, imagining that the things they do make some kind of difference. That they matter. Their petty feuds, their heartbreaks, their daydreams about futures they will never make real.” He bent down and this time, when he smoothed his hand over my jaw, he kept going. He speared his long, elegant fingers into my hair, then used it to tug my head back. “But you and I, we know different, do we not?”

That didn’t seem like a question he wanted the answer to, and that was a good thing, since the most I could do was stutter out a breath.

“You and I know that all of it is futile,” he told me in that low, dark, rumbling voice of his that I could feel take up residence behind my ribs. “The bright, happy, pointless lives of people who are nothing more than prey. Just as you and I know that the world is sharply divided, is it not? Life belongs to the predator. Prey lives only insofar as predators allow it, and we both know that more often, they die.”

“I’ve always heard that Italians are poetic,” I murmured, and his grip in my hair was tight. It should have hurt.

Maybe it did hurt, but that, too, wassensation—and it turned out I was a glutton for every last scrap of sensation that I could hoard. That I couldfeelwhen for as long as I could remember, there had been so little but boredom, apprehension, and the inevitability of my own surrender. The tedium of the chokehold of the life my father allowed me, in the convent or under his disapproving eye. The endless stretch of these prison days without number.