Page 193 of Modern Romance December 2025 1-4

Yet something in me knew better than to ask.

He pulled me up to my feet and then he led me out of that room with that big, hard hand of his guiding the way. This time it was on the back of my neck, propelling me out into the house ahead of him and up those stairs to the next level.

When we got to the door that waited for us on the landing a flight up, he paused. It was gloomy in this stairway, with no windows and only a dim light up on the wall. I could hear him breathing, and something about that felt unbearably intimate. My eyes drifted shut, but opened again when he put his hand on the door that waited there.

I could feel him, big and glowering and so impossibly beautiful, so exquisitelyhim, behind me.

“Tomorrow,” Jovi told me roughly. “I will kill you tomorrow.”

Then he opened the door and led me into what looked like a perfectly normal, happy little flat, lit up from all the light that was pouring in from outside.

It took me longer than it should have to understand that it was daylight.

And if he didn’t know that it was already tomorrow, I wasn’t going to tell him.

Especially not when he turned me back around to face him, so I could see that look of anguish and desire all over his face, and took me in his arms at last.

CHAPTER SEVEN

HE WAS RUINED.

Wrecked.

Jovi had no idea what was happening to him. What had been happening to him ever since Rux had looked up from her book, met his gaze, and held it.

The attraction was bad enough. His body had always been his to command—the only thing that was entirely and only his—until now. This feeling inside him, this unbearable need, made him feel like someone else, some stranger unbound by the vows that had ordered the whole of his life. He could not understand how anyone lived through feeling like this, why it didn’t cut them to their knees.

He didn’t understand what his body was doing. It was a wild ride, and on some level, he might have understood it if it was only his cock, but there was all the rest of it, too. That outrageous pain in his chest. The surprising fragility of his own ribs.

Worse still, he felt…hot. Everywhere.

When he’d left her in that room below, he’d climbed the stairs to the living part of this house and had wondered if he was coming down with some kind of fever. If he was actually ill.

Because otherwise, he could not account for this. For any part of this.

His body did not feel likehisany longer. It seemed to obey that heat inside him instead, that consuming, outrageous heat that seeped into every part of him, making him edgy. Making himhungry.

He’d tried to shake himself out of whatever spell he was under. He’d tried to remind himself that he was a professional, that this was what he had been raised and trained to do and not some kind of twisted date, and that he had things to accomplish here.

Promises to keep to the man who had allowed him to live.

Promises that were all that differentiated him from an upstart or an enemy, in his family’s eyes.

Jovi could not make sense of the voice in him—some odd, alien voice—that wanted to know why he was allowing this to continue. Why, when he was by far the most powerful person in Il Serpente if fear alone was the metric, did he continue to bend the knee to those he could end as easily as anyone else he’d been assigned to handle?

These were treacherous thoughts, he’d thought. Dangerous thoughts.

Because Don Antonio had spared Jovi’s life, but he had taken that life and made it his. There was not one thing Jovi had, including the air he breathed, that his uncle had not given to him by virtue of letting him live.

How could he possibly question that? It was the foundation on which the whole of Jovi’s existence stood.

He’d moved around the flat, determined to force himself back to normal by performing the usual tasks he would typically handle at a time like this. There were always tracks to be covered, competing exit scenarios to be plotted out in case one or another fell through, not to mention the more unsavory details comprising cleanup, disposal, staging if necessary, and all the rest of the things that Jovi had always accepted without the faintest hint of emotion.

Yet tonight—this morning, he corrected himself when he’d realized the sun had already come up outside—none of it sat well with him.

Hedidn’t sit well with him.

Too many things seemed to be chasing each other around and around inside his head. Scraps of memories he rarely allowed himself to look at and would have denied he still carried inside him.