Page 199 of Modern Romance December 2025 1-4

Now, I thought, he’d made my body his as if it had been destined for him all along.

I knew my body all too well. I despaired over the flaws I saw in it that I liked to pick apart in the mirror. I admired its strength. What I really liked was the way the most dangerous man I’ve ever met looked at this body. How he’d moved his hands over me in seeming awe and wonder. How he’d used his mouth like some kind of benediction.

After all those days and nights in lonely rooms in both the convent and my father’s house, it seemed to me that I had finally found holy ground.

By this point, I realized that I could see in the dark well enough, so there seemed little reason to linger where I was when he was the only thing on my mind. I could see my pajamas crumpled in a heap on the floor, so I pulled on the little shorts and only remembered that he’d torn all the buttons off the top when I shrugged it on.

The girl I’d been before him paused, becauseshehad never let another person see her naked since she’d been a baby.

But the woman I was now decided I didn’t really care if the man who’d had his hands and mouth all over my body saw that body in the light.

Though even as I thought that, the idea made me shiver a little all the same.

Because the darkness was one thing. There were places to hide. Or maybe I just wanted to believe that there were.

I swallowed, but I moved over to the door anyway.

I put my hand on the doorknob and accepted that this was a moment of truth, in its way. Had he locked me in here? Was this just another cell?

He was my captor. He was my only lover.

But which one was he right now?

I held my breath and tried the knob—

And when it turned easily in my hand, I pulled the door open.

I felt emotion pummel me then, as something alarmingly close to a sob threatened to erupt from deep inside me.

Maybe because I couldn’t remember the last time I hadn’t been locked away. In the convent. In my bare little room in the dormitories there. In my father’s house, sequestered on my own lonely hall, guards at the end to keep me there. And sometimes, depending on my father’s mood, with the bolt thrown on my bedroom door—to which only he had the key.

I had no idea what expression could possibly be on my face as I let all the light that greeted me wash over me, but I didn’t fight it. I didn’t stop, either. I let all that shocking emotion roll through me as it would, then I let it go.

And it was only when I was sure I wasn’t about to break down in sobs that I looked around and found Jovi watching me with a curious look on his face from where he sat at the counter in the open plan kitchen, a tablet in his hand.

“Good morning,” I said, with laughable courtesy, given the circumstances.

But he didn’t laugh, of course.

“It is afternoon,” he told me, expressionless. But with a hint of reprimand in his tone, as if I’d been lazing about like some kind of spoiled princess after a night out partying.

For some reason, that mademelaugh.

“Yes,” I said, nodding. “It’s very important to keep the correct time in a circumstance like this. And I do apologize. I usually prefer to wake up bright and early to fully experience the breadth and depth of traumatic kidnaps. My bad.”

Jovi did not respond to that. He only watched me, darkly.

This was fine with me because there were important details to consider, I realized belatedly. Such as the fact that he was wearing a pair of what looked like athletic trousers. They were black, sat low on his hips, and, more importantly, they were the only thing he was wearing.

Meaning I could see the full glory of his chest.

I had felt it last night. I’d driven myself happily mad against it, and even now my hands longed to do a better job with it. I wanted to find my way over every ridge and scar. I wanted to commit them all to memory.

I wanted to brand him on the inside of me, so he would always be mine.

What I noticed most of all was the tattoo over his heart. It was a circle of words in all-black ink, stamped deep into his skin. With a snake coiled in the middle of it.

“You should eat,” Jovi said in a gruff voice.