Page 202 of Modern Romance December 2025 1-4

“My family runs a very particular kind of family business,” he said. Eventually.

Neither one of us named that business. Neither one of us chose any one of the many words and phrases we could have used to describe the kind of business I was certain he was part of. It was unnecessary. I had always referred to my own father asan entrepreneurfor the same reasons.

“My father did not wish to be part of this business,” Jovi continued, with a faint note of surprise in his voice, as if he could not believe he was talking about such things. “He became embittered by it. He wanted out, not only for himself, but for the whole of his family. That might have been allowed, since he was the brother of the family’s head, but he wanted to take the business apart as well.”

I wanted to hold him. I settled for putting my hand over his, there where it rested against my face.

Jovi frowned as if this story caused him pain, or maybe my touch did, but he kept going. Stiffly. “He began talking to the people who could do the dismantling. It was discovered. Consequences followed swiftly.”

I thought aboutconsequences. About the kind of consequences that were typically rendered in a world like ours. He didn’t have to tell me what had happened to his family in any detail. I could guess.

And I thought, too, about the ways loyalty was demanded but even more so, how it was cultivated. If the only person in your life who could help you or harm you was a tyrant, well. I supposed that some people might havestandards. They might hold themselves to some higher level of morality, because they could. But it was my experience that when the kinds of people Jovi and I knew took charge of a child and set themselves up as a cruel god who had the power of life and death over them…

There were all kinds of consequences when you lived the kinds of lives we had.

Something in me shuddered, near enough to another sob, when I thought about all the ways that Jovi and I were the same.

I didn’t say this out loud. I wasn’t that far gone.

So I did what I could. I went up on my toes and while he looked at me with something like wariness, I slid my hands onto his hard jaw, and cupped his face.

But that wasn’t enough, so I leaned in. And I kissed him.

Not the devouring, life-altering kissing that we’d been doing. Not that wild burn that consumed everything, leaving nothing in its wake but ash and longing.

I could feel that fire inside me, and I could taste it on his lips, but this kiss wasn’t about that.

This kiss was comfort, understanding. This kiss was compassion and empathy.

This kiss was all these strange and overwhelming things I felt for him that didn’t feel any less real for being so fast, so sudden.

Truth be told, I had never felt anything more real in my life.

I kissed him like he was a wish granted, like I was sealing the deal on something magic, some marvel that was only ours.

The kiss shook through me. I could feel it in him, too.

When he pulled away, I gazed up at him and found the world was gone. Everything had narrowed down to this. The two of us, eye to eye. The sound of our breath and the way we seemed fused together, into one.

My hands on his face while his hands had come to grip my upper arms.

And I knew something without reservation or shame, without argument or concern. Webelonged, Jovi and me.

We were made for this, this dark communion. No matter what happened. No matter what he did because of vows he’d made to monstrous men. I would forgive him.

I already had.

And I think he saw that on my face, because he made a low, helpless sort of growl and then he was swinging me up in his arms. He carried me back into the bedroom, laid me out on the bed, and taught me that the things I’d only read about in books were far, far better on this side of the page.

He let me explore him. I traced the muscles on his back, the strength of his biceps, and the planes of his chest. I became obsessed with his male nipples that I found I could lick and tease as he’d done to me. I moved from one to the next, the way he’d showed me, and paused to make sure I licked my way along every letter that circled his heart, and the snake slapped over it.

“Chiù nniuri ri mezzannotte nun pò fari,”he muttered at me, as if it was some kind of prayer. Then he translated himself. “It can’t get any darker than midnight, surely.”

As if I was torturing him. I flushed with pleasure.

I followed the hair on his chest, glorying in the way it thickened as I moved down south, and when I got to that intriguing V that seemed to point the way to exactly where I most wanted to go, I thought he would stop.

But he didn’t.