Page 204 of Modern Romance December 2025 1-4

But I knew better than to crow about that. Or even to question him. Maybe I was afraid that if I did, he’d change his mind.

Instead, I turned my head slightly and pressed a kiss to his thigh. “All right.”

His voice, if anything, was grittier when he replied. “It has not yet been twenty-four hours. Once we passed that marker, likelihood of getting caught in a snare increases.”

All my limbs felt weighted down, but I managed to shift my hand and I traced patterns on his heavy quad muscle, currently acting as my pillow while I knelt there. His fingers moved through my hair, smoothing out the inky-black strands as if he found them precious. It would have been unbearable enough to make me cry if I could have processed it then, but I couldn’t. I didn’t.

I could only drift in the sweetness of this. I could only live in it.

“Where will we go?” I asked.

“Sicily.”

I looked at him, confused. “Isn’t that the last place you should go? With me?”

His mouth tightened. “It is the last place they will think to look for me. Until they hear that the assignment is complete, they will assume I am doing what is necessary somewhere else. It will buy some time.”

Time, I decided, sounded lovely. It sounded the way I felt, gazing at him with his fingers in my hair.

Maybe, with time, I’d figure out if it was even possible to process…all of this.

“It is better if I appear to be traveling alone.” He sounded fully grim then. “Do you understand what I mean?”

I thought I might, but I wanted him to tell me. So all I did was shake my head, there where he could feel it.

He tipped my head back so I was looking at him, and it was as if all the constellations in the sky somewhere above us changed position and found a new firmament there in his gaze.

I held my breath.

“I will need you to stay out of sight and quiet for some time. There is only one way to achieve this, practically speaking. I will knock you out and keep you out, then transport you out of Czechia.”

“You do love to give a girl choices,” I whispered. “I’ve never heard of such a thing as a woke weapon before.”

His head tilted slightly to one side. But his eyes were gleaming. He was laughing. I knew he was.

“This is not a matter of offering choices. I am telling you what must occur.”

He sounded as forbidding as ever, but the thing was… I knew better. Everything was changed.He isn’t going to kill me.And there was a gap between not being killed and living happily ever after, I knew that. I did.

Although, given who we were, maybe not quite so big of a gap after all.

But in any case, I wanted to make him mine, and I wanted to be a part of thewewho left Prague together. I wanted to make all of this my own, and not just because that was the easiest way to make a bad thing good.

Because I didn’t think it was bad. I didn’t think it was terrible.

I wanted more.

“You can do what you want with me,” I told him. I tilted my head a bit to show him my neck, where long ago—it felt like a lifetime ago when it was only last night—he had traced his fingers down the side of my neck and talked to me ofblood chokes. “All I ask is that you make it good.”

For a moment, he looked stunned. In the next, I actually saw a flash of his teeth, as before my very eyes, Giovanbattista D’Amato, Il Serpente’s deadliest weapon, smiled.

It almost made me come again, just at the sight. It hit me like a bolt of sensation, directly between my legs.

“As you wish,” Jovi told me.

And then he hauled me up from my knees and dragged me over him to straddle his lap. He gripped my head, palming the back of it, and kissed me, dirty and deep.

As he did, he reached between us and speared his fingers into all of my molten heat, and he was deliciously, deliberately ungentle. As if he knew my hunger had teeth.