Page 212 of Modern Romance December 2025 1-4

Am I going to have to take care of you too, you little shit?he’d asked. This man whose lap Jovi had napped in when he was smaller. This man who usually ruffled his head and gave him extra dessert at the family table. He had known it was Antonio, but that night, his uncle had looked like a monster. Something out of the nightmares Jovi had thought he should have been too old to keep having.Or can I make you useful to me?

Jovi hadn’t said a word. He’d had blood in his mouth. His ears were ringing, but at least he couldn’t hear any more screaming. He’d wanted to cry.

He’d known better.

Smart kid, Antonio had said.Keep your mouth shut, unlike yourstronzofather.

Then he’d kicked Jovi in the stomach, for good measure, before he’d had his men drag him out of the house. They’d thrown him in the back of their car and had delivered him, unceremoniously, to his uncle’s house. He’d been kept in a tiny room at the back, visited only by his angry aunt, and it hadn’t been until many years later that he’d realized his life had likely been in the balance that whole time.

It had only been after a few weeks of keeping Jovi locked away had his uncle decided that he would, in fact, create a secret weapon to unleash on his enemies. Before that, his nephew had been considered “missing”—and at any point, Antonio could have killed him, too.

That wasn’t a realization Jovi liked to revisit.

This was exactly why Jovi kept these things out of his head. This was why he had never let another human close to him, because closeness led to blood.

Though if he was entirely honest with himself, he doubted that there was any other person on earth who could have gotten to him like this, so far under his skin that he had no choice but to revisit…everything that had led him here. To her.

So he’d held Rux close in his bed, baffled that urge to do so seemed to be more aphysical needthan anything else. He’d stared at the ceiling in this haunted place, and had been deeply pleased that he’d had the place stripped down. He didn’t think he would have been able to handle the memories that poked at him if he hadn’t. If his father’s books were still overflowing from their shelves. If his mother’s paintings still graced the walls. If his sisters’ toys were left as they had been, in and around the bin in their playroom—

Stop, he had ordered himself.

He had pushed the memories away—though he was aware, then, that they didn’t go anywhere. That he could no longer cut them off from himself. But instead of lingering on the implications of that, he had set about meticulously plotting out his next move.

And the one after that. And on and on, testing strategies in his head, throwing in different obstacles, and revising as he went.

But no matter how he’d approached the problem, he’d arrived at the same conclusion. There was only one way out of this. And he doubted very much that it would be anything but painful.

He hadn’t been surprised—maybe he was even proud—that Rux was worn out, so he’d let her keep sleeping. While she did, he’d slipped out of the bed, showered once again, and then tended to some business that he could not accomplish electronically.

It took the better part of the afternoon.

When he came back, he found her dressed in the clothes he’d torn off her in the garden. She was sitting out on the back steps, looking pensive.

“Where have you been?” she asked. She did not sound accusatory. Jovi almost wanted her to, so he could perhaps convince himself that she was just a woman like any other.

“Surely you’re hungry,” he said, instead of answering her question.

She looked up at him as if she was trying to read him and his instant response to that was to make himself impassive, a wall of blank stone, to keep her out. The way he kept everyone out.

It took a significant effort to stop doing that, and it made him…not exactlyangry. He didn’t allow himself anger. But he didn’t wish to discover what else it could have been. He just knew he didn’t like it.

“You don’t always have to feed me, you know,” Rux told him with great seriousness, her gaze dark gray and deeply grave. “You don’t always have to tend to me like I can’t take care of myself.”

Jovi studied her. He liked the way the breeze played with her hair. He liked the way she curled around herself as she sat. “But I want to.”

He watched her melt in real time, and so it was a little longer, then, before he took her into the kitchen and satisfied himself by serving her the pasta he made and then insisted she eat until she was full.

First he had needed to taste her all over again, to be sure.

This was a pattern that repeated itself as the days passed, one into the next, like something from a dream. The sun was so bright. The sea beckoned from afar. The mountain rose strong and tall, and the birds sang them arias to while away their days.

It was almost like a holiday, if Jovi ignored the many things he was putting in place.

If he ignored the storm that drew closer to them by the moment, and was likely to eat them whole.

“How long do you think we have?” Rux asked one night, tucked up against him in bed.

Jovi had just taken her with a ferocity that should have shocked him, but this was his Rux. Whatever he brought to her, she met it and gave it back. She had teased him, and it had taken him a moment to understand both that she was teasing him—actuallyteasinghim—and that he’d liked it.