Page 221 of Modern Romance December 2025 1-4

For treating him like the man I knew he wasn’t.

But I didn’t take it back.

“This is what I am good for,” he told me, with a certain deliberateness that made me want to run and throw myself into his arms. It made me want to press my lips to all the places he hurt, starting with his heart. “Haven’t I said this to you before? I am a weapon. A monster. I was made precisely for the purpose I serve. I am the very model of efficiency and promise.”

“So you keep saying,” I managed to reply.

He moved into the kitchen then, prowling his way toward me. Behind him, I could see the light spill out into the empty rooms of this place, all of them graceful, exquisite.

Pointless, standing empty like this.

A lot like the man he pretended he was. But I knew better.

Did he?

“So what happens?” I asked, watching him closely. “If you kill me, who cares? I’m an unremarkable casualty. My father, despite his outsized sense of self-importance, matters to no one. I doubt very much anyone will notice when he’s gone.”

His eyes flared with an emotion I recognized, because I’d felt it myself moments before when he’d declared that this was all he was good for, all he was. These ghosts. This violence. This grotesque mirror of what lifeshouldhave been.

“My uncle does not need your father gone just yet,” he said coolly, as if he’d never been inside me. So deep I’d forgotten we had separate names. So deep I’d seen forever. But I knew him better now. I knew that the colder he got, the less he truly believed what he was saying. I kept my gaze on his face. I watched his eyes that were no longer ice-cold, but bright. “He needs him neutralized. Humbled. But then he prefers everyone in that position. The more bowing and scraping, the better.”

I nodded. “You would know how to do that best, of course.”

He made his way deeper into the kitchen, and his gaze was fastened on me as if he couldn’t decide if he wanted to kiss me or kill me after all.

“I find humbling myself overrated,” Jovi told me, darkly.

He kept coming, and I wondered why he couldn’t hear how hard my heart was pounding. Why he couldn’t read me the way I read him. I might have asked him, but then he was right in front of me.

And he leaned forward, putting his hands on either side of me, directly beside mine. Then he was leaning onto the counter, towering over me while I was staring up at him in what I hoped looked like defiance.

But the only thing I was really defying, I thought, was my own very real urge to throw myself into his arms. Because I wanted to see what he would say. What he would do. What value he put on the trust I’d thought we had between us—until he went off to court his probable death.

“Tell me what you think is happening here,” Jovi said, and he sounded…impatient and dark. Dangerous and something likeindulgent, if an indulgence could be that hard. “And make it quick. We are short on time, you and me.”

“What’stimebetween a killer and his victim?” I asked airily, as if I was still that girl who he’d carried out of my father’s house, bound and gagged and yet held securely and kept warm on the way out.

He muttered something beneath his breath. “Baggiana, I have told you. I am a man of vows.”

“I know that,” I fired back at him. “And yet you continue to honor your cruel, vicious uncle for some reason, even after he slaughtered your family and forced you to be a monster just like him—”

“I blocked out my memories of my family,” Jovi gritted out at me, standing so close I thought we might as well have been touching, his gaze so intense on mine. “It was better this way. It allowed me to function. It allowed me to survive.” He shook his head, though his dark gaze never left mine. “I was always taught that my father was a weak man. A small man, greedy and vain. But I remember now.”

I wanted, desperately, to touch him. I whispered his name instead.

Jovi swallowed. “He was neither. He wanted something better. Something clean. He wanted to save his family from this greed and horror that my uncle would tell you is in our blood. My father wanted to cut it out. He wanted to leave. But every time he thought about how he would do that, how he would convince Antonio to let us go, he could not see how it was fair for him to rid himself of the Il Serpente pollution and allow his family to continue operating normally. That’s why they killed him. They might have let my mother and my sisters go, but my father brought the authorities in. My uncle was forced to make an example of him.” His mouth curved, but it was a bitter reenactment of that smile of his. “But I was here. He enjoyed making that example. He reveled in it.”

This was where my childhood came in handy, I thought then. I could hear what he was saying. I could picture what he meant. I could want to cry again—for his life this time, instead of the death I’d imagined he’d walked into.

But I could also hold all of that inside.

“So what you’re telling me is that you’re not a monster at all,” I said, as evenly as I could, because I wanted him to hear me say it out loud. Just in case he was ever tempted to try to sacrifice himself again. Just in case a dark day found him and convinced him that he was nothing but the thing his uncle made him. “You’re the son of a hero and you lost your way.”

“I found my way,” Jovi told me, as if he was laying down law in the form of stone tablets. “I found my North Star, Rux. I found you.”

“I thought you went to sacrifice yourself,” I told him.

“You,” he said, intensely, “would be worth sacrificing myself for, Rux. But I find I would rather have you than lose you.”