Page 222 of Modern Romance December 2025 1-4

I couldn’t breathe. “But your vows. Your promises.”

“I told you that you were mine and I was yours,curò,” he said, even more urgently. “I meant that. You gave me your innocence and that meant something to me. You are my heart. It did not beat until I met you and now it only beats for you.”

He was thundering all these things at me. They moved through me like a wild storm.

And I believed every word as surely as if they were written on my heart.

Because they were.

Jovi’s gaze scanned mine, and it felt like that same thunder. “We have an hour.”

“Until what?”

“I negotiated the terms of my exit from my family and from Sicily.”

I wasn’t sure I heard him properly. I wasn’t sure I could believe him. That we had to run, that we had to escape, that made sense—but that they might let him go? Impossible.

Wasn’t it?

I wanted it to be true more than I wanted my next breath. “I didn’t think that was a possibility.”

“Everything is a possibility if you have the proper tools,” he told me. “In the case of my uncle, he underestimated the attention to detail I give to everything I do. Names. Places. Dates. Recordings. As if it was my job to maintain a record of his crimes.”

“Did you always mean to leave Il Serpente, then?”

I hardly dared ask it. But he blinked, as if he’d expected the question. As if he’d asked it of himself.

“Tonight I dug up the graves inside of me,” he told me gruffly. “I let the ghosts out, and all the memories that came with them. I tried to honor them. Yet all this time, I think that I was trying to honor my father in my own, twisted way. I told myself I was simply being thorough, and keeping myself safe. And I was. But I also think that I was gathering all the evidence my father would have. If he hadn’t been found out. If he’d lived.”

I was finding it hard to breathe. I was swaying, and my eyes were blurry again, but I couldn’t seem to care enough to wipe at my cheeks.

Jovi reached over and did it for me. First one cheek, then the next. “But if you no longer wish to come with me, Rux—if you can’t see a life with someone who’s done the things that I have, I understand. I will get you out. But I will stay here and let them do what they will.” He laughed, but it was a bitter sound that I didn’t like at all. “I will take my place with the ghosts of this villa as I should have done years ago.”

I slapped my hand in the center of his chest, shocking us both.

“We either both live or both die,” I threw at him, intense and sure. As I had been about him from the start, hadn’t I? As if I had recognized him the moment he’d appeared in my bedroom. As if my heart had known him at once. “And I’m not finished living, Jovi. I promised you right back. Yours.” I pointed to myself. Then I pointed to him. “Mine.”

And for a moment that I knew, somehow, would be etched into me forever, we stood there in the kitchen of his wreck of an old house and breathed each other in.

The vows we’d made wrapping tighter and tighter around us with every breath, just the way we liked it.

The way it had started. The way it would go on. The way it would end, he and I bound to each other like fate.

But not tonight. Not yet.

“They will be here within the hour,” Jovi told me after a small eternity passed between us. He leaned in and cradled my face in his hands. “You have brought me to life, my beautiful Rux. Mycurò, my light, my love. You showed me why the earth turns, why the birds sing, why the stars shine. I cannot be without you. I cannot bear it. I will not allow it.”

“I love you, too,” I whispered back, fiercely. “And I’m willing to fight for it. Even if the first one I have to fight is you.”

He kissed me then. And it was dark and wild, filthy and deep. It was a ruthless, glorious claiming.

I kissed him back and I loved him so much it hurt.

“I never doubted you.” I whispered my confession in a rush. “I thought you had gone to die like some noble fool and I wanted you to feel as desolate as that made me.”

For a moment, he only breathed. And I wished I could go back and do this differently.

“I’m sorry,” I told him. “I—”