Page 170 of Modern Romance September 2025 1-4

Amelia spoke ofnext year. She spoke of future balls. Worst of all, she included him in thatfuture. She spoke of how their “partnership” would need to change in the new year. She wanted to focus on events at the castello. He was going to have to take on more responsibility.

She spoke as if he was just going tostay. And he did not correct her. Not because he planned on staying, but because he did not know how to articulate how wrong she was about everything.

She had this rosy, happy version of a future in her head. Just as she seemed to have a rosy, happy version of the past there. She seemed determined to look on the positive side ofeverything, and he had never been around someone like that.

Even her father had not been full ofoptimism. Diego thought that was why he’d handled Bartolo as a slightly overbearing “assistant” as well as he had. They’d both had a rather nihilistic view of what the world was.

But Bartolo had thought in the face of that, you had to be the center of good in your life. That the world did not matter. It mattered what you did within the world.

I killed everyone I loved, including you, in that world. Then defiled your daughter. So.

A tiny bell tinkled somewhere, interrupting Diego’s thoughts. A prickle went up his neck, a ridiculous feeling of…something. He shook it away. Amelia was standing over by the tree, fastening little bows to the limbs. No doubt there was some bell there in the tree she’d rustled with her work.

Tonight she was dressed in some soft, casual set in the color of holly berries. She buzzed around the castello like a top, as tomorrow the first guests for the ball would arrive. They would host a large holiday dinner. The following night would be the ball.

Her energy wasn’t so much nervous as a determined kind of excitement. It did not remind him of his childhood, full of his mother’s anxious meltdowns over napkins or RSVPs. Amelia reminded him of a determined bird—she might flit from one branch to another, but it was always with purpose.

But he could not understand her current purpose—there were enough ribbons on the damn tree to cover all of Italy. He poured some wine into a glass and walked over to her, urging her to take it.

She accepted the glass and stepped back to admire her work. “I don’t know if that’s enough.”

“Well, I shall distract anyone who tries to count them.”

She smiled up at him, bright and warm. “My hero. Or you will be, if you wear it.”

She was the queen of these moments. Where a lancing pain, a horrible black cloud of all the ways he could not be the man she seemed to think he was, like ahero, were never quite strong enough to make him step away, because she immediately changed the subject.

No amount of having her dulled this ache. No amount of release seemed to change that she felt different from every sexual conquest who had come before. That something deep had lodged in his chest and he could not eradicate it.

But pain was the currency he lived his life by now, so as long as it hurt, he supposed it was not the worst thing that he stayed. Pain had to be right, didn’t it? Even if it was punctuated by a strange feeling, something soft and settled—contentment, he might have called it.

If he was planning on staying longer than the new year. But he was not.

“I will not be wearing a Babbo Natale hat,” he said darkly.

Mischief twinkled in her eyes. “Come now. Have some fun.”

Fun.Even before the accident, his idea offunhad never been this. And what he might have calledfunwas less about happiness or joy and more about drowning all those complexities inside him.

Drowning had always felt far more comfortable than struggling to the surface. A realization that had all his hard-held beliefs about pain crumbling a bit at the edges.

So he shoved it away. He would not change. Changing was weakness.

Only punishment was strength.

So why are you still here?

He stared down at Amelia, beautiful and happy. She was why he was still here, and it was wrong. It would have to change, but…not yet. “Only if you’ve a La Befana costume in the works for January,tesoro.”

“I will have my warts and broomstick ready to go.”

The laugh rumbled through him, foreign and light, but anything light, warm, joyful was followed by the icy needled barbs of realization that he did not deserve it.

Alone, he could immediately seek more pain, more penance. With her, she seemed to sense it. Anticipate it and find some way to soothe it. A touch, a smile, a kind word. A kiss, a caress, more.

He should have left then. He knew that. He was getting to the point where he’d told himself it would need to end—where good outweighed the bad he deserved.

But he did not leave or push her away. Instead, when she pressed her mouth to his, soft and sweet, he let himself be soothed.