Page 33 of Queen

The door is already open when he appears.

I don’t hear his footsteps—just the subtle shift in the air, the faintest trace of cologne carried in before his shadow fills the doorway. He never knocks. He doesn’t need to. He moves like a man who already owns everything he enters.

He leans against the frame like it belongs to him. Like I belong to him.

No storm in his face. No raised voice. Just stillness. Controlled. Dangerous.

“You didn’t run,” he says finally, his tone almost conversational.

“I wasn’t planning to.”

“That makes one of us,” he mutters, stepping further in.

I brace myself for the explosion—rage, shouting, threats. Instead, he claims the armchair across from my bed, settling into it like he has all night to dismantle me. He doesn’t cross his arms. Doesn’t raise his chin. Just looks at me, steady and unblinking, like I’m a puzzle he’ll break apart piece by piece.

His eyes find mine in the dim light. “Do you know what that vase was worth?”

I don’t answer. Silence is my rebellion.

He nods slowly, as if that’s exactly the response he expected. “Figures. You think breaking something proves you’re in control. You think it means you can still make choices in a place where most of your choices have already been stripped away.”

My jaw tightens.

His voice drops lower, colder, each word slicing clean. “But what you really smashed wasn’t mine. It was yours.”

The words hit harder than the slap I gave him in the garden.

I blink, caught off guard.

“Your dignity,” he says, his tone sharp as a bullet. “You think you’re making a statement, Zina, but all you’ve done is bleed for nothing. You’re standing in the wreckage you created, proving to everyone watching that you don’t know how to survive in this world without tearing yourself apart first.”

It’s a clean strike. Below the belt. I feel my lip tremble before I can stop it, and I bite down hard until I taste blood, forcing the weakness back.

“At least Giovanni…” I start, but the words tear through anyway. “At least Giovanni didn’t try to rewrite who I was.”

His head tilts, slow, deliberate, the faintest gleam of something cruel in his eyes. “No,” he says finally. “He just kept you in a smaller cage and let you believe the leash was your idea.”

My chest tightens, but I don’t look away. I won’t give him that.

The quiet between us stretches like glass about to crack.

And I know he isn’t finished.

A Shift in the Power

His gaze changes. Not softer—nothing about Emiliano is ever soft—but deeper, like he’s peeling back a layer I never agreed to shed. The weight of it makes my skin feel too tight, my heartbeat drumming loud in my ears, every pulse a countdown I can’t control.

He rises from the armchair with a slowness that feels deliberate. No rush, no sound beyond the whisper of his shoes sliding against the rug, and still the air seems to thicken with each step he takes toward me.

I don’t move. I tell myself it’s defiance—that I’m rooted here to show him I won’t flinch—but the truth coils in my stomach like smoke. It feels more like paralysis.

He stops just close enough that the heat of him seeps into my skin, the faint trace of whiskey curling from his breath like temptation and threat in one. His eyes drop—not to my face, but to my hand.

I’d forgotten about the cut until now. The sting flares fresh when his fingers close around mine. His thumb turns my palm upward, slow and deliberate, like he’s claiming a piece of me I hadn’t realized I’d exposed.

The blood has dried into a thin red line, stark against the pale of my skin. He brushes it with the side of his finger, and thetouch is so light it almost feels kind. Almost. But nothing with him is ever without purpose.

Our breathing matches without meaning to, the air between us pulled tighter, wound sharp as a wire ready to snap.