Page 40 of Modern Romance Collection February 2025, 1-4
“I am what the Vaccaros made me,” Marcella told him, like a threat. “Think of that, while you listen to your happy little wife sing her songs and dance her way through this dark place. And think of this. One day, there will be no difference at all between her and me.”
That was one of his darkest fears, but he refused to give her the satisfaction of reacting. Instead, he stared down at her impassively. He watched her dig her nails into his forearm, then release him with a snarl.
“You will see,” she warned him darkly, and then she spun around and swept out of the room.
Leaving him with a dark ballroom and chandeliers that could only reflect back the shadows all around them.
And so Alceu knew, then, there was only one thing that he could do.
He felt like a condemned man as he made his way through the castle that too many of his ancestors had left their fingerprints on. He passed room after room filled with ghosts and scandals and long-dried tears. And he knew by now that Dioni did not see these things here. She could not feel the darkness in the walls and pressing in the windows no matter how many times he pointed it out to her.
Just as he knew that she would not bother to go to sleep in any bed but his.
That ache in his chest was becoming too familiar.
He made his way to his rooms and she was there, curled up in his bed the way she always was, now.
There was a large part of him that wanted to claim that she belonged there—but that was the trouble. That urge. That tide of something like desperation that wanted more than anything for him to be a different man.
The kind of man who could deserve a woman like her, sunlight and sweet songs, in his bed. In his arms. In hislife.
The truly galling part of this was that Apostolis and Dioni, two of the best people he knew, were wrong about this. His mother was right. They had both lived this story. They knew how it ended.
Because it only ended one way.
Over and over again.
He had always been kidding himself that he could change that trajectory.
For some while, he stood in the moonlight at the foot of the bed and watched her sleep. And he even imagined that he could leave her there. That he could let her sleep and let her know from some distance what he had decided.
What he had beenforcedto decide, for all their sakes.
He let himself imagine that he could simply do what needed to be done, and remove himself with no further blurring of lines and intentions—but it seemed his mother had been right about him all along.
He was no better than his father.
He was weak, through and through.
He could not help but fail to meet his standards, no matter what he wanted to do.
Because Dioni lay naked in his bed, just as she had that first night. The sheet was crumpled at her feet as if she’d kicked it off, and so the moonlight caressed her curves like a lover.
And no power on earth could keep him from going to her.
From sliding into bed beside her and running his hands all over her satiny flesh and feeling her heat beneath him. Nothing could keep him from caressing her, everywhere, and waking her up to pleasure. From making her spin and sob and cry out his name.
Over and over again.
When he was deep inside of her, he understood that he would never feel whole again. That he never had before.
That he had been lost at sea seven months ago. That his surrender that night had been total—that he had drowned then and had spent all this time trying to pretend that he had been treading water instead.
It would have been kinder all around to simply slip beneath the water then.
But he hadn’t.
He couldn’t.
