I wake slowly, as if I'm climbing out of thick water that doesn't want to let me go, and the first thing that reaches me isn't pain, or cold, or fear, but the smell of Duca.
I recognize it instantly—present, unmistakable—that blend of skin, smoke, and something metallic that settles straight in my chest and steals my breath. For one absurd, almost soothing moment, I think I dreamed everything. That I'm back in a big bed, that his arms are close, that none of what happened was real.
Then I try to move.
My body doesn't respond the way it should. My shoulders feel heavy, my wrists ache, and when I instinctively try to bring my hands closer to myself, I feel a hard, cold resistance. Metal. Rope. Something pulled far too tight.
I open my eyes halfway.
The light is dim and dirty, falling from above at an unforgiving angle, and the world sharpens slowly, like an image that refuses to come into focus. I'm sitting on a chair, upright, my back rigid, my hands tied behind me to its frame. My legs are bound too, cinched to the chair legs just enough that I can't move at all.
I suck in a sharp breath, and only then do I feel the cell's cold air on my skin.
My heart starts to beat faster, but it hasn't tipped into panic yet. It's too soon. My mind is still clinging to his smell, to the false sensation that I'm not alone.
I blink a few times, forcing myself to be here, to see.
And then I see him.
Duca is sitting on another chair, directly in front of me, at a short, calculated distance—close enough that I can't escape him even with my eyes. He's relaxed, elbows resting on his knees, hands clasped together, and his posture is so controlled that it chills me more than if he were violent.
He looks at me, then his gaze drifts downward slowly, pausing for a moment on the shirt I'm still wearing—crumpled, stained, still smeared with dried blood—and something in his expression shifts for a fraction of a second. A vague memory flashes through me: throwing myself over Gaston when he fell, clutching him, screaming hysterically, not understanding anything, unable to stop. That's why I'm smeared with blood now, and tears well up when I think of Gaston, who is dead.
His gaze continues to slide over me, slow and methodical, as if he's trying to burn me into his retina, centimeter by centimeter, as though he never wants to forget this version of me—bloody, bound, helpless.
This isn't the look I know. It isn't that steady, protective calm. It isn't warmth. In his eyes there's something hard, sharp, a concentrated hatred that hits me straight in the stomach.
My throat tightens.
"Duca…" I say without meaning to, my voice coming out hoarse, thin, as if it hasn't been used in a long time.
He doesn't react at all. He doesn't move, doesn't blink, and the way he looks at me stays fixed, heavy, as if I'm an object that needs to be examined, weighed, and ultimately condemned.
Only then does the truth begin to settle into me, slowly and painfully, and I understand with a clarity that cuts me open from the inside where I am—and what I am not.
I am not saved, and I am not safe, and his smell—the thing that woke me and fooled me for a moment—is not a promise.
It's just a warning. Cold. Relentless.
"Duca… where am I? Why am I tied up? What's happening?" I ask, the words tumbling over one another, out of order, carried more by fear than by thought, because his silence presses down on me harder than any truth he could tell me.
He doesn't answer.
He stays in his chair, his gaze fixed on me, as if he hasn't even heard what I said, and the silence stretches until it begins to hurt physically. Then, without looking at me differently, without changing his posture, he starts to speak.
"I grew up with Gaston," he begins, his voice low, even, as if he were saying something trivial. "I've known him for as long as I've known myself."
He lifts his gaze for a moment, but not toward me—somewhere beyond the cell walls, as if he's seeing something else.
"The first time he pulled me back from death, I was a kid. Stupid. Weak. I was on the bank of a river and I slipped. The water dragged me under and I didn't know up from down anymore. I was swallowing water and I thought that was it. He jumped in after me without thinking. He hauled me out with my lungs full of water and my life still in me."
He inhales deeply, his jaw tightening.
"The second time, I was a teenager. I thought I was invincible. I took a curve too fast, the car flipped, and I got trapped between twisted metal. I could smell gasoline and hear fire. He tore the door off with his bare hands. Dragged me out before I burned."
This time he pauses longer. When he speaks again, his voice is lower.
"The third time… I was already a man. My father was still alive. I worked for him. I thought the world was at my feet, that I was untouchable."
Then he looks at me. His gaze is hard, weighted.
"The rivals came at night. They broke in and slaughtered everything that moved. They killed my father in front of me. They shot me too. I collapsed in his blood."
His fists clench.
"The house was burning. I couldn't move anymore. Gaston lifted me off the floor, carried me out of the flames, and hid me. He stayed with me until I was breathing again."
He leans forward slightly.
"Three times," he says, "he saved my life."
His gaze darkens completely when it returns to me.
"I promised him then that I would always be by his side," he continues, his voice harsher. "That if it was ever his turn to fall, I'd be the one to lift him up. That I'd save his life, the way he saved mine."
He stops.
He looks straight at me, and the hatred from before comes back in full force, concentrated.
"And I couldn't do that, could I?" he says, the question not waiting for an answer. "Because I was too bewitched by your little pussy to understand who you really are and what a threat you are to me."
His words hit me like slaps.
He suddenly stands up, the chair screeching against the floor, and takes a few steps toward me, and the air around me seems to tighten.
"Why Gaston?" he shouts. "Why him, when you could just as well have killed me instead?"
His voice echoes louder inside my head than in the cell, because I don't understand why he's telling me all this, or what I could possibly have to do with Gaston's death—but I see the raw pain in his eyes, and something in me decides to stay quiet, not to defend myself, to let him pour his fury into me, because I hurt too, in a different way, that Gaston is dead.
"You wanted to see me on my knees, suffering?" he goes on, almost spitting the words. "Fine. Enjoy it."
He stops right in front of me, so close I can feel his hot breath on my skin.
"Now it's my turn."
He moves in so close that I feel his heat before I see him move, and his large hand clamps around my jaw from the side, squeezing with a force that makes me think, for one absurdly clear second, that it's going to crack. My bones ache, my mouth is forced open, and my breath catches high in my chest.
He stares at me from too close—far too close—and in his blue eyes there's so much hatred that a cold, lucid thought crosses my mind: he could kill me just by looking at me like this. This isn't the blind rage from before. It's something denser. Deeper. A pain that has learned how to bite.
Then he screams. He curses. The words come out jagged, filthy, dripping with venom, and before I can understand what's coming, his mouth crashes down over mine.
It isn't his kiss. Not the one I know. Not the one I want.
This kiss is rough, rushed, loaded with hatred and pain, and it hits me straight in the soul. His lips crush mine, his teeth sink in without hesitation, and the bite comes brutal, until I taste the metallic tang of blood and a sting that shoots straight to my head.
He bites me again, as if even that isn't enough, as if he's trying to tear something out of me—to punish me, to punish himself—and I stay trapped in the chair, my jaw still aching, my mouth burning, understanding with a clarity that terrifies me that he isn't kissing me to have me.
He's kissing me to make it hurt.
He stops abruptly, his lips still pressed to mine, our breaths tangled in thick, heavy air, and lets out a short, bitter laugh that scrapes me rawer than the bite.
"See?" he says, his voice harsh, rasped, as if it's been worn down by too much smoke and too little forgiveness. "How weak I am."
He stays there for a moment, close—too close—and when he pulls back a millimeter, his gaze burns into me.
"You kill the only friend I've had in this miserable life," he says, "and I still want you."
His words sink into me one by one, delayed, like blows that only reach the brain after the body has already reacted. I'm still caught in his spell, in his smell, in the heat that doesn't retreat, and for a second I can't connect them.
"Me?" I finally say, and my voice sounds foreign even to myself. "Kill who?"
I pull my head back as far as the restraints allow, just enough to look him in the eyes, to search for a crack, an explanation—anything.
"I didn't kill anyone."
He laughs again, short and joyless, carving his face into hard angles, and the way he looks at me now is almost tender and completely dangerous at the same time—like a promise that knows it will lie.
"There were security cameras at the hotel," he says slowly, deliberately, as if he wants to slice me into pieces. "I saw everything. You can't lie to me. I saw absolutely everything."
He looks at me with disgust, a heavy, filthy stare, as if I'm something rotten, something that should have been thrown away a long time ago, and the way he keeps his eyes on me makes my skin feel too thin.
He comes closer again, without touching me this time, letting the words do all the dirty work.
"It's going to hurt when you die," he says slowly, without haste. "It's going to hurt more than it hurts me right now—and I'll make sure of it."
And the way he says it terrifies me more than any blow ever could.
Duca straightens abruptly, as if my closeness has burned him, and wipes his mouth with the back of his hand—hard, again and again—as if he's trying to erase the kiss, my taste, any trace of me. The gesture hits me harder than his words. There's disgust in it, cold and sharp, and I see it gathering at the corners of his mouth.
"No… no, not me," I burst out, my voice tearing out of my chest without passing through thought. "It wasn't me, please, I swear, I didn't do anything, I didn't kill anyone."
I start screaming, desperate. The restraints creak as I thrash against the chair, every word coming out more mangled than the last, because I'm no longer trying to be coherent—I'm just trying to reach him. I call his name, tell him I can convince him, that I can explain, that the truth is there and he only has to let me speak.
"Duca, please, look at me, please, believe me…" I repeat, tears spilling uncontrollably, my chest tight, my breath cut short, because desperation has no patience left and no idea how to hide.
He remains standing a few steps away, back straight, shoulders rigid, and his silence crashes down on me like a slammed door.
And for the first time since I woke up tied here, the horrifying thought crosses my mind that it doesn't matter how loudly I scream or how true what I'm saying is.
Maybe he doesn't want the truth anymore.
Maybe he just wants it to hurt.
Duca turns back without hurry, with a clean, controlled movement, and heads for the door as if everything I have been until now has suddenly been reduced to nothing. His back is straight, his steps sure, and the way he leaves the room—without a flicker of hesitation—hits harder than if he had turned back to strike me.
To him, in this moment, I am nothing more than lint on his trousers—something brushed off easily and forgotten at once.
"Duca!" I scream after him, his name ripping out of me like an open wound. "Not me! It wasn't me! Please, please, listen to me!"
The door closes.
The sound settles over me like a sentence.
I keep screaming. I scream my innocence until the words lose their shape, until my voice shatters and turns into harsh, meaningless sounds, until my throat burns and my chest refuses to give me air. I call him again and again, his name repeated obsessively, as if that alone could bring him back—or at least make him hear.
Time stretches in a cruel way. I don't know how much passes. Minutes blur into hours, and the desperation has no edges left. The tears dry on my cheeks, then come back, and my body trembles uncontrollably, trapped in the chair, unable to stop.
I scream until I have no voice left.
I scream until everything I am is reduced to pain and the air becomes too little.
And somewhere between one scream and the next, when my lungs no longer obey and the world starts to drift away, darkness takes me again.
I pass out.
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