I WOULD KILL FOR YOU

Chapter 10: Love, Redefined

Love with Dario was fire.

It wasn’t the kind of love that made sense to anyone else. It wasn’t soft or gentle. It wasn’t filled with sweet promises or whispered dreams of growing old together. It didn’t wrap me in warmth. It scorched. It consumed. It left marks, both seen and hidden.

Sometimes I stared at the bruises blooming on my skin, traces of his grip from nights when love turned into something more savage. Sometimes I pulled down my sleeves and smiled at strangers, pretending I wasn’t unraveling on the inside. But I never blamed him. Not really.

Because that’s what loving Dario felt like—falling down a never-ending stairwell and calling it flying.

People might call it toxic. Maybe it was. Maybe it still is. But it was real. Every kiss, every fight, every breathless moment between life and death—it was all real. No pretending. No masks.

He never promised me safety. Not once. He never looked me in the eye and said, “You’re going to be okay.” What he promised was darker. Something more intense. He promised that if the world tried to take me from him, he’d burn it down to ash. He’d turn cities into rubble. He’d make chaos look like art. For me.

That was his love language. Not words. Not flowers.

Destruction.

And if I ever tried to leave?

I wouldn’t.

Because I couldn’t.

Because somewhere along the way, I stopped being the victim. I stopped being the girl he found and protected and ruined. I started becoming something else. Something darker. Someone unrecognizable.

I didn’t just accept his darkness.

I met it.

Matched it.

Mirrored it.

I used to flinch when he raised his voice. Now I looked him dead in the eye. I used to cry when things got too loud, too messy. Now I laughed when the world started burning around us.

I used to want to be saved.

Now I only wanted him.

I didn’t know the exact moment it happened. Maybe it was the first time I saw blood on his hands and didn’t feel fear, just a strange kind of comfort. Maybe it was the way he looked at me, like I was both the reason he breathed and the thing that made him dangerous. Or maybe it was the moment I realized I’d do anything to keep him too.

Even if it meant becoming the monster everyone warned me about.

I thought love was supposed to heal. But with Dario, it didn’t heal me—it broke me open. And inside the pieces, I found someone new. Someone I didn’t hate.

Someone who didn’t care about right and wrong.

Only about him.

I used to lie awake at night wondering if this was all too much. If I was losing myself. If I was becoming exactly what he was.

Now I lie awake hoping I have.

Because he’s not the only monster anymore.

I am too.

And maybe that makes us twisted. Maybe we’re the nightmare in someone else’s story. But I stopped caring about what they think. They don’t know what it’s like to be seen like he sees me. To be chosen, fully, violently, without question.

They don’t know what it’s like to kiss a man who’d kill for you. Die for you. Drag you to hell and sit there with you just so you’re never alone.

They don’t know what it’s like to fall in love with the villain… and realize you are one too.

So maybe this is the end.

Or maybe it’s the beginning of something darker.

Because once you love someone like Dario, you don’t come back the same.

You don’t come back at all.

You stay.

You burn.

And you smile through the flames.

Because love with Dario was fire.

And I was made to burn.