in love with the devil himself

What he did

I found it by accident.

Vincenzo had gone to deal with the aftermath of Aria's escape — meetings, calls, the quiet controlled fury of a man reorganising an army — and I had wandered back to the library because I didn't know what else to do with myself. My blood was still humming from whatever I'd done in that underground room. My hands wouldn't quite stop shaking.

I wasn't looking for anything. I was just pulling books at random, running my fingers along spines, trying to find something to anchor me. And then one of them didn't move the way it should have — too light, too hollow — and when I pulled it free it wasn't a book at all.

It was a box. Old, dark wood, no lock. Inside, a single folded letter and a photograph.

The photograph stopped me cold.

My mother. Young — younger than I had ever seen her, maybe twenty, laughing at something off camera with her whole face. She looked free in a way I had never known her to be. Behind her was the entrance hall of this mansion, unmistakable even then.

I unfolded the letter.

It was her handwriting. I would have known it anywhere.

It was addressed to Vincenzo.

I should have stopped reading. Some part of me knew — the same part that had felt the wrongness in the air before Aria's men came, the same instinct that never lied — that I was standing at the edge of something I could not come back from. But I read it anyway, word by word, and with every line the warmth I had been carrying since the war room slowly turned to ice.

She had been in love with him. My mother. That much was clear from the first paragraph — quiet and certain and heartbreaking in the way she wrote his name. But that wasn't what made my hands start to shake.

It was the last page.

She had been pregnant. Not with me — before me, years before, when she still lived in this house and believed the world could hold both her and Vincenzo in it without something breaking. She had written it carefully, like she was still deciding how to feel. She had been happy. Terrified, but happy.

And Vincenzo had told her to leave.

Not asked. Told. Had stood in front of her and looked her in the eye and said that she and the child were a vulnerability he could not afford. That his enemies would use them against him. That she had to go and she had to go completely — no contact, no trace, nothing that could be followed back to him.

She had lost the baby three months later. Alone. In a city where nobody knew her name.

I was sitting on the floor when Vincenzo found me. I don't remember sitting down. The letter was in my lap and the photograph was face down on the stone and I was staring at the middle distance trying to locate something solid to hold onto.

He stopped in the doorway. Saw the box. Saw the letter.

The colour didn't leave his face because it was never really there. But something did. Something went out of him like a light.

"Selina —"

"Don't." The word came out quiet. That was the thing — I wasn't shouting. I didn't have shouting in me right now. Just this terrible, bottomless quiet. "Just tell me it's wrong. Tell me I'm misreading it."

He didn't.

Of course he didn't. He had never once lied to me. I had thought that was a virtue.

"She lost a child," I said. "Because of you. Because you decided she was inconvenient."

"That is not —" He stopped. Pressed his mouth closed. Tried again. "I believed I was protecting her. Both of them. My enemies at the time were —"

"She was alone." My voice cracked on it. "She was completely alone, in a strange city, and she lost — " I couldn't finish. I pressed the back of my hand against my mouth and breathed through my nose and refused to fall apart in front of him. "She never told me any of this. She protected you even then. Even after everything."

Vincenzo was very still in the doorway. The careful control he always wore was still there but underneath it something was happening that I didn't have a name for — something that looked almost like a man finally being asked to stand in a fire he had been avoiding for decades.

"I know," he said. Just that.

"Is that why you kept me here?" The thought arrived cold and fully formed. "Guilt? I'm not her, Vincenzo. I'm not a replacement for what you —"

"No." The word came sharp and immediate — the first unguarded thing he'd said since he walked in. He crossed the room and crouched in front of me and I wanted to pull back but I didn't have the energy. His eyes found mine and held them. "What I feel for you has nothing to do with her. I need you to believe that."

"I don't know what I believe right now," I said honestly.

He absorbed that. Didn't argue it, didn't try to smooth it over. Just sat with it the way you sit with something that is entirely your fault.

"I made a decision three hundred years ago that I would not allow anyone close enough to be used against me," he said quietly. "Your mother paid for that decision in ways I will carry for the rest of my existence. There is no version of this where I ask you to forgive me. I am only asking you to let me tell you the whole truth — all of it — if you want it."

I looked at him for a long time.

The man who had tended to my wrist and warned me away from himself and said wanted someone to stay like it cost him everything. The man who had come through a stone door for me without hesitating. The man who had, a long time ago, made a choice that broke my mother's life in ways she never once let me see.

People were not one thing. I had always known that.

It didn't make it hurt less.

"Give me space," I said finally. "Tonight. Just — give me tonight."

He stood. Stepped back. And for the first time since I had known him, Vincenzo did exactly as he was asked without a word.

The door clicked shut behind him.

I sat alone in the library with my mother's letter in my hands and let myself grieve the things she had never told me — the life she had lost, the love she had buried, the weight she had carried every single day and somehow still managed to make me feel safe inside of.

And underneath the grief, quiet and complicated and refusing to be simple —

I was still there. Still in his house. Still not leaving.

I didn't know yet what that meant. But I knew it meant something.