in love with the devil himself

Close enough

He found me on the rooftop.

I hadn't known there was a rooftop. I'd found the door by accident — a narrow staircase behind a bookshelf in the upper hall that opened onto a wide, flat terrace overlooking the grounds. The night air was cool and sharp and smelled like rain that hadn't fallen yet, and I'd sat down on the stone ledge with my back against a pillar and my knees pulled to my chest and just breathed. After everything he'd told me, I needed somewhere the ceiling wasn't pressing down on me.

I heard him before I saw him. The soft sound of footsteps, unhurried as always. Then he appeared through the doorway and stopped when he saw me, like he hadn't quite expected me to still be here.

"I'm not running," I said, before he could ask. "I just needed air."

He was quiet for a moment. Then he moved to the ledge a few feet away from me and sat — not standing over me, not keeping his careful distance, but sitting, the way a person sits when they've decided to stay. He looked out over the dark grounds below, and I looked at the side of his face, and neither of us spoke for a while.

It was surprisingly easy. The silence between us had shifted into something I didn't have a word for yet — not comfortable, exactly, but no longer sharp.

"How long did you know her?" I asked eventually. "My mother."

He didn't tense the way I expected. "A long time. She came to work for my family when she was very young — younger than you are now. She was sharp and funny and completely unafraid of things that made grown men leave the room." The faintest trace of something moved across his face. "She used to argue with me. Constantly. She was one of the only people who ever did."

I tried to picture it. My mother — quiet, careful, always measuring her words — arguing with Vincenzo. Somehow it didn't surprise me as much as it should have.

"She never talked about her past," I said. "Not once. I used to ask and she'd just smile and change the subject. I thought she was private." I paused. "I didn't know she was protecting me."

"That was all she ever did," he said quietly. "From the moment she knew you were coming. Everything she gave up, every door she closed — it was all for you."

My throat tightened. I looked up at the sky — thick with clouds, starless — and blinked until the feeling passed.

"Do you miss her?" I asked.

A long pause. Long enough that I thought he might deflect, might retreat behind that careful wall of his. But he didn't.

"Every day," he said. Simply. Without armour.

Two words, and they cracked something open in my chest.

I turned to look at him fully, and he turned at the same moment, and we were closer than I'd realised — the ledge was narrow, the pillar behind me bringing us within arm's reach of each other. His eyes were dark and unguarded in a way I had never seen them, all the careful control he wore like a second skin momentarily set aside, and I thought: this is who he actually is. Underneath all of it. This is the person my mother knew.

"You're different," I said softly. "Up here."

"Don't tell anyone," he said. "I have a reputation to maintain."

It surprised a small laugh out of me. He watched it happen like it was something rare — like he was committing it to memory.

"There it is," he murmured.

"What?"

"You don't do that often enough. Laugh." His voice was low, almost to himself. "You should."

I didn't know what to say to that. The air between us had changed — gone warmer somehow, closer, even though neither of us had moved. I was aware of everything: the few inches between his hand and mine on the stone ledge, the way he was looking at me, the sound of the wind moving through the gardens below.

Then he reached out.

Slowly. Deliberately. Giving me every opportunity to pull away.

He tucked a strand of hair back from my face, his fingers barely grazing my cheek, and the touch was so light it should have meant nothing. It didn't mean nothing. It moved through me like a current — warm and startling and impossible to ignore — and I went very still, the way you go still when something beautiful is happening and you're afraid to breathe in case it stops.

His hand didn't move away. It stayed at the side of my face, his thumb resting just below my cheekbone, and he looked at me with an expression I felt in places I hadn't expected.

"Selina." My name, barely a sound.

"Don't," I whispered. "Don't say something careful right now."

Something shifted in his eyes. His head dipped — slowly, slowly — and I felt the warmth of him closing the distance between us, and my heart was so loud I was certain he could hear it, and I tipped my chin up, and —

His phone rang.

The sound shattered the moment like glass on stone. Vincenzo pulled back, his jaw tightening immediately, and the wall came back up so fast it almost gave me whiplash. He looked at the screen, and whatever he saw there made something cold move behind his eyes.

"It's Aria," he said.

The name landed like a bucket of ice water.

I sat up straight. "What does she want?"

He was already standing, already shifting back into the version of himself that ran things, that made decisions, that people were afraid of. But he paused before he turned to go, and looked back at me with an expression that was there and then gone so quickly I almost missed it.

"Stay up here," he said. "Don't come down until I come for you."

"Vincenzo —"

"Please."

I closed my mouth. In all the time I had been here, I had never once heard him say that word. It sat between us for a moment, unexpected and unguarded, and then he was gone — back through the door, back down the stairs, swallowed by the mansion.

I sat alone on the rooftop with the wind picking up around me and my heart still beating too fast and the ghost of his hand against my cheek.

Aria was making her move.

And for the first time, instead of thinking about how to get out — I was thinking about how to help him.