Epilogue—Adrian
“Mira, mira — no, you have to commit to the lie.” I lean both elbows on the bar, grinning at Tomás, our newest busboy, nineteen and terrified and three weeks into the job.
“When table six asks if the lobster is fresh, you do not say ‘I think so.’ You say —” I press a hand to my heart like a man wounded by the question.
“‘Senora, it was swimming this morning and dreaming of you.’”
Tomás laughs so hard he nearly drops his tray. "That's a lie, though. It's frozen."
"It is aspirational, mijo. There's a difference." I catch the tray before it tips, steady it in his hands, and clap him once on the shoulder. "You did good tonight. Table twelve asked for you by name. You know what that means? It means you're not a busboy anymore. You're somebody."
His whole face opens up like I've handed him the deed to the place, and the thing is — I mean it.
I love this kid. I love this room, the laughing couples and the birthday girls and the regulars who treat La Sirena like their living room.
I made it that way. I make every single person who walks through that door feel like the most important person I've ever met.
It's the easiest thing in the world, loving everyone a little.
The hard part is the one I love too much.
She's at the far end of the bar. Third stool from the end — her stool, though she'd cut you for calling it that.
All black, sleeves rolled to the elbow, dark hair scraped back so severe it looks painful, that thin silver chain at her throat she's never once taken off in all the years I've known her.
Isa doesn't work the room. Isa is the room's spine, and she holds it up the way a knife holds up an argument — quietly, with the understanding that she could end things if she chose.
She isn't laughing. Isa almost never laughs; the regulars have learned to treasure the rare crack of it like a coin found in an old coat.
To everyone else she's weather — a cold front behind the bar.
They order their drinks and don't make it personal, because she gives them nothing.
No smile. No opening. Those near-black eyes assess you and hand back a verdict of not worth the words.
Everyone reads her as a closed door.
I read her like the only book I've ever owned.
I know that the small line between her brows means she's three drinks behind and irritated about it, not angry. I know the difference between her silence that means leave me alone and her silence that means stay, just don't talk.
Years I've spent learning a language she has never once agreed to speak — translating a woman who gives the world nothing, fluent in a dialect of exactly one.
People think obsession is loud. Grasping.
They picture a man who can't control himself.
They have it exactly backwards. Obsession is discipline.
It's nine years of standing close enough to memorize the freckle below her left ear and never once reaching out to touch it.
It's knowing she switched perfumes in March and waiting a week before I mentioned, casually, that the new one suited her — because the truth, I noticed the day you changed it, would have shown her the shape of the thing.
I noticed the day she changed it.
I lift the espresso cup from its saucer and carry it down the bar. Set it at her elbow. She doesn't look up from the till she's counting.
"My coffee's getting cold," she says. Which is a joke, because I just made it. It's the closest thing to affection in her whole vocabulary, and it lands in me like sun.
"Then drink it, Isa"
She drinks it. Counts. Then, flat, not looking at me: "I've been thinking about leaving."
The room keeps moving. Tomás laughs at something across the floor. My face does not change — years of practice, and my face does not change.
"Lisbon, maybe," she says, to the till. "Somewhere nobody's got a history on me. Start clean." A pause. The driest shrug in the world. "You'd survive without me."
I smile. The big one. The warm one. The one that runs this room. "Of course I would, Isa."
Underneath the bar, where she can't see, my hand has gone white around the edge of the wood.
She thinks leaving is a thing she can simply do. Choose a city, pack a life, become a stranger somewhere new. It's almost sweet, that she believes that. That she thinks the door she keeps so carefully closed is the only locked thing.
Lisbon. Nobody. Disappear.
She doesn't understand yet — and that's all right, because I understand enough for both of us.
There is no somewhere she goes that I don't follow.
No new start that doesn't have me already standing in it.
She can run to Lisbon, to the far side of the world, to a city where she's nobody and nothing — and she will look up one day and find me there, smiling, holding her coffee made exactly the way she likes it.
I can wait.
I'm very, very good at waiting.
Thank you so much for reading Gunner and Daphne’s story!
I’ve always had a soft spot for men who look like monsters and women reckless enough to love them anyway.
Gunner spent so much of his life believing he was something to be feared.
Daphne was the first person stubborn enough to look past the scars, the walls, and the growling long enough to see the man underneath.
He pushed her away. She stayed. And somehow, they saved each other.
Beauty and the beast stories will always have my heart—and I loved every minute of writing this one.
Up next: Adrian and Isa.
For years, Adrian has been content to stay in the friend zone.
That was a lie.
He’s watched. Waited. Protected.
Obsessed.
And when Isa finally sees him as more than a friend, Adrian has no intention of letting her look away.
If you want to see how friends-to-lovers romance works with a possessive mafia twist, you’re going to love Cruel Devotion.
xx Pia
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