Chapter 12
Chapter Twelve
MARINA
“And THEN,” Dante Draven announced to the crowd of delighted regulars, “Alessandro tried to cook dinner. For a girl. My brother, who once set fire to a microwave trying to reheat soup, attempted homemade pasta.”
“I was twelve,” Alessandro said through gritted teeth.
“You were seventeen and she was the mayor’s daughter and you had to pay for the kitchen renovation yourself.
” Dante grinned, all white teeth and deep-set dimples that belonged on a cologne ad.
The Draven genes were apparently distributed equally between the brothers: they were both unfairly beautiful, but Dante wielded his looks like a weapon of mass destruction while Alessandro treated his like an inconvenience.
Mrs. Thornberry clutched her chest. “Oh, he was a romantic even then!”
“He was a disaster,” Dante corrected cheerfully. “Still is. Did he tell you about the time he tried to give a presentation and accidentally—”
“Dante.” Alessandro’s voice could have frozen the harbor. “Perhaps you’d like to see the town.”
“I’d rather stay here and share stories.” Dante winked at Marina. “You should hear about his college years. There was an incident with a library, a fire alarm, and a very confused dean.”
Alessandro’s mortification prickled across her skin, the kind that came from having your worst moments exposed to someone whose opinion you cared about.
She found herself smiling.
“The library story sounds fascinating,” she said, “but I actually need help in the kitchen. Alessandro, would you mind?”
“Of course,” he said, and followed her through the swinging door.
Behind them, Dante launched into another story, something about Alessandro’s first day of law school and a misunderstanding involving a professor’s toupee, but the sound faded as the kitchen door swung shut.
In the kitchen, away from Dante’s performance, Alessandro leaned against the counter and exhaled slowly. Some of the tension left his shoulders. Here, surrounded by bread and sugar and flour-dusted warmth, he looked more human than she’d ever seen him.
“I apologize for my brother.”
“Don’t. He’s wonderful.”
“He’s a menace.”
“He loves you.” Marina pulled mixing bowls from the shelf, giving him something to focus on besides his embarrassment.
“The stories aren’t meant to humiliate you.
They’re meant to show people who you were before…
” She paused, searching for the right words.
“Before you had to carry everything alone.”
She watched him process the words. Recognizing truth he hadn’t wanted to see.
“He worries,” Alessandro said. “He thinks I’ve forgotten how to be human. That I’ve let the curse consume me the way it consumed our grandfather. The way it’s consuming our father.”
“Has it?”
He was quiet. Whatever he was reaching for, it wasn’t one of his polished deflections; she’d learned the texture of those by now, and this wasn’t it. This was him deciding, for once, to tell the truth.
“I thought I had to become something hard to survive,” he said slowly.
“Something that couldn’t be hurt. The curse takes everything we love, Marina.
Every investment fails. Every venture collapses.
Everyone we care about eventually sees us as failures or leaves before the losses drag them down too.
” He stared at the counter. “I decided it was easier not to care. Not to let anyone close. If I didn’t have anything to lose, the curse couldn’t take it from me. ”
“That sounds lonely.”
“It was practical.”
“It sounds lonely,” she repeated, softer this time.
He looked at her, really looked, with those dark eyes that seemed to see everything she tried to hide.
“I’m remembering,” he said. “What it feels like to want something anyway. Even knowing I might lose it.”
Neither of them spoke. The meaning was clear enough without words.
The kitchen door swung open.
“There you are!” Bea swept in with her usual hurricane energy, purple hair practically vibrating. “Dante says you’re hiding. I told him…” She stopped. Her eyes went wide. “Oh. OH. Your auras are doing the thing again.”
“What thing?” Marina asked, though she already knew.
“The pink and gold spiral thing. The ‘about to make a terrible decision’ thing.” Bea grinned. “Don’t stop on my account. I’ll just…”
“Beatrice!” Dante’s voice carried from the front. “I have questions about your chaos magic.”
Bea’s expression shifted to something between intrigue and alarm. “Did that disaster of a dragon just call me by my full name?”
“He does that,” Alessandro said. “Consider it a warning sign.”
“Noted.” But she was already heading for the door, drawn by whatever force of nature Dante Draven represented. “This isn’t over, Marina. We’re discussing those auras later. In detail. With diagrams.”
The door swung shut behind her, and Marina could hear the explosion of conversation in the front: Dante’s theatrical voice tangling with Bea’s sharp responses, both of them apparently delighted to have found someone equally dramatic to argue with.
“They’re going to be insufferable together,” Alessandro observed.
“Or they’re going to kill each other.”
“Either way, we should probably stay out of blast radius.”
The kitchen fell quiet again.
Marina turned back to her mixing bowls, hyperaware of Alessandro watching her. The tension from yesterday hadn’t faded; if anything, Dante’s arrival had amplified it. Having someone else see them together made whatever was happening between them feel more real.
“She reads auras,” Alessandro said. “Your friend.”
“Among other things. She’s very talented.”
“What does a pink and gold spiral mean?”
Marina’s cheeks heated. “She’s probably exaggerating.”
“She seemed quite certain.”
“Bea is certain about everything. It doesn’t mean she’s right.”
The air between them shifted. He moved closer. His attention sharpened.
“Marina.”
She kept her eyes on the mixing bowl. “Yes?”
“Look at me.”
She shouldn’t. Looking at him led to moments like yesterday, when the world narrowed to the space between them and nothing else existed.
She looked anyway.
He was closer than she’d realized. Close enough that she could see the gold flecks in his dark eyes, the slight tension in his jaw, the careful control he was maintaining over whatever he was feeling.
His want was undisguised. Unashamed. It pressed against her awareness like heat from an open flame.
The easy thing—the Marina thing—would be to let the bond take the blame.
The magic did it. The tether made me. But she’d lived inside this connection for eleven days now, and somewhere in there she’d gotten good at telling the difference between what the bond pushed on her and what was simply, inconveniently, hers.
This was hers.
“Dante will keep Bea occupied for hours,” he said. “They’ve been arguing about magical theory since he walked through the door.”
“That’s… good?”
“It means we’re alone.”
Her heart skipped. “Alessandro—”
“I’ve been thinking about yesterday. About what almost happened.”
“We shouldn’t…”
“I know.” But he didn’t move away. “We shouldn’t complicate this. The bond is temporary. In twelve days, this ends.”
“Eleven,” she corrected automatically. “The full moon is in eleven days.”
“Eleven.” His hand came up, hovering near her face but not quite touching. “And I’ve spent every one of those days trying to convince myself that this is just proximity. Just the bond. Just magic forcing feelings that aren’t real.”
“Is it working?”
“No.”
The word fell between them.
“Marina.” His voice dropped. “Tell me to stop. Tell me this is a mistake. Tell me anything that will make me walk away right now.”
She should. She knew she should. This was temporary. He was leaving. The bond would break and he would go back to Manhattan and she would stay here, alone, missing him.
But she was so tired of being careful. So tired of protecting herself from things that might hurt. So tired of standing at the edge of something beautiful and choosing not to jump.
“I can’t,” she whispered. “I don’t want you to stop.”
ALESSANDRO
He kissed her.
Not the careful, controlled kiss he’d imagined during all those sleepless nights on her too-small couch. This was desperate, hungry, two weeks of tension finally released.
She gasped against his mouth, and the sound broke something loose in him.
He pulled her closer, one hand tangling in her hair, the other pressed against the small of her back.
She melted into him like she’d been waiting for this, like they’d both been waiting, circling each other, pretending they weren’t already falling.
Her desire doubled back through the bond. He felt what she felt, she felt what he felt, and the combined intensity nearly drove him to his knees.
“Alessandro.” His name in her voice, breathless and wanting.
He kissed her deeper. Slower. Learning the shape of her mouth, the way she sighed when he nipped at her lower lip, the small sounds she made that he wanted to hear for the rest of his life.
The rest of his life.
The thought should have terrified him. Instead, it felt like coming home.
“Upstairs,” she breathed against his mouth. “We should—”
“Yes.”
They barely made it through the door before Alessandro had her pressed against it, his mouth on hers, two weeks of tension collapsing into something urgent and graceless. Her back hit the wood and she heard the deadbolt dig into her spine and didn’t care.
“Bedroom,” Marina gasped against his lips.
“Where?”
“There.” She pointed, but he was already lifting her, her legs wrapping around his waist. They kissed the entire way, messy, off-center, more teeth and breath than technique. His shin cracked against the bedframe.
“Shit—”
“Language,” she said, and he laughed against her mouth, startled, the sound vibrating through her chest.