I know he doesn’t expect me to speak about it. But if I’m asking him to stay, he needs to know everything. Shouldn’t he? “Don’t wait for the shoe to drop.” Those words linger in my head. He needs to know everything Dominic put me through before he goes through with a decision he sounds so sure about.
I take a long pause, tears still falling, but then I begin to speak.
“You already know who Dominic is.”
My fingers curl slightly against Enzo’s chest.
“But you don’t know what he did to me.”
Even saying that much makes my stomach twist.
“And I think… if you’re really asking me not to wait for the shoe to drop, then you need to.”
I swallow.
“He wasn’t always like that.”
Or maybe he was.
That thought has tortured me almost as much as everything else.
“At least, I didn’t see it.”
My eyes lower.
“For years, Dominic was… Dominic. My best friend. The boy I grew up with. The person who knew when I was upset before I said anything. He could make me laugh when nobody else could. He remembered stupid little things I told him months before. He could be sweet. Protective. Gentle.”
My throat tightens.
“He wore an angel’s face so fucking well.”
Sometimes I still don’t know whether any of it was real.
“Maybe that boy actually existed once. Maybe the monster came later.”
I shake my head slowly.
“Or maybe he was always a monster and I just loved him enough to believe the mask.”
That hurts to admit.
“The first cracks were jealousy.”
“Any man who got too close to me became a problem.”
“At first, it almost seemed harmless. A comment. A look. Dominic putting his arm around me a little tighter. Asking who someone was or why they were texting me.”
I give a small, humorless laugh.
“I thought it was jealousy. Normal jealousy.”
“It wasn’t.”
My fingers tighten.
“Men started getting hurt.”
“People disappeared from my life.”
“Someone would get too close to me and suddenly Dominic would have a reason why they were dangerous, why I shouldn’t trust them, why I shouldn’t see them anymore.”
“And if they didn’t take the warning…”
I stop.
Enzo doesn’t need me to finish that sentence.
“Eventually I understood.”
My voice drops.
“And that’s when I became afraid to leave him.”
I finally look at Enzo.
“Not because I thought I couldn’t live without Dominic.”
“Because I was afraid somebody else wouldn’t live if I tried.”
My eyes burn.
“Every man who looked at me became a potential body.”
“Every friendship became leverage.”
“Every person I cared about became something he could use to punish me.”
“So I stayed.”
There is so much shame attached to those two words.
“I stayed longer than I wanted to.”
“I smiled when I didn’t want to. I let him touch me when my skin was screaming at me to pull away. I told people everything was fine because I thought keeping Dominic calm meant keeping everyone else alive.”
I wipe angrily at another tear.
“I thought if the only person he was hurting was me, I could handle it.”
God, I really believed that.
“I thought I could contain him.”
“I couldn’t.”
My breathing becomes uneven.
“And then he took me.”
Six months.
Six months compressed into two words.
“He kidnapped me and kept me for half a year.”
My body stiffens automatically.
“And that was when there was no mask anymore.”
“No sweet Dominic.”
“No boy I grew up with.”
“No fiancé.”
“Just him.”
I stare at my hands.
“And the wolves.”
The word makes something cold crawl underneath my skin.
“That’s what I called them.”
“The men he gave me to.”
My voice gets smaller.
“When Dominic couldn’t break something out of me himself, he let them try.”
“They tortured me.”
I force myself not to soften the word.
“Sometimes because he wanted something from me.”
“Sometimes as punishment.”
“And sometimes…”
My breath catches.
“Sometimes I think they did it simply because they enjoyed watching me hurt.”
My eyes close.
“They beat me. Humiliated me. Hurt me in ways I still can’t say out loud without feeling like I’m back there.”
My nails dig into my palms.
“And they took advantage of me.”
My voice cracks.
“Over and over.”
I can’t give Enzo every detail.
I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to give anyone every detail.
“Sometimes Dominic stopped them.”
The bitterness almost chokes me.
“And that somehow made it worse.”
“Because then he’d become my rescuer.”
I laugh once, brokenly.
“My fucking rescuer from the men he’d thrown me to.”
“He’d pull them off me. Clean me up. Hold me while I shook.”
“Tell me he loved me.”
“Tell me this wouldn’t happen if I would just stop fighting him.”
My stomach turns.
“And there were moments…”
I hate this part.
“There were moments when I actually felt relieved when he walked into the room.”
My eyes snap shut as shame washes through me.
“Do you understand how much I hate that?”
“He created the thing I needed saving from and somehow trained my brain to feel safer when I saw him.”
My hand presses against my chest.
“I hated him.”
“I feared him.”
“And sometimes when those men were there, I wanted him.”
My voice breaks.
“Not because I wanted him.”
“Because I wanted him to make them stop.”
I finally look at Enzo again.
“That fucks with your head.”
My tears fall silently now.
“You start questioning everything.”
“What you wanted. What you agreed to. Whether you fought hard enough. Whether surviving something somehow made you responsible for surviving it the wrong way.”
I shake my head.
“And after six months of that, they rescued me.”
Rescued.
Such a clean word.
“Everyone thought getting me out meant it was over.”
“It wasn’t.”
My body came home.
Some pieces of me didn’t.
“I couldn’t sleep properly.”
“Footsteps outside a door made me freeze.”
“A man raising his voice could make my heart race before I even understood why.”
“If someone stood between me and an exit, I noticed.”
“I started watching people’s hands.”
“Their voices.”
“The way they moved.”
“I learned how quickly kindness could become cruelty, so eventually even kindness started frightening me.”
My eyes drift toward Enzo.
“Especially kindness.”
Because cruelty makes sense to me now.
“Cruelty announces itself.”
My voice becomes quieter.
“It’s tenderness I don’t know what to do with.”
My fingers trace absently against Enzo’s chest.
“Someone holding me without hurting me.”
“Someone touching me and not demanding anything afterward.”
“Someone promising to stay.”
My eyes fill again.
“Those are the things that scare me.”
Because Dominic taught me that an angel can take off his halo whenever he wants.
I take a shaky breath.
“And then Papa died.”
My entire body changes at the words.
That wound is different.
Dominic terrifies me.
Papa breaks me.
“My grandmother was in the hospital.”
“I was going there to see her.”
“I’d already been rescued. My family had me back. Adrian and Alexander barely let me out of their sight. Serafina was watching me like I might disappear if she blinked.”
My lips tremble.
“They’d spent my whole life protecting me.”
“That’s another thing I didn’t understand until afterward.”
I look at Enzo.
“The Castellano name.”
“I knew we were old money. I knew my family had influence. I knew there were things nobody explained to me.”
“But I didn’t know how deep our ties to that world actually went.”
My voice cracks.
“My family made sure I didn’t.”
“Adrian, Alexander, Serafina… all those years I thought they were overprotective.”
Another tear slips free.
“They knew.”
“They knew exactly what people connected to our family were capable of.”
“And they were trying to keep their little sister outside of it.”
I shake my head.
“Dominic was the person they couldn’t protect me from because I willingly let him close.”
The guilt comes immediately.
“I loved him.”
I force myself to say it.
“And because I loved him, I trusted him more than I trusted their fear.”
My breathing shakes.
“Then after they finally got me back…”
Papa.
I can see it before I say it.
“He died in front of that hospital.”
My voice disappears for several seconds.
“I watched my grandfather die when I was supposed to be walking inside to visit my grandmother.”
My hand presses harder against Enzo.
“And something inside me just…”
I shake my head.
“…stopped believing that being rescued meant being safe.”
There it is.
The thing I’ve been trying to explain without knowing how.
“That’s what Dominic left behind, Enzo.”
I pull back enough to look at him.
“Not just scars.”
“Fear.”
“Guilt.”
“Hypervigilance.”
“The constant feeling that happiness has a price attached to it.”
My lips tremble.
“When something feels too good, I start looking for what’s about to destroy it.”
“When someone loves me, part of me wonders who is going to bleed for it.”
“When someone promises forever…”
My voice breaks.
“I remember the last man who promised me forever.”
And suddenly everything Enzo said earlier hurts in an entirely different way.
“You told me not to wait for the shoe to drop.”
My fingers rise to his face.
“I don’t know how not to.”
“Dominic spent years wearing an angelic mask before I saw what was underneath.”
My thumb trembles against Enzo’s cheek.
“So when you come into my life and somehow, in less than seventy-two hours, make me feel safer than I have in years…”
I laugh softly through my tears.
“My first instinct isn’t to relax.”
“It’s to wonder when your mask comes off.”
The admission hurts because Enzo hasn’t earned that suspicion.
“And I hate that.”
“Because you haven’t done anything to deserve being compared to him.”
I shake my head.
“I’m not looking at you and seeing Dominic.”
“That’s not what scares me.”
My eyes hold his.
“I look at you and don’t see Dominic.”
“And that’s so much fucking scarier.”
Because I believe Enzo.
That’s the problem.
“I believe you when you say you’ll stay.”
“I believe you when you hold me like this.”
“I believe the way you look at me.”
“And every time I believe you, I give you another piece of me.”
My hand settles over his heart.
“Dominic spent years earning enough of me to destroy me.”
“You’ve broken through defenses in three days that I spent years building back.”
My voice drops to a whisper.
“So yes.”
“I’m terrified of losing you already.”
There.
God.
I actually said it.
“And that sounds insane.”
“Seventy-two hours.”
I shake my head.
“But trauma doesn’t give a shit about what makes sense.”
I lean my forehead against his.
“If I’m asking you to stay, then you deserve to know what staying might look like.”
“There might be nights I wake up afraid of you before I remember who you are.”
“There might be moments when you reach for me and I freeze.”
“I might ask if you’re angry when you’ve given me absolutely no reason to think you are.”
“I might panic when you leave.”
“And then panic when you get too close.”
My tears fall between us.
“I might love you someday and still be afraid of you.”
My breath catches at my own choice of words.
Love.
Too soon.
Way too fucking soon.
But I don’t take it back.
“Not because of anything you’ve done.”
“Because somebody taught my body that love and danger can wear the same face.”
I close my eyes.
“And I need you to know that before you promise me forever.”
For a moment, I say nothing.
Then I force myself to look at him again.
“I don’t need you to fix it.”
“I don’t need you to avenge me.”
“And please…”
My voice trembles.
“Don’t pity me.”
“I survived things I shouldn’t have had to survive.”
“Sometimes I fought.”
“Sometimes I begged.”
“Sometimes I completely fucking broke.”
“Sometimes surviving meant doing whatever kept me alive for another hour.”
I swallow.
“But I’m here.”
My hand remains over Enzo’s heart.
“And for some insane reason…”
I breathe.
“I want to be here with you.”
There is nowhere left to hide after that.
“So that’s the truth.”
My eyes search his face for the change I’ve been expecting since I started speaking.
“That’s what Dominic left behind.”
My voice drops to almost nothing.
“Now you understand why I’m waiting for your shoe to drop.”
I stay completely still in his arms.
Terrified.
Exposed.
Waiting for pity.
Waiting for fear.
Waiting for the first crack in Enzo’s expression that tells me I’ve finally shown him too much.
But for once, I don’t run before someone gets the chance to choose.
“So if you’re still sure…”
My fingers curl softly against his chest.
“Tell me again.”
My eyes don’t leave his.
“Tell me you’re staying.”