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I was angry for the women he’d hurt before me, and I watched this for them.

It was after, when three of Professor Hewitt’s fingers had fallen to the concrete floor like discarded flower petals, that I realized Dario had known I was there the entire time.

Because he turned to me, bloodstained hands, red flecks of it pebbling his chin, and he grinned at me.

Ferocious as a feral wolf and just as victorious after a kill.

I startled under the gaze, under the emotions it evoked in me, and fled the basement, running all the way back to my room.

Where he found me, minutes later, still cleaning the blood off his hands with his wet, red-soaked handkerchief.

“It doesn’t matter if you try to keep these things from me, Fiammetta,” he drawled as he leaned in my doorway, watching me where I sat by an open window trying to cool myself down. “I will always know when someone moves against you, and I will always deal with them so they know never to do it again. Did I not promise you that the day you married me?”

It was one promise, apparently, my husband was reluctant to break.

“I remember,” I told him.

“I didn’t want a wife,” he admitted, and I noticed a smear of blood on the side of his mouth that, shockingly, I wanted to lick away. “I still don’t. But you are mine, whether I like it or not. I . . . I care about your well-being in my own way. This is how I show it.”

“Blood,” I surmised. “And orgasms.”

His mouth twitched in his short beard, his frequent tell that he found me—reluctantly—amusing.

“Blood and orgasms,” he confirmed. “One is in my nature to give, the other I seem unable to resist when it comes to you.”

“Just me?” I asked.

Because in the four years we had been married I had never found the courage to ask outright if he stepped out on me.

Part of me, I thought, didn’t want to know the answer.

Dario’s full mouth twisted sharply, as if in disgust. “Just you. I do not like people enough to spend time with most of them, Fiammetta. Perhaps you haven’t noticed.”

My laughter started with bitterness but ended in genuine amusement, because, of course, I had noticed, and part of me, that silly section of my heart I could never quite quell, rejoiced in being different than the rest.

“I noticed,” I agreed. “But it’s not as if you spend time with me outside of our public appearances and the random trysts we have.”

“Trysts,” he echoed with another mouth twitch. “Let me assure you, I am not a man who likes to give up control for anything. And our . . . trysts are as close as I am willing to come to being vulnerable with anyone. Do you understand what I am saying, principessa mia?”

My princess.

It was the first time he’d called me the taunting moniker in the possessive.

I fought the way that made me feel.

For you, I am as soft as I can be, he seemed to be saying.

It wasn’t much.

It was hardly anything for a girl who’d believed herself in love with a boy who promised to love her back and give her a home filled with love, laughter, and children.

But it was something.

And in the fallow grounds of this immense house, it felt like a miracle.

Instead of answering the question, I rose to my feet and moved to him, stopping only when I was inches from his hulking form. Then, I rolled to my toes and brought my hand up to swipe the blood from the corner of his mouth.

“You have blood,” I said redundantly, gaze fixed on his lush mouth. “Just there.”