Page 43 of Modern Romance Collection February 2025, 1-4

Her heart was thumping at her, but what she really didn’t want was that emotion she could feel pricking at the backs of her eyes to come flooding out. He would only take that as evidence to support his case, she knew.

“Are you forbidding me from contacting you?” she asked instead. “Is that why you’re telling me withsuch significancethat the doctors will talk to you?”

And if she stepped back from all this and observed this moment like it was happening to someone else, she supposed it was fascinating, really, the way he could turn himself to stone as he stood there.

“There is no reason for you to contact me.”

“I understand that you have a genetic predisposition to melodrama, Alceu, but this does seem to take it a bit too far, don’t you think?”

And oh, she hoped he would never know how much it cost her to keep her voice calm and sweet.

“I meant what I said, Dioni.” He didn’t use that word, camurria. That insult that she had long since come to think of as the sweetest endearment imaginable. “There will be no more giving in to temptation.”

And when he turned to go, she could have yelled. She could have screamed the castle down around them, maybe. She was sure she had those things inside of her, so she wasn’t sure where the strength to stay quiet came from.

The strength to simply hold his gaze untilhedropped it.

The courage to simply stand there, pitiless, and allow him to abandon her and their baby in real time, with no pretense that he wasn’t doing precisely that.

But the trouble with that was that he did it anyway.

And then she was left there, standing in a doorway and clinging to the wall while it seemed the world spun around and around, heedless of how dizzy it made her.

She made herself move after what seemed like an ice age, wandering deeper into the castle, of half a mind to simply lose herself in the libraries again.

But she was intercepted by Concetta.

“If you will come with me,” the housekeeper said, sounding almost apologetic, “I will get you settled into your cottage.”

And once again, she could have fought. But what would it gain her?

So instead it was all a long, slow march out into the forecourt and then through the castle door. Then back along the rocky outcropping with only the music of what she was certain was her mother-in-law’s spiteful laughter on the breeze.

Concetta led her to one of the cottages, though Dioni could see that Alceu had not lied about its size. It was set back from the others, with the more wooded side of the outcropping all to itself, and what looked like gardens left to their own devices.Like me, she thought.

Once she let them lead her inside, the staff bustled all around her, though she could not have said what they were doing. She still had that sense that everything was a blur.

Maybe it was only that shewishedit was.

And when she finally jolted awake from whatever daydream had her in its grip, she was screamingly hungry again. She was also alone.

The cottage was bright and lovely and pretty, filled with books and art and perfectly cheerful in every way, which made Dioni want to practice that screaming again. So loud that she might knock that castle down into pebbles. So fierce that it might send this whole outcropping of dark Vaccaro history tumbling down the side of the mountain.

But she did no such thing.

She had spent her whole life being quiet and unassuming, because why attempt to have a bigger personality than the infamous Spyros Adrianakis? Why attempt to compete with a circus like that?

Dioni found herself standing in the living room, her hands folded before her and some sort of strange smile on her face. Some terrible parody of somethingquiet and unassuming, she supposed.

It reminded her of when she’d first made it to New York. When she’d dismissed all the staff, made grand proclamations about her independence, and finally found herself standing all by herself in the townhouse.

Alone at last.

But back then, she’d had the pregnancy to come to terms with. She’d had all those dreams and daydreams about Alceu. All the various fantasies she’d entertained of seeking revenge, or accepting him back if he apologized, or a thousand other twisted little scenarios that she’d known would never come to pass.

Now she still had her baby on the way, but there were no fantasies attached to it.

She thought of all the things he had said to her. All the words he’d used, and that look on his face, and how stony and distant he had been when he’d left. Dioni supposed she should take all that at face value.

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