Page 17 of Modern Romance Collection February 2025, 1-4

The woman moved with serpentine grace. She came closer, flicking her dark gaze all over Dioni, until she felt as if she’d suffered some sort of clinical examination.

“It will all end in pain,” the woman said. Darkly. “You will see soon enough.”

“I’m Dioni,” Dioni told her in as friendly a tone as possible. “And you are...?”

“I am Marcella Maria Vaccaro,” the woman told her, with the sort of enunciation that suggested that trumpets should have sounded. “Alceu is my son, and so I know him as only a mother can. He is pretending he is something other than what he is, and he does so to his detriment. You will see. Like it or not, you will know the truth.”

“The truth of what?” Dioni rubbed her hand over her belly at another insistent kick. “Your grandchild? We only have about three months to go, and then the baby will be here. Like a truth all on its own.”

Marcella moved closer still, but did not regard Dioni’s belly with any maternal warmth. On the contrary, she looked as if she thought the child might reach out and bite her.

“I always knew that he would fall, as they all fall.” She shook her head so her dark hair slithered this way and that. “Fate comes for us all, in the end.”

She looked expectantly at Dioni. Dioni smiled back.

Marcella let out a small huff, turned on her heel, and slunk off.

And Dioni did, then, indulge in thefaintestbit of worry she’d made a terrible mistake.

But she dismissed it.

Because there was no changing course, and anyway, there was far too much to see, do, and absorb over the next few days.

Alceu made himself scarce—though in fairness, that was easy enough to do in such a large, rambling place. She would get the sense of him, like a disturbance in the air—a kind of rippling sensation, or possibly heat—lingering in otherwise empty parts of the castle. As if he had been there only moments before and the intensity of his presence remained.

She would find herself breathing a little faster, a little deeper. Her heart would set itself to hammering. And it would take her some while to get her breath back under control.

Dioni spent her first day or two simply exploring. She did her best to build a map for herself. Like how best to get from one side of the castle to the other when there was a courtyard in between. It was true that she had grown up in a kind of luxury, and that even her school had adhered to standards far beyond the reach of many. But this was certainly her first time in anactual castle.

It was difficult not to act like she was some sort of princess, though she was far rounder and less nimble than the singing, dancing princesses she’d loved to watch when she was young.

Then again, Concetta and the rest of the staff were universally dour and disapproving, which only made her more inclined to act as if she was a one-woman musical.

“The acoustics of this are marvelous,” Dioni said on one occasion, finding herself in what had once been a grand ballroom. She tried out a few bars of the first princess song that came to mind, about letting it go, and sighed happily. “I can only imagine what it must sound like with an orchestra here. Singer. Dancers going this way and that.”

When she swirled back around to face the housekeeper and the two maids who were accompanying her today—with her arms out wide, like a proper princess would do mid-song—they were all staring at her with the same expression on their faces.

Discouraging expressions, it went without saying.

“People do notsinghere,” Concetta said oppressively.

One of the younger women bit back a laugh. “What would there be to sing about?”

The other one had a sort of musing look on her face. “It would be one thing if it was a dirge, don’t you think? Or a proper elegy.”

Dioni had laughed. At them. “I think this place could do with a whole lot more singing,” she told them. “And I certainly like to sing. So I suppose we will all have to come to terms with that reality.”

“It will change you,” Concetta assured her, and the other women nodded. “The Vaccaros are creeping poison and none survive it intact.”

The housekeeper appeared to be hale and hearty, and had been in the employ of the family for at least the last forty years. Suggesting that it was a slow-creeping poison, indeed. But after that interaction she took it upon herself to take her tours alone. She found the libraries—a whole set of them, one linking to the next. They were arranged around a kind of atrium that was filled with fruit trees, bright and bursting with blooms and fruit. She stood in the very center, her face tipped up to the soft morning light, and wondered how anyone could find this place anything but magical.

When she opened her eyes, she thought she saw movement high above, as if someone was up on those battlements. Or had been, only a moment ago, looking down.

Not someone, she corrected herself.Him.

Something inside her wound tight and hummed, and she found herself daydreaming—again—about that kiss in New York. His mouth on hers, so demanding. So marvelously incapacitating.

It was a wonder she could think about anything else.

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