Page 51 of Queen
“Zina,” he says evenly, “you’ve always belonged to me. You just didn’t know it.”
My nails dig into my palms until pain shoots up my arms. “Stop talking in riddles. Stop pretending this is fate. You don’t get to rewrite my life into some obsession you dressed up as destiny.”
Something flickers in his eyes—annoyance, maybe pity. He leans forward, elbows braced on the desk, his voice dropping low. “Do you remember the fire at the Calabrese orphanage?”
The name alone guts me. My throat tightens. Smoke fills my lungs again. I hear screams. I taste ash.
“I was thirteen,” I whisper. “I almost died that night.”
“You didn’t.” His words are brutal. “Because of me.”
The world tilts. My knees nearly buckle, my hand clutching the desk for balance.
“You—”
“You were choking on smoke, trapped in the dormitory. Everyone else had fled. I carried you out.” His voice grinds rough, gravel dragged across stone. “Your face was black with soot, your eyes wide, but alive. You clung to me even unconscious. You didn’t know me. But I knew exactly who you were.”
My chest constricts, every ragged memory colliding—heat, flames, lungs clawing for air, and then hands lifting me into the cold night. I’d told myself it was a stranger. A nameless savior.
But it wasn’t. It was him. Always him.
“You—” My words fracture. “You watched me grow up. You chose me before I even knew you existed.”
His lips twitch, almost a smile, but it’s crueler than comfort. “Not chose. Claimed. The night I pulled you from the fire, you were mine.”
Gratitude slams into fury, colliding so violently I can barely breathe. He saved me. He fucking saved me. And he forged shackles out of it.
“You don’t get to use that against me,” I hiss, tears burning hot. “You don’t get to twist the worst night of my life into proof that I belong to you.”
His gaze hardens, unyielding. “It isn’t proof. It’s truth.”
My voice breaks on the sob clawing out of me. “No. No, fuck you, Emiliano. You don’t get to rewrite our story.”
Emotional Whiplash
The air in his office is choking me. Smoke from a fire I barely survived coils with his words, wrapping around my throat tighter than the flames ever did. I can’t breathe here—not with his truth pressed against me, not with my own memories unraveling like loose stitches.
My nails scrape the polished wood of his desk as I push away, needing distance, needing air. I storm toward the door, heelshammering marble in a rhythm like gunfire echoing through the corridors.
“Zina.” His voice follows, low and commanding, the same timbre that once pulled me out of nightmares when I was thirteen. Only now it drags me deeper into one.
“Stay the fuck away from me!” I fling the words over my shoulder, not slowing.
But Emiliano never obeys. The door swings wide behind me, his stride lengthening, every step a predator closing in. By the time I reach the grand foyer, shadows crawling up the stone walls in candlelight, his hand clamps around my arm and spins me hard.
I slam into the wall. Breath punches from my lungs. The flicker of candle flames paints his face in shifting light, making him look less man, more specter.
“You think this changes what you did?” I spit, voice raw with rage and shame tangled together.
His eyes burn, dark and merciless. “I think it changes everything.” His hand lifts slowly, brushing wetness from beneath my eye.
A tear. Shit. I hadn’t even realized it escaped.
The humiliation sears me hotter than the fury. I slap his hand away so hard my palm stings. “Don’t fucking touch me! You don’t get to own me just because you saved me!”
His jaw tightens, but he doesn’t retreat. The space between us suffocates, his presence heavy, every breath laced with him.
“You think I saved you to own you?” His voice is quiet but sharper than a scream. “I saved you because the world would’ve lost something it didn’t deserve to lose. You were mine before you knew what it meant.”
