MILENA
I wake slowly, the way you do when you’ve had a good dream and you don’t want to leave it behind.
My eyes are still shut, but I can feel the sheets twisted around my legs, my skin slightly damp, like I sweated during the night. My hips ache in that deep, satisfying way that usually comes with—
My eyes snap wide open as my fingers brush between my thighs, and then consciousness slams me fully awake.
Firstly, where the fuck is my underwear. Secondly, there’s no denying that what I feel dried on my inner thigh right by my bikini line is the remnants of arousal.
I sit up quickly. The room spins, my head twisting in a haze of confusion with something dark, wrong, and hot swirling underneath it all at once.
Before I can begin to unpack what the hell is going on, something catches my attention at the edge of my peripheral vision. When I whirl to it, my heart skips.
There’s a black rose lying on the pillow next to me: thorns still intact, a single velvet petal beginning to curl at the edges. Underneath it, folded with perfect, eerie precision, are my panties.
Not the ones I’m currently missing. The ones from the night at Greymoor.
Everything goes quiet all at once—so quiet that all I can hear is the thud of my pulse in my ears as I stare at the rose and the panties beneath it.
What. The. Actual. Fuck.
I scramble out of bed, nearly tripping over the sheets. My legs feel weak, and I’m painfully aware of the bareness and lingering sensations between my legs, like my body’s trying to remember what my mind refuses to believe.
I didn’t dream what I thought I did last night.
Maybe I did. Maybe that’s all it was: an extremely vivid sex dream. The kind that sinks its claws into you so deeply that you’re still thinking about it hours after you wake up.
But dreams don’t leave roses on your pillow.
And they sure as hell don’t return the panties you lost during a chase through a fucking haunted mansion.
My throat tightens.
I stare at the black rose like it might bloom into teeth and bite me.
He was here.
He was in my fucking bedroom while I slept.
I don’t remember anything, but something happened—
You orgasmed, that’s what happened.
I remember that much, even if ten seconds ago I was still imagining that it was a delicious dream. My body arching into the sheets, heat flooding my skin, my mouth parting with a moan I tried to swallow.
Viciousness ripples through my core, sending a toxic mix of horror and shameful arousal slamming through my system.
He was here.
He touched me.
For a second, another thought erupts in my head, sending my hand back between my legs.
No.
He may have touched me, but he didn’t fuck me. That much I can tell, even if it’s been…well…forever since I’ve felt that sensation.
Years. Literally. Not since that night.
But I can tell I didn’t have sex while I was unconscious last night, which is both a relief and, horribly, something else.
…At least, to the sick part of me inside.
Although, when I think about the feral madness of the man who chased me through the darkness and promised to “wrap my ponytail around his fist while I choked on his cock”—I mean, Jesus—I seriously doubt I would have slept through being fucked by him.
Another wave of shame crashes over me. But then, again, it’s followed—God help me—by venomous darkness, twisting low in my belly, burning like a lit match.
I grab the rose and shove it in a drawer. I stuff the panties into my clothes hamper, hoping hiding them will make it less real. I pace the room, running my hands through my hair, shaking off the panic.
No one knows. No one can know.
This thing that’s happening to me… It isn’t normal.
I should be terrified.
I am terrified.
…Fuck, I’m also wet again.
That terrifies me even more.
I shower until my skin turns pink and scrub until I feel raw. I dress quietly, and by the time I leave the house, I’ve reapplied my lipstick twice and told myself a thousand times that it didn’t happen.
That it was just a dream.
But the truth curls in the back of my throat like smoke.
He was here.
And he left a rose and a darkness inside me to prove it.
I throw myself into rehearsal, thinking punishing my body might erase last night from my memory.
Spoiler: it doesn’t.
It doesn’t stop me from pushing harder and harder, though.
Pirouette. Nail the landing. Extend, higher. Hold.
Again.
Again.
I push past the burn in my legs, the pain in my feet, the tightness in my chest that has nothing to do with dancing and everything to do with what I woke up to.
A rose and a memory that won’t die.
“Milena!” Madame Kuzmina snaps. “Arms!”
I adjust. She nods, tapping her ringed fingers together in that way that always makes me think of a Roma fortune teller. Then she moves on, finds Val goofing off in the corner of the studio with Jackson and Miguel, and barks at them to get back to work.
I stare at my reflection in the mirror. Outwardly, I look normal. In control. Strong.
But I don’t feel normal.
I feel wrecked, inside and out. Like there’s the beginnings of the flu or a cold inside me that’s eventually going to bring me down.
During a break, I snag my phone and slump down against the wall of the studio, pushing sweat-dampened hair from my face as I aimlessly scroll Insta. I grin when I see a picture Lyra posted last night that I must have missed: a shot from over the weekend, her and Carmine out at some fancy gala.
Lyra, of course, looks stunning, the emerald of her gown contrasting perfectly with her fiery red hair. Carmine looks his usual slightly-psychotic-but-still-a-male-supermodel type of handsome beside her in a tuxedo.
Suddenly, I go still.
Next to Carmine is his younger brother Nico, his arms wrapped around Naomi who’s looking amazing in a violet dress. Beside them is another face I know all too well.
Nero De Luca.
His hair’s a little longer than it used to be. His chest has filled out a bit, his shoulders and arms a little more muscled. His eyes are even sharper and deadlier than they were that night.
A shiver ripples up my spine.
We don’t necessarily move in the same social circles, but they intersect here and there. He’s friends with Carmine and Nico; I’m friends with Lyra and Naomi. That sort of thing.
Whenever I am in the same room as him, however, there’s a strange sensation that always pools inside me.
I guess that’s to be expected when you’re around the person you lost your virginity to.
Or, probably the person you lost your virginity to, and they don’t know it.
Not “don’t know it” as in “didn’t realize it was your first time”.
As in, literally don’t know it was you.
Yeah.
We weren’t supposed to know. That was the whole point that night. No names. Hidden identities. Faces covered by masks.
Looking back, all that cloak and dagger bullshit seems so stupid now. At that point, we already knew almost everything there was to know about each other. Every dream. Every dark secret. Every buried fantasy.
That is precisely what brought me to that converted warehouse loft in Brooklyn four years ago: the promise of a night of letting go of inhibitions. Of exploring my dark side.
A night of masks, breathless gasps, and pounding pulses as he fucked me as roughly and as brutally as I craved.
But then it turned into a night of terror, with gunfire. A night that had me fleeing home and rushing up the stairs to find Uncle Levka sitting at my father’s desk, as he had been for the last few months while Papa was deep in his treatments.
“Thank God you’re home, Milena. I was so worried about you.”
I replay the frantic way he jumped up from the desk and raced over to hug me fiercely. Four years later, I still remember every single detail of that night.
The good, and the horrible.
“I need you to stay home, now, da? No need to be scared, moya plemyannitsa.”
“What’s happening, Uncle?”
“War, Milena. We are at war. The De Luca family fired the first shots, and we’ve responded with more hellfire than the bastards ever saw coming.”
His face is grim yet proud as he tells me. I’ve barely heard of the De Luca family. All I know is that they’re Italian, very powerful, and—according to my uncle—have been trying to start something with our family for months.
“Those motherfuckers sent a sniper, Milena. Tonight! To this very house!”
My face goes white.
“Was anyone—’
“Da, Milena,” he growls thinly. “They got some of ours. But Antonio fucked with the wrong Russians,” Levka goes on. “And this war he started will be over soon. He’s already dead,” he grunts with a grimace, “and so is his wife. I just heard that we may have even gotten the crown prince Nero, too.”
Nero. I’ve heard of him. The heir to the De Luca empire. He went to Knightsblood University with my friend Evelina’s older brother Roman and a few other young men I know from the Bratva world: Laz Kislev, Bane Antonov, Mikhail Javanovic.
But besides that, he’s a complete unknown to—
“Da,’ my uncle snickers. ‘We caught him with his pants down with some girl out in Brooklyn. A converted artist loft in Bushwick.”
My heart stops beating.
“Some shithole on Decatur Street.”
The world grinds to a halt under my feet. Time freezes in a horrific moment of clarity and pain.
The ‘shithole on Decatur Street’ is where I just came from. A loft where I finally met in person a man I’ve only known through letters for MONTHS. Where I kissed him. Where I asked him to chase me through the dark, pin me to the ground, and fuck away my virginity in a violent clash of pain and pleasure.
…And then, that same masked, unknown man shoved me out the back door and told me to run as the bullets rained through the windows.
The sharp clap of Madame Kuzmina’s ringed hands as she barks a correction to Dove across the rehearsal space yanks me back to the present.
Mostly.
I swallow as I stare blankly at the phone in my hands, the memories of that night of ecstasy and terror, of fantasy and blood trickling through my thoughts.
It was when my uncle said those words that it all clicked horribly into place.
The man behind the letters, the book, the mask—who touched me like I was something cherished and devoured me like I was something cursed—had a name.
Nero De Luca.
The mad emperor.
Or at least, I’m ninety percent sure.
He didn’t, in fact, die that night when my uncle’s men filled that loft space with bullets. He buried his parents, took over the throne, and made a name for himself carved out of brutality and carnage.
And I gave him my heart and virginity the night it all came crashing down.
Again, probably.
“Wow. Didn’t peg you for a Nero De Luca fangirl.”
Brooklyn’s voice jolts me so hard I almost drop my phone. I fumble to catch and quickly lock it, my face blooming with heat as I glance up at her.
“I wasn’t looking at—”
“Oh, no, you were in fact staring. Longingly,” she grins. “Fawning over, if you will.”
“Okay, not what you think. I just happened to have Insta open when I got caught up thinking about something. Chill.”
“Yeah, thinking about something like dick.”
“Wait, who’s thinking about dick?”
I groan. Val—of course—joins in the torment.
“How is it that the second someone is getting teased about sex, you show up?” I mutter at him.
“It’s my superpower,” he shrugs. “Say the word dick, and boom—here I am.”
“Milena was ogling Nero De Luca,” Brooklyn says smugly.
I glare at her. “I was not—”
“No no, I get it,” Val muses. “Tall, kinda unhinged, super-hot in that ‘I’ll choke you ‘til you come’ way?”
I roll my eyes. “You need help.”
“Hey, you’re the one getting wet for Nero De Luca, baby girl,” he tosses back.
I sigh.
Touche.
Val grins as he glances at Brooklyn. “I mean, what does a dude like that even do for foreplay? Commit arson? Smash kneecaps?”
“Definitely drown puppies,” Brooklyn nods sagely.
I frown at them. “I take it back: you both need professional help. Desperately.” I shake my head. “That’s fucked up. You don’t even know him.”
“And you do?” Val teases.
Yes.
At least, I think I do. After that night, my pen pal and I never corresponded again. The book disappeared. The letters stopped.
Have I ever confirmed beyond a shadow of doubt that the man was Nero?
No.
But sometimes, a gut feeling is all you need. And it’s that gut feeling that makes me abruptly go quiet whenever he happens to be in my vicinity, that makes me stare at him, trying to peel back the—admittedly gorgeous—layers, trying to guess if I’m imagining it correctly.
To try to reconcile the fearsome, brutal don of the De Luca mafia with a letter full of deep secrets and hidden desires. To see him in the pages of a centuries-old German book, and in a night of wild abandon, smelling of sweat, blood, and cum.
It’s the same feeling I got another taste of the other night, when Alicia set me up to get chased by whatever psycho was waiting for me—or for her—in Greymoor.
I gulp.
Even if he did expect her and got me instead, it looks like I still caught his attention.
Caught it like a disease.
I shiver and make a note to talk to Rurik, Papa’s head of security, about tightening things way the hell up around the house.
“Whatever, I need to get back to work,” I mutter, making a move to stand.
Val grabs my hand, lifting me effortlessly to my feet.
“Oh, by the way.” Brooklyn turns to me. “You wanna go out on Friday?”
“Like, out out?”
She grins. “I was thinking Doomsday?”
Goddammit.
Part of me wants to say I can’t make it, but only out of sheer petulance. I mean, she busted me about staring at Nero’s photo. But Doomsday, a wild club that’s known for drawing both great DJs and lots of mafia-types—mainly because it’s partly owned by Laz Kislev—is fun as fuck.
My dance friends and I only started going a few months ago, after we got dragged there during Lyra’s impromptu bachelorette party. But now it’s become a favorite for a fun night out.
“You have my attention,” I say with dramatically arched brows.
“Do I have it like Nero’s Insta page had it?”
“Oh, fuck you.”
Brooklyn dissolves into giggles as Madame Kuzmina barks at us to get to work.
