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25. The Neverland

Auteur: aflyingwhale
last update Date de publication: 2026-08-05 21:24:59

Dove

The piano room felt different with him in it.

I sat down on the bench, in the room that once felt like mine, and it stopped feeling like mine the moment he followed me in. He didn't sit close. He took the chair across from the piano, a little back in the shadow, and folded himself into it the way he folded into everything, all long lines and unhurried ease, and he took out a cigarette and lit it. The small flare of the lighter. The first slow pull. His eyes on me over the ember, patient, w
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  • Love's Darkest Cage   60. The Money

    ElioShe wasn't eating.Maria reported that to me on the third day. "She takes water," she said, hands twisted in her apron. "She takes a little bread if I stand there. The rest comes back." A pause. "The trays go up full and they come down full, Mr. Visconti."The guards told me the rest, though they didn't want to."She cries at night, boss." The younger one wouldn't look at me. "Not — not loud. Not so anyone else would hear. But we're right outside the door, and it's quiet up there at three in the morning." He shifted his weight. "Most nights. Every night, if I'm honest."I sat in my study after that and did not move for a long time.Every night. Three days now. Four now. A girl of eighteen, locked in a room, starving herself and weeping into a pillow at three in the morning with two of my men standing outside her door listening and unable to do a thing about it, because their boss had ordered it.This is what saving her looks like, I told myself.I put Dove behind a locked door fo

  • Love's Darkest Cage   59. The Prisoner

    DoveI cried myself to sleep.I don't say that to be dramatic. I lay in that bed and sobbed until my ribs ached and my eyes swelled shut and my throat was raw, and the whole time — the whole time — I kept my eyes on the door.He'll come. He’ll come back.That was the thing I told myself, over and over, like a rosary. He'll come for me. He's doing something. There's a reason why he’s acting this way. But he'll come up here when the house is quiet and he'll sit on the edge of this bed the way he did the night I fell, and he'll explain, and it will make sense.Because it had to be a reason. It had to be. After everything that happened last night. After everything — how could it be that he'd simply stopped caring?I watched that door until the sky went gray.But he never came.* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *And then it was morning, and the house just went on.That was the part I couldn't bear. Maria came with a tray. The maids came for the sheets. Someon

  • Love's Darkest Cage   58. The Replacement

    ElioI got the study door shut behind me before it hit.I don't fold. I have stood in rooms where men were dying and kept my pulse under seventy. But I got that door closed and I put my hand flat against it and I stood there for a moment with my head down and I could not make myself turn around.You imagined it.Her face when I said it. She'd come running down those stairs barefoot, flying, her whole heart out in front of her like something she was carrying in both hands to give me, and I'd taken that and I'd broken it in half in the middle of my own hall in front of the staff.You were confused.Three weeks ago, a girl walked out of my club and ruined my life, and last night she nearly died for a watch she stole out of my father's coat, and tonight I looked her in the face and told her she'd hallucinated the only good hours of either of our lives.She'd whispered I stayed awake. I stayed awake so I'd remember.I stood with my forehead nearly against my own study door and made myself

  • Love's Darkest Cage   57. The Cruelty

    DoveI woke up alone.The space beside me was empty and cold. I reached for him before I was even properly awake, my hand going out across the sheets on instinct, and found nothing but rumpled sheets where a body should have been.I sat up too fast and the room tilted. My head throbbed. My cheek ached where Gio had hit me, and my whole body felt like it had been taken apart and put back together by someone in a hurry.But I remembered.That was the thing I checked first, before anything else. I closed my eyes and made myself walk back through it, terrified there'd be a hole. The gold dress. The coat check. The bull mask. The fake smile. The velvet couch and the sound of tearing silk and the door coming down and Elio, standing there. His arms were around me. His jacket. Him sitting with me on the bed. Him kissing me. Him tying my wrists above my head. And him giving me my very first órgasm.The indescribable feeling of it. I remembered it all.And then his voice was cracking. Not like

  • Love's Darkest Cage   56. The Weakness

    ElioThe plane sat on the tarmac at Teterboro with its engines already turning over, and my father's men were arranged along the stairs like teeth.Brandon came up the steps behind me and a guard put a hand out flat against his chest."It's all right," I said, without turning. "Wait for me here.""Boss—""Wait for me here, Brandon."He stepped back. He didn't like it. That's what makes him good.And I went up alone.The cabin was cool and dim and smelled of leather and money.My father sat forward, in the first of the big seats, one leg crossed over the other, a coffee at his elbow, reading something on a tablet. He didn't look up when I came in. Of course he didn't.And from the back of the plane, in the shadows behind the galley, came a sound.Groaning.I looked down the aisle. Gio was curled up across two seats, and a flight attendant was crouched beside him with a cold compress and a look of professional patience. My brother's face — what I could see of it — was a swollen purple r

  • Love's Darkest Cage   55. The Departure

    ElioShe'd finally gone under sometime around six.I know because I'd been counting, lying awake in the gray light with her small hand fisted in the covers over my chest, feeling her fight it. She'd held out an unbelievable length of time. Hours past when the drug should have taken her, hours past when anyone in her state had any business staying conscious, and every time her breathing started to slow, she'd jerk herself back and dig her fingers in and force her eyes open again, furious with her own body.I won't fall asleep, she'd told me. And she hadn't.She'd stayed awake for all of it. She'd kept the whole night.And then, somewhere in the thin dawn light, she'd simply run out — the fight going out of her all at once between one breath and the next, her hand going slack, her face turning into my chest — and she'd slept.She was still sleeping now.I lay there a while longer than I needed to. There was a war on the other side of that door, business and damages to attend to, and I l

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