My pulse stuttered.
Saved was a generous word for what I’d done.For what I was still willing to do.But then… then she flipped the last card.
“The Lovers.”
Something in my chest stopped.Then restarted.Harder.Rougher.Meaner.Like my heart was trying to beat its way out and into her hands.The air thickened.I could barely breathe around it.
Zelda’s voice turned soft.Serious.
“There’s a bond here… a real one.It’s already in motion.”
My head dropped forward until it rested against the wood.I closed my eyes.
Because I knew.I already fucking knew.
The second I’d seen her standing in my home—dark hair, bruises blooming like violets on her throat, eyes too wide and too brave—I’d known there was no world where I would let her go.
And now her cards were saying the same thing I’d been fighting not to say out loud.
She was mine.
Not because I’d asked for her or because I deserved her.But because fate—or chaos—had shoved her into my life and now I couldn’t look at a single door without imagining her behind it.
Zelda’s voice broke through the haze.
“Just be sure this man deserves you.”
I gritted my teeth until pain sparked up my jaw.Because I was not a man who deserved anything that beautiful.But I would burn alive before I let anything touch her.
Her laugh drifted through the door—small, nervous, trying to pretend nothing had changed.Yet everything had.She didn’t know that her cards had just tied a rope around my throat and pulled on it.I stood there, breathing like a starving animal, fighting the urge to rip the door open and tell her exactly what the universe already knew: that there was a reason we kept crossing paths.
The momentI heard Zelda’s cards slide back into their pouch, I pushed away from the door.I didn’t want to be caught listening, and I didn’t want Neve to see me like this, with my jaw locked, breath uneven, my pulse punching through my skin, begging for release.
The door opened.
Neve stepped into the hall, her eyes searching for me before anything else.And when she found me?Christ.It hit like a blow.Her face was still flushed from the reading, her lips parted, her hair a little messy.She looked warm.Alive.And every damn card Zelda had pulled was still echoing in my skull like a prophecy.
The Emperor.
The Devil.
The Lovers.
Zelda appeared behind her, slinging her bag over her shoulder.“Alright, big man,” she chirped, “walk me out before your hallway eats me.”
Neve snorted a laugh.It was small but nervous.She had no idea I was seconds from tearing the universe apart for her.
I nodded, because if I stayed there with Neve while she was looking at me like that, I would do something I couldn’t undo.
I guided Zelda down the hall.She chattered, but I barely heard her.All I could think of were those damn tarot cards, and the way she had hinted at a possessive man in her life.
Outside, Alessio was waiting by the black SUV, leaning on the hood with that shit-eating grin he saved for annoying his boss.
“Got your girl,” I told him bluntly.
Zelda cooed, “Oh!A chaperone.How cute.”
Alessio’s eyebrows shot up before he laughed and bowed.“I’m just the cab driver today, my queen.”