Chapter 18: Purification by Fire
The smell of gasoline was a sweet, toxic perfume in the damp basement air. Adrian stood with the red canister at his feet, its contents glugging out in a final, arcing stream over the crumpled hood of the Alfa Romeo. The liquid pooled in the crevices of twisted metal, dripped from the shattered windshield frame, soaked into the stained upholstery where his mother had died.
Marissa watched from the foot of the stairs, her arms crossed tight over her chest. She wore one of his old sweaters, the sleeves swallowing her hands. Her face was a pale oval in the gloom, her eyes fixed on the wreck.
Adrian tossed the empty canister aside with a metallic clang. He pulled a silver Zippo from his pocket, flicking the wheel with his thumb. A small, defiant flame sprang to life, dancing in the still air. He looked at her across the dim space, the fire reflecting in his dark eyes.
“Last chance to object,” he said, his voice echoing flatly off the concrete.
She shook her head once, a sharp, decisive movement. “Burn it.”
He held her gaze for a second longer, then turned and touched the flame to a dangling strip of gasoline-soaked fabric hanging from the driver’s side door.
The fire didn’t whoosh; it breathed. A soft, expanding sigh of heat and light that crawled eagerly over the car’s skeleton. Yellow-orange tongues licked up the doors, bloomed across the roof, poured into the interior with a hungry, crackling joy. The heat hit Adrian’s face instantly, a solid wall. He took a step back, then another, until he stood beside Marissa.
Together, they watched their past burn.
The flames grew, snapping and popping, consuming vinyl and leather and memory. The dark stain on the roof blackened, then vanished in the inferno. The air grew thick, acrid, nearly unbearable. Adrian’s hand found hers, their fingers lacing together, squeezing tight.
“I loved her,” he said, so softly she almost didn’t hear it over the fire’s roar. “And I hated her for leaving. For choosing him to drive that night.” He didn’t specify who ‘him’ was. Luca. Their father. It didn’t matter. “This is for her. And for me.”
The fire was now a contained blast furnace, the heat making their eyes water, forcing them back a step. The metal began to groan, contorting further in the intense heat. It was beautiful in its destruction, a violent catharsis painting shifting shadows on the walls.
Adrian turned to her suddenly, the firelight carving his face into a mask of stark angles and deep hollows. His eyes were alive with a fierce, frightening light. He cupped her face, his thumbs rough on her cheeks.
“You’re my only god now,” he growled, the words hot against her lips. “The only thing I kneel to.”
He kissed her, and it tasted of smoke and gasoline and salvation. It was a consuming, desperate thing. His hands dropped to her waist, gripping the soft wool of the sweater, and he walked her backward until her shoulders hit the cold, concrete wall beside the staircase, away from the worst of the heat but bathed in its hellish, pulsating glow.
The contrast was dizzying. The searing heat from the fire on one side, the chill of the wall seeping through the sweater on her back. Adrian’s mouth was relentless, his tongue claiming hers. He pulled at the sweater, tugging it up until she raised her arms and he pulled it over her head. It fell to the dusty floor. She was naked underneath. He’d told her to come down here with nothing under it.
“Look at it,” he commanded, his voice ragged as he broke the kiss. He turned her head, forcing her to watch the car, the centerpiece of his trauma, melt and blacken. At the same time, his hands groped her breasts, his palms rough on her nipples, pinching and rolling until she gasped. “Watch it turn to ash.”
He undid his trousers, freeing his cock, already thick and hard. He didn’t bother with foreplay, with gentle coaxing. He spit into his hand, slicked himself roughly, and then his fingers were between her legs, probing her folds. She was wet—from the fear, from the spectacle, from him. He growled his approval.
“This,” he snarled, positioning the head of his cock at her entrance, “is the only legacy I give a fuck about.” He pushed inside her, a single, brutal thrust that stole her breath.
She cried out, her head thudding back against the wall, her eyes still locked on the burning wreck. The intrusion was sharp, overwhelming, a claiming as violent and final as the fire. He held himself there, buried to the hilt, letting her feel every inch of him as the flames danced in his pupils.
“Our past is burning,” he panted, his hips beginning a ruthless, driving rhythm, slamming her into the unyielding concrete with each thrust. The slap of their flesh mixed with the crackle of the fire. “And I’m planting my future right here, right now, in this cunt.”
His words were filthy, obscene, and they sent a shock of pure arousal through her core. She wrapped her legs around his waist, anchoring herself, meeting his punishing pace. Her nails scraped down his back, digging in. The heat from the blaze was starting to singe the air around them, sweat springing up on their skin instantly.
“Tell me you feel it,” he demanded, one hand gripping her thigh, the other braced against the wall by her head. His thrusts were deep, agonizingly perfect, hitting a spot inside her that made her vision swim. “Tell me you feel me filling you up where all that grief used to be.”
“Yes!” she screamed, the word torn from her throat. The dual sensations were too much—the visual destruction, the physical invasion. She was split between them, unraveling. “I feel you, Adrian! God, I feel you!”
“It’s all yours,” he grunted, his pace becoming erratic, losing its militaristic precision, giving way to raw, urgent need. “My name, my money, my fucked-up life, my cock. Every part of me. You take it. You own it.” He was pounding into her now, each drive a punctuation mark on his confession. “Come on it. Come while you watch it burn.”
The command, the possessiveness, the sheer overwhelming sensory overload broke her. Her climax erupted, a silent, seismic convulsion that locked her muscles and tore a ragged scream from her lips. She shook violently, her inner walls clamping around him in rhythmic, fluttering pulses.
The feel of her coming, the sight of her head thrown back in ecstasy against the backdrop of his personal hellfire, undid him completely. With a guttural roar that rivaled the sound of the fire, he followed. He slammed into her one final, devastating time, burying himself as deep as he could go, and emptied himself. His release was hot, seemingly endless, a flood claiming her depths as his past burned to cinders a few feet away.
He collapsed against her, his forehead on her shoulder, his body shuddering through the last waves of his orgasm. They stayed like that, joined, panting, slick with sweat and the smell of smoke, illuminated by the dying fire. The car was a blackened, skeletal husk now, the flames subsiding into a bed of glowing embers.
Slowly, softly, he pulled out. He leaned down, picking up the sweater, and gently pulled it over her head, guiding her arms through the sleeves. He dressed himself with slow, deliberate movements. The frenzy was gone, replaced by a profound, weary stillness.
He took her hand, lacing their fingers together. They stood silently for a long moment, watching the last of the flames flicker and die over the remains.
A sound from the stairs made them both turn.
Luca stood on the bottom step, silhouetted by the light from the hall above. He was fully dressed, a duffel bag slung over his shoulder. The bandages were gone from his face, revealing the full, livid map of his wound—the sutures a dark, angry track through the stubble on his cheek. He looked from the smoldering wreck to their joined hands, to their disheveled state. His expression was unreadable.
“Always knew you were a dramatic bastard,” Luca said, his voice still slurred but clearer than before.
Adrian didn’t release Marissa’s hand. “You’re leaving.”
“What’s left to stay for?” Luca’s gaze drifted to the charred metal. “You’ve torched your ghosts. I’m not sticking around to be your next ritual sacrifice.” He shifted the bag on his shoulder. “He’s coming back, you know. End of the week. Got a call from his assistant.”
Their father. The news landed like a stone in the quiet room.
“I know,” Adrian said, though he hadn’t.
“He’ll take one look at this,” Luca gestured vaguely at the basement, at Marissa, “at her, and he’ll try to break it. To break you. It’s what he does.” A faint, bitter smile touched his damaged mouth. “Maybe he’ll succeed this time.”
Adrian took a step forward. “Luca…”
“Save it.” Luca cut him off, his good eye glinting with a hard, final light. “You made your choice on that altar. You made it again right here.” He glanced once more at Marissa, a long, complicated look that held no lust, only a distant, weary envy. “Good luck.”
He turned and walked back up the stairs without another word. The door at the top opened, then shut with a soft, definitive click.
The silence after his departure was thicker than before. The embers of the car hissed softly as they cooled.
“He’s right,” Adrian said, still staring at the space where Luca had been.
“About which part?” Marissa asked, her voice small.
“All of it.” Adrian finally looked at her. The firelight was almost gone, leaving them in near darkness. “He will try to break us. He’s very good at it.”
She stepped into him, pressing her body against his, the sweater soft between them. “Let him try.”
He held her, burying his face in her hair, inhaling the scents of smoke and sex and her. The future was a door swinging open, and what waited on the other side was not freedom, but a different kind of war. But holding her in the dark, with the ashes of his oldest pain cooling behind them, he felt something unfamiliar: a grim, ready determination.
He had something to fight for now. Not an empire. Not a name.
A person.
“Come on,” he murmured, leading her toward the stairs, away from the ruins. “We have a house to secure.”
The week passed in a strange, suspended silence. The estate felt different with Luca gone, the absence of his chaotic energy leaving a hollow quiet in the west wing corridors. Adrian worked from the study, his voice a low, constant murmur on calls, restructuring holdings, moving assets into blindingly clean new trusts under numbered accounts. Marissa spent her days in the library, or walking the frost-bleached gardens, feeling the vast weight of the house around her.
They didn’t speak much about what was coming. They didn’t need to. It lived in the set of Adrian’s shoulders as he stared out the window, in the way Marissa’s eyes would track to the security monitors in the hall. Their conversations were practical, quiet. “The team from Zurich confirmed.” “The roses are all dead.” It was a ceasefire before a storm.
Their sex in those days was different, too. It wasn’t the violent purging of the basement or the chapel. It was a deep, almost grim reinforcement. Two nights after the fire, he found her in his father’s study, a room he’d always avoided. She was standing behind the colossal ebony desk, running her fingers over the empty leather blotter.
“Looking for secrets?” he asked from the doorway.
She didn’t jump. “Just mapping the territory.”
He crossed the room, the Persian rug swallowing his footsteps. He came around the desk and sat in the high-backed throne of his father’s chair. It felt alien, wrong. He looked up at her. “Come here.”
She went to him, settling sideways on his lap, her legs over the arm of the chair. He nuzzled into the warmth of her neck, his hands sliding under her sweater to palm her bare back. “He’ll sit here,” Adrian murmured against her skin. “In two days. He’ll look at me from right where you’re sitting.”
“So take it first,” she whispered, her hand cupping the back of his head.
He kissed her, a slow, consuming kiss that tasted of defiance. His hands grew urgent, pushing her sweater up, pulling her leggings and underwear down over her hips. He didn’t move from the chair. He shifted her, guiding her to straddle him, the thick, polished wood of the desk looming behind her.
He freed himself, his cock already stiff and eager. He positioned her above him, his gaze locked on hers. “This is mine,” he said, his voice low. “You are mine. This room will remember that.”
He let her lower herself onto him. She took him in slowly, a tight, hot, inch-by-inch descent that made them both gasp. He filled her completely, his grip on her hips iron-tight. She began to move, a rocking, grinding motion that had his head tipping back against the chair. The decadence of it, fucking in his father’s sacred seat of power, sent a brutal thrill through him.
“Tell me who you belong to,” he grunted, thrusting up to meet her downward strokes.
“You,” she panted, her breasts swaying before him. “Only you.”
“Whose name is on your lips when you come?”
“Yours. Adrian. God, Adrian.” Her rhythm became frenzied, sloppy. He could feel her body tightening, coiling. He slammed up into her, the chair creaking in protest under their combined weight.
“Come on your boss’s cock,” he snarled, one hand tangling in her hair, pulling just enough to arch her throat. “Soak this old bastard’s chair. Mark it.”
The filthy command pushed her over. She cried out, a sharp, broken sound, as her orgasm ripped through her. Her cunt clamped around him, spasming wildly, milking him. The feel of her pulsing around his length dragged his own release from him. He came with a choked groan, his hips bucking, pumping his seed deep inside her, claiming her in the heart of his father’s domain.
They stayed tangled like that for long minutes, breathing hard, glued together by sweat and spend. The room no longer felt like his father’s. It smelled of them.
On the morning of the seventh day, the silence broke. It was the sound of tires on the gravel drive, not the soft crunch of Adrian’s town car, but the assertive, multi-vehicle roll of a motorcade. Marissa, standing at the bedroom window, saw them: two black SUVs, sleek and ominous, sliding to a perfect stop at the front portico.
Her heart hammered against her ribs. She didn’t call for Adrian. He already knew.
She heard his footsteps in the hall, measured and calm. She met him at the top of the grand staircase. He was immaculate in a charcoal suit, his face a serene, unreadable mask. Only his eyes, when they met hers, held a dark, galvanic fire. He took her hand, his grip firm.
“Remember,” he said quietly. “You are the spark. He’s just dry tinder.”
They walked down the stairs together just as the front door opened. Not a servant in sight—Adrian had given them the week off. Cold, grey-white light flooded the marbled foyer.
Vincent DeLuca entered his own house as if it were a conquered territory. He was a tall man, unbent by his sixty-odd years, with Adrian’s same sharp bone structure but none of its latent warmth. His hair was iron grey, swept back. His eyes, the color of old flint, swept over the foyer and landed, instantly, on them standing on the stairs.
A man in a dark coat preceded him, scanning the area, then stepped aside. Vincent’s gaze passed over his son and fixed, with chilling intensity, on Marissa. He took in her presence, her hand in Adrian’s, her posture. His expression did not change. It was the look a geologist might give an interesting but worthless stone.
“Adrian.” His voice was dry, quiet, and carried effortlessly across the space. It held no greeting. It was a simple acknowledgment of a fact.
“Father.” Adrian’s reply was just as flat. “You’re early.”
“I am on time for my own life.” Vincent’s eyes finally slid back to his son. “Dismiss your companion. We have things to discuss.”
Adrian’s hand tightened around Marissa’s. “She stays.”
A fraction of a second’s pause. The air in the foyer grew several degrees colder. Vincent slowly unbuttoned his overcoat, letting his assistant ease it from his shoulders. Underneath, he wore a suit of such understated expense it seemed to absorb the light.
“I see,” he said. The two words were a universe of disapproval. “The help has taken up residence in the main house. How… modern.”
Adrian took the final step down onto the foyer floor, pulling Marissa gently to stand beside him. “Marissa is not the help. She is my future. You’ll adjust your tone accordingly.”
Vincent actually smiled then. It was a thin, cold stretching of lips that touched nothing near his eyes. “Will I?” He took a step forward, his polished shoes clicking on the marble. “You’ve been busy in my absence. Burning heirlooms. Exiling your brother. Installing a pet.” His flint eyes cut to Marissa. “Do you enjoy playing house with what’s mine, dear?”
Before Marissa could speak, Adrian stepped slightly in front of her, a subtle but definitive shield. “Nothing here is yours anymore. Not the wreck, not Luca, not me.” His voice dropped, taking on a dangerous, intimate chill. “And certainly not her.”
Vincent stopped a few feet away. He looked at his son, really looked, as if seeing a flawed replica. The silence stretched, thick and suffocating. The assistant and the security man had vanished, leaving the three of them alone in the vast, chilly space.
“Very well,” Vincent said, his tone shifting to one of bored dismissal. “We’ll have dinner. The three of us. Eight o’clock. In the formal dining room.” His gaze swept over Marissa once more, a clinical assessment. “See that she’s presentable. We wouldn’t want to embarrass ourselves.”
He turned then, without another word, and walked toward the east wing, his footsteps echoing with a finality that sounded like a door slamming shut on a past Adrian had just finished burning.
Adrian didn’t move until the sound had completely faded. He exhaled, a long, slow breath. He looked down at their joined hands, then brought hers to his lips, pressing a hard kiss to her knuckles.
“The battle lines,” he said, his voice low and fierce, “are drawn.”
The silence after his father’s departure was a physical weight in the foyer’s chilled air. Adrian didn’t move, his body a taut wire still vibrating from the confrontation. Marissa watched the rigid line of his jaw, the pulse hammering in his temple.
“Presentable,” she finally said, the word tasting bitter.
Adrian’s gaze snapped to her, the cold fury in his eyes softening into a razor’s edge of focus. “He wants a performance.” He brought her hand to his lips again, his kiss hotter this time. “We’ll give him one. But not the one he expects.”
He led her upstairs, not to her room, but to his. He went directly to his closet, a room larger than her first apartment, and began moving through the hanging suits with a surgeon’s precision. He pulled out a dress, a simple sheath of midnight blue silk, and held it against her. “This,” he stated. “No jewelry. Your hair down.”
He then dressed himself, selecting a suit of deep black wool that seemed to absorb the light, a shirt so white it was severe. He stood before her as he knotted his tie, his reflection a study in monochrome control in the full-length mirror. “He will try to get under your skin. He’ll use information. He’ll make you feel small, temporary.”
She met his reflection’s eyes. “I’ve been temporary my whole life. I know how it feels. It doesn’t scare me.”
A ghost of something approving touched his mouth. “Good.” He finished the knot, smoothing it down. “When he speaks to you, look at him. Don’t look away. Don’t flinch. And remember,” he turned from the mirror, closing the distance between them, “you are the woman who made me burn a tomb. You are the woman I fucked on his altar. His opinion is ash.”
At precisely eight o’clock, they entered the formal dining room. It was a cavern of dark wood and oil paintings of stern, dead relatives. A chandelier dripping with crystal hung over a table that could seat thirty, but only three places were set at the far end, making the vastness feel like a trap. Vincent was already seated at the head, a glass of red wine untouched before him. He did not rise.
A silent server pulled out Marissa’s chair opposite him. Adrian sat at the other end, the long expanse of polished mahogany between him and his father. The first course, a colorless consommé, was placed before them.
“I spoke to Luca,” Vincent began, without preamble, picking up his soup spoon. “His account of recent events was… vivid. A chapel defiled. A historical asset destroyed. A departure under duress.” He took a sip, his eyes on Adrian. “Explain your thinking.”
Adrian didn’t touch his spoon. “I wasn’t aware my thinking required your ratification.”
“It does when it involves the disposal of family property and the alienation of family.” Vincent’s voice was calm, conversational. “The car was evidence. It had a purpose. Now it is sentiment, and sentiment is expensive.”
“It was grief,” Adrian corrected, his voice flat. “And I was done paying the price for it.”
Vincent’s eyes shifted to Marissa. “And you, my dear. Do you often encourage such expensive purges in the men you… accompany?”
Marissa lifted her spoon, her hand steady. She took a slow taste of the broth. It tasted of nothing. She set the spoon down and looked directly at him. “I encourage honesty. It seemed a good place to start.”
A faint flicker in the flint eyes. Surprise, perhaps. Or annoyance. “Honesty.” He savored the word. “A novelty. Tell me, honestly, what you know of the DeLuca holdings. Of the shipping contracts in Rotterdam, or the lithium stakes in Chile.”
“Nothing,” she said, unblinking. “I know Adrian burned a car full of ghosts. I know he values loyalty over contracts. That seems more important.”
Adrian watched his father’s face, a predator studying a new movement in the brush.
“Loyalty,” Vincent repeated, smiling his thin smile. “A currency for the sentimental. It fluctuates wildly.” The soup plates were whisked away, replaced by plates holding a meticulously arranged cut of beef, tiny vegetables like foreign architecture. “Adrian’s loyalty, for instance, was once to this family. To its continuity. Now I find it transferred to a stranger with a pretty face and a talent for arson.”
Adrian’s knife hissed against the china as he cut his meat. “You confuse loyalty with obedience. You always have.”
“They are siblings.” Vincent took a slow sip of wine. “But let’s speak of your new loyalty, Marissa. Your mother was a nurse in Dayton, correct? She died of cancer. Your father left when you were four. You have… what? Thirty-eight thousand dollars in student debt? A college drop out?”
The air left the room. He had torn open her life with the casual cruelty of someone opening mail.
Marissa felt the blood drain from her face, a cold wash of violation. He hadn’t shouted. He’d simply laid her bare on the table between the fine china. She forced herself to keep looking at him, to not glance at Adrian.
“And yet somehow I still managed to sit at your table.”she said, her voice miraculously even.
“Yes,” Vincent nodded, as if she’d confirmed a minor point. “You are. A summer storm in Adrian’s otherwise predictable life. Storms are dramatic. They also pass, leaving damage in their wake.” He turned his full attention to Adrian. “She is a hobby. A fascinating, visceral one. But when the time comes to marry, to secure the next generation, you will choose appropriately. This… interlude… does not change your DNA. It does not change your duties.”
Adrian put his knife and fork down. The click of silver on porcelain was extraordinarily loud. “Is that your play?” he asked, his voice dangerously soft. “You researched her to tell me she’s poor? That her father walked out? I know more about her than you ever could. I know the sound she makes when she comes. I know the taste of her skin. I know she’s stronger than any trust-fund vacuum you’d parade before me. Your information is worthless.”
Vincent leaned back, assessing his son. The server tried to approach to pour more wine; a microscopic shake of Vincent’s head froze the man in place. “You are emotional. It’s beneath you.”
“I am alive,” Adrian countered. “It’s a distinction you’ve never appreciated.”
“Alive.” Vincent said the word like a diagnosis. “Very well. Be alive. But be aware. This rebellion has a cost. The board will not approve the Singapore merger with a scandal whispering at your heels. The Vanguard fund is already reconsidering their position. Your little bonfire in the basement was photographed by a security drone, Adrian. The chapel incident is a story Luca is only too happy to tell for the right price.” He flicked his eyes to Marissa. “Every time you fuck her, the empire I built for you weakens. That is the arithmetic. Her pussy is a luxury you cannot afford.”
Adrian stood up so fast his chair screeched on the floor. He placed both hands on the table, leaning forward. “Then I’ll burn the empire, too. Brick by fucking brick. I’ll torch every holding, every contract, every last cent of your legacy, and I’ll warm my hands on the fire with her beside me. Do you understand me? It’s over. Your way is over.”
The silence this time was absolute, seismic. Father and son stared at each other across the ruined dinner, decades of icy control and simmering revolt finally boiling over.
Vincent DeLuca slowly dabbed the corners of his mouth with his napkin. He laid it neatly beside his plate. He looked, for the first time, not angry, but profoundly disappointed. As if Adrian had failed a test he hadn’t known he was taking.
“A pronouncement,” Vincent said, his voice devoid of all emotion. “Not a strategy. You have passion. You lack vision.” He pushed his chair back and stood. “We are done here. I will be in the city. You have forty-eight hours to reconsider your position. To realign your priorities. After that, the mechanisms will begin to turn. You will be removed from operational control. The allowances will be frozen. And your companion…” He finally looked at Marissa, a last, dismissive glance. “Will find the world outside these gates remarkably unchanged, and remarkably expensive.”
He walked out, leaving them in the cavernous room with the congealing food and the weight of his ultimatum.
Adrian didn’t move for a full minute. His knuckles were white where they pressed into the wood. Then, he turned. His eyes were black with a fury so deep it looked like ecstasy. He grabbed Marissa’s wrist, his grip almost painful.
“Upstairs,” he commanded, his voice a rough scrape.
He didn’t speak in the elevator. He backed her into their bedroom, kicking the door shut. The calm facade was gone, stripped away by his father’s clinical evisceration. What remained was pure, unchanneled rage.
“He thinks he can price you,” Adrian snarled, tearing at the buttons of his own shirt. “He thinks you’re a line item. A liability.”
He pushed her onto the bed, following her down. His mouth crashed onto hers, a kiss that was pure possession, a branding. He ripped the silk dress at the shoulder, the sound vicious in the quiet room. “This cunt,” he growled against her lips, his hand shoving her underwear aside, fingers thrusting into her, “is worth more than every fucking ship, every fucking mine, every rotten dollar he’s ever counted.”
He was relentless. He freed his cock, thick and angry, and drove into her with a single, punishing stroke. She cried out, her body arching, her wetness offering no mercy from the force of his entry. He fucked her with a brutal, piston-like rhythm, each slam of his hips a wordless denial of his father’s arithmetic.
“Tell me whose you are!” he demanded, his breath hot on her neck, his pace unforgiving. His balls slapped against her skin. “Say it!”
“Yours!” she gasped, clawing at his back, her legs locking around him. “Adrian, yours!”
“He can’t have this,” Adrian panted, his thrusts becoming deeper, harder, as if he could weld himself inside her. “He can’t quantify this. He can’t put a fucking number on how good you feel wrapped around my cock.” He shifted, hooking her legs over his arms, opening her wider, penetrating her even deeper. The new angle made her see stars. “This is mine. This tight, fucking perfect cunt is my kingdom. Come on it. Come on your king’s dick.”
The vulgarity, the raw claim in the face of his father’s cold dismissal, shattered her. She came with a sharp, broken scream, her body seizing, her inner muscles clamping around him in frantic, fluttering waves.
The sensation tore his own control away. With a guttural roar, he spent himself, pumping his release into her in hot, claiming pulses, his body shuddering as he collapsed his weight onto her.
They lay tangled, breathing in ragged unison, the sweat cooling on their skin. The confrontation hung in the air, but here, in the animal truth of their joined bodies, it felt distant. Weakened.
Adrian finally rolled, pulling her with him, keeping her close. He traced the tear in her dress. “I’ll burn it all for you,” he whispered, his voice raw with exhaustion and conviction.
She pressed her ear to his chest, listening to the hammer of his heart. “Don’t burn it,” she whispered back. “Take it. Every last brick. And then change the locks.”