Serafina
The message appeared on the encrypted club app late at night, just as I was trying to force sleep upon myself.
I lay in bed with my back turned toward Adrian, the silence between us thick and strangely cold, when my phone buzzed on the nightstand. I almost ignored it—expecting some council update or a security alert that could wait until morning—but something in the vibration felt insistent.
I reached for it reluctantly, shielding the screen’s glow from Adrian’s sleeping form.
My breath caught the momentI knew the phrasing, that was a message on the club’s encrypted app. I knew the intensity hidden beneath even a simple text.
“I need to see you again. Tell me when.”
The words were deceptively calm, but beneath them I felt the weight of recognition—of the electric touch in the darkened room, of the way his voice had trembled with a familiarity he could not explain. My heart slammed against my ribs with such force I feared it would wake the entire house. I swallowed hard, staring at the message as if it might burn through the screen.
“No,” I whispered to myself, the word cracking under the strain. “Absolutely not. You cannot do this. You cannot answer him.”
But my thumb hovered over the keyboard, trembling with forbidden temptation. My pulse refused to settle.
Every rational part of me screamed to delete the message, block him, cleanse the app from my phone entirely. Yet reason held no power over the memory that clung to my skin—that scorching, devastating moment when Matteo touched me without knowing who I was, and my body responded as if the years had never passed.
I shut my eyes tightly, pressing my lips together in a thin, desperate line.
Ignore him, I ordered myself. You’re a Dona. A wife. A mother. You’re not the broken girl who once loved him.
But the truth I didn’t want to face echoed back.
I was still the woman whose bones remembered him.
The soft rustle of sheets beside me made me jump. Adrian shifted slightly, asleep, unaware that I sat trembling inches away, torn apart by a past neither of us had escaped. I watched him for a moment—his jaw relaxed in sleep, his lips parted, his breath steady. Once, this sight had comforted me. Tonight, it felt like ice beneath my skin.
I looked back at the message. The silence taunted me.
“I need to see you again.”
My throat tightened. I whispered to the empty air, “Why… why do you still have this hold on me?”
No answer came, of course. Only the truth I tried to bury.
Curiosity. Torment. Hunger.
And longing—god, the shameful, devastating longing.
My fingers moved before my mind could stop them. I opened the keyboard. For a moment, I simply stared, paralyzed by guilt. Then, in a voice barely audible even to myself, I spoke the decision aloud.
“Just once. I only need to know what he wants. That’s all.”
The lie tasted like poison.
Against my better judgment, my trembling hands typed back an anonymous reply:
“What do you need from me?”
My thumb hovered for a fraction of a second before hitting send. The bubble shot across the screen. I exhaled sharply, as if I had plunged into freezing water. A sickening rush of adrenaline spread through my veins. I should have felt relief at finally choosing. Instead, I felt the crushing weight of something opening inside me—something dark, dangerous, and uncontrollable.
The reply came almost immediately, as though he had been waiting for my message with the desperation of a man chasing a ghost.
“You. I need you.”
The words hit me with the force of memory itself. I pressed my hand against my chest, fingers curling over my heart as it beat wildly. I whispered, “Don’t do this to me. Don’t make me feel this again.”
Matteo was intoxicated that night, yet even drunk he had sensed something in me—something he used to own, something he had once shaped and destroyed. He shouldn’t want me now. He shouldn’t even be thinking about that masked stranger. He shouldn’t be stirring this madness.
But he was.
And worse—I wasn’t stopping him.
My phone vibrated again.
“I can’t stop thinking about you. Tell me who you are.”
Panic flared inside me. I clutched the phone tightly, glancing again at Adrian’s sleeping form. My voice trembled as I answered aloud, though only the silence heard me. “I can’t tell you that. You can never know.”
My fingers typed quickly, the truth disguised as mystery.
“Names ruin things. If you knew me, you wouldn’t want me.”
The reply came fast, sharp, breathless.
“Try me.”
I closed my eyes, leaning back into the headboard, exhaling shakily. My skin burned with memory. My throat tightened. The dark room returned to me in flashes—Matteo’s grip, his voice at my neck, his body recognizing mine even when his mind could not.
“Damn you,” I whispered, tears pricking at the corners of my eyes. “You will ruin me again if I let you.”
But I had opened the door.
And doors like this never closed easily.
The phone buzzed again.
“Meet me. Just once. I won’t touch you unless you ask.”
A whimper escaped my lips—not desire, not entirely, but fear tangled with something far more dangerous. My body remembered him, yes. But my heart… my heart remembered too, in ways that terrified me.
Behind me, Adrian shifted again, murmuring something incoherent in his sleep. I swallowed hard, torn between the life I built and the one I escaped. But what scared me most wasn’t choosing between them—it was how deeply I still responded to Matteo’s pull, how effortlessly he ignited parts of me I had vowed were dead.
“I shouldn’t,” I murmured to myself, shaking. “I shouldn’t want this. I shouldn’t answer. I shouldn’t have opened this door.”
But I typed anyway.
“One meeting. Darkness only. No questions.”
The message whooshed across the screen, sealing my fate.
Matteo replied instantly, as though relieved beyond reason.
“Tell me when. I’ll be there.”
I turned the phone face-down on the bed and covered my mouth with both hands, tears finally spilling over. “What am I doing?” I cried softly. “What am I becoming?”
No answer came.
Only the echo of a truth I could no longer deny.
A door had opened tonight.
And I feared I would not survive what waited on the other side.