Page 52 of Take Me Darkly

Understanding bloomed across her features. “You see yourself in them.”

“Maybe.” I lifted her hand to my lips, kissing her knuckles while holding her gaze. “Perhaps I just want to possess something that proves how much I’ve evolved from where I came from—from the boy who had nothing to the man who has the power to acquire objects that had survived millennia.”

Serena’s eyes glistened from my brutal honesty, and she was quiet for a long moment, absorbing all I’d said. She studied my face with those intelligent blue eyes that saw far too much.

For some reason, her expression made me feel vulnerable—stripped bare until she could see the blackness in my soul. I fought the urge to look away, to hide behind the mask I showed the rest of the world. Instead, I took her hand, lacing our fingers together, needing a physical connection.

“Where are they now? The six coins?” she asked.

“In a secure vault at Romano LLC headquarters. My public office at Cornerstone Tower.”

Her frown returned. “Your public office?”

Once again, I was reminded of how little she knew about my life in New York.

“Cornerstone Tower is where I conduct most of my public business—the crypto trading, the real estate investments, everything that requires board rooms and lawyers and contracts. Zeke and Myla maintained their primary offices there before I moved our operational hub to the club to protect you.”

“I just assumed your only office was at the club. And when I think about the short time I spent at your penthouse after the Met Gala, it almost feels like a fever dream. It’s easy to forget that you have another life outside these walls. You continue to surprise me, Anton Romano.”

“I aim to keep you on your toes, princess.” I captured her hand, kissing her palm and letting my lips linger on her skin.

She let out a soft laugh—a genuine, beautiful sound that chased away the shadows in the room. But the moment passed as her eyes fell back onto the research pages. The coffee stains, the erased notations, the dog-eared margins—it was the physical footprint of a brilliant man chasing a truth that had ultimately cost him his life.

Suddenly, Serena went completely rigid, her eyes locking onto a specific entry near the back cover.

“Anton,” she said slowly, her voice barely above a whisper. “Look at this.”

I leaned in close, her warm jasmine scent instantly filling my senses. She pointed to a series of hand-written numbers crammed into the lower margin. They were written in a faint, cramped hand, easily overlooked unless you were searching for them. I studied them briefly before quickly realizing they were a string of precise geographic coordinates.

Pulling her phone from her pocket, Serena pulled up a browser tab and typed the numbers into the search field.

“It’s a location,” she whispered. “Looks like it’s near the Roman Forum. But he broke the string... it’s incomplete so I can’t get an exact.”

“What would the Forum have to do with anything?”

“I don’t know, but there’s more,” she said, her breath hitching as she shifted her attention back to the tablet rubbing. Her fingers hovered over specific letters that had been pressed with double heavy ink. “Look at the shading. Certain characters are emphasized. I thought it was an inconsistency in his rubbing technique, but it’s a pattern.”

I analyzed the pattern she indicated, drawn to the mystery waiting to be solved. She was right—certain characters did seem to stand out, almost as if they’d been marked purposely during the rubbing process or highlighted afterward.

Reaching across the coffee table, she grabbed a blank notebook and a pencil, then began writing down the highlighted letters. As written, they didn’t make any sense.

“Looks like it’s a key of some sort,” I mused aloud. “But what does it mean?”

“I don’t know.” Frustration tinged her voice. “My father was brilliant, but he could be maddeningly cryptic when he wanted to be. He had a habit of hiding things in plain sight, of layering meaning into his work. With him, everything was a lesson for me to learn.”

She slumped back against my shoulder, the immense mental toll catching up to her. I wrapped my arm around her waist, pulling her flush against my chest, absorbing her tension.

“Maybe that was on purpose,” I said, the thought crystallizing as I spoke it. “Maybe he knew what he was onto and wrote things down in a way only you could understand.”

“As much as I hate to admit it, that statement is likely truer than you think. I just wish he’d made it easier,” she whispered, and the raw pain in her voice made my chest ache.

She looked up at me then, eyes glassy with the weight of everything she carried, and something inside me gave way. I didn’t think—I simply moved, cupping her face in my hands and bringing my mouth down to hers.

She stilled for just a breath before she kissed me back, her fingers curling into the fabric of my shirt like she needed something to hold onto. It was fierce and tender all at once, tasting of grief and want and the kind of desperation that comes from feeling too much for too long.

When I finally pulled back, resting my forehead against hers, her eyes were dark with a mixture of desire and newfound purpose.

“We’re going to solve this, princess. I promise.”