Page 78 of Take Me Darkly

“But?”

I held her face a beat longer, then pressed my mouth to her forehead and stayed there until I could trust my hands again. Then I stepped back and crossed to the side table. I set the silver coin down on the linen runner. The lamplight caught the ancient profile of Brutus, and I made myself let it go for now.

When I turned back to Serena, I took both of her hands in both of mine. Tonight, she had given me an important piece of herself. Now she deserved to know the truth—my truth.

Somewhere downstairs, a door closed, and the building that had once belonged to Jerry Arnold settled around us in the dark.

I drew a long, steadying breath.

“You don’t know the man you think you love. Sit down, princess. I need to tell you about me. About this building. And what happened here, before I transformed it into something that was mine.”

Chapter Twenty-Four

Anton

* * *

I could still smell the old version of the church if I let myself—the damp, crumbling plaster, the sharp stench of stale tobacco, and the sweetish, sickening rot underneath it all. It was the scent of cramped rooms, traded flesh, and unpunished violence. More than a decade had passed since I’d gutted the structure and rebuilt it into a house for dark luxury, but it didn’t matter. Some stains soak past the stone and settle straight into your soul.

I swallowed the acrid, metallic taste rising in my throat and forced my gaze to remain locked on Serena.

She sat across from me on the sofa with one leg tucked beneath her, hands folded in her lap. She was waiting with the patience of a woman who spent her life coaxing meaning out of broken things, and right now, all her fierce, brilliant focus was aimed directly at my wreckage.

She’s going to look at me differently after this.

The conviction burned cold in my gut, but I was going to strip myself bare anyway. She deserved the absolute truth.

“I gave you the sanitized version of my past,” I began, my baritone dropping into a low, rough rasp. “In Italy... the night I came awake in the dark with my hand clamped around your throat.”

Her breath hitched sharply, her fingers instinctively rising to trace the delicate curve of her neck.

She remembered. The sheer terror of that moment had to have been etched into her mind.

“You got the cleaned-up history about my mother selling herself, the hell we lived in, and the men that sometimes came for me too,” I continued, shaking my head as a dark, bitter curve touched my mouth. “I told you I clawed my way out, but I didn’t tell you everything because I didn’t trust you then. All I did was hand you a sketch and let you believe it was the map. But you deserve better than that.”

“Anton,” she whispered, her ocean-blue eyes swimming with sudden, tender alarm. “You don’t have to do this.”

“I do,” I countered flatly, my gaze holding hers with unyielding authority. “If you’re going to give me your heart, princess, you need to know exactly what kind of devil is holding it.”

She didn’t push back. She simply offered a single, quiet nod, giving me the floor.

“This building, including Club O, was once the whorehouse I grew up in. I had everything in the old church converted—the arched hallways you walk, the catacombs beneath our feet, even the private room where my mother drew her last breath... I built a fortress of absolute consent straight on top of the rot. In a twisted way, it was penance for what I’d done.”

“I don’t know what sins you’re carrying, Anton, but living on top of the room where your mother died isn’t penance,” she whispered, her voice trembling. “It’s self-inflicted torture.”

Maybe they’re the same thing, princess.

The dark thought flickered through my mind, but I kept it to myself and kept going.

“My mother wasn’t hooked on heroin or alcohol, despite what was flooding the streets back then,” I explained, my jaw clenching hard enough to grind enamel. “She shot methamphetamine. Intravenous. I spent my childhood watching her go three, four days straight without sleeping a single second. Her mind moved at a terrifying speed—talking so fast the words slurred into a frantic hum, her fingers picking continuously at the skin on her arms until she bled. One night, when I was eleven, I watched her tear her room apart until four in the morning, screaming for something she’d lost that never existed.”

I forced a breath into my tight chest, remembering the erratic, manic energy that had filled my childhood. “Meth doesn’t make a person peaceful. It makes them wired, volatile, and gone. That was the mother I knew. She was a hurricane of frantic friction—never, ever still.”

Serena’s brow furrowed, a swell of deep, agonizing sympathy softening her features. But beneath the compassion, I caught a flare of protective anger—rage directed at the woman who had failed to shield her son, and profound grief for the helpless boy caught in the wake.

“The night she died, she was still,” I said, my voice dropping an octave. “That’s how I knew something was wrong. Whatever she’d pushed into her vein that night slowed her frantic pulse down to a crawl. She was just... quiet. At fourteen, I didn’t possess the medical terminology for an overdose. I just knew in my bones that the substance burning through her blood wasn’t her usual fix.”

“What do you think it was?”