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“Hot. Like, ridonkulous hot.”

…Yeah. This is the problem. Because painfully, cosmically unfairly…yes.

Damiano Barone is fucking gorgeous.

Not cute. Not handsome in a polite, polished way. He’s the kind of hot that feels antagonistic. He’s offensively hot.

Dark hair. Sharp cheekbones. Heavy brows over cold, dark eyes that have a way of hooking into me and not letting go. Hard jaw. Perfect nose. A mouth that has zero business being as pretty as it is considering ninety percent of what comes out of it makes me want to commit aggravated assault.

And then there’s the rest of him.

The fact that he’s like a foot and a half taller than me. The broad shoulders. The lean, chiseled body. The thighs—I mean, Jesus fuck, what is it about a man with thick, strong thighs? Not to mention his gorgeously sculpted butt. The muscled forearms. Long fingers.

Damiano has really nice hands. I hate how much I’ve noticed them.

Also, because winning the genetic lottery clearly wasn’t enough, the asshole knows how to dress.

Knightsblood has a uniform during class hours. He’s hot enough in that—dark trousers, crisp dress shirt, navy tie, midnight blue jacket with a gold Knightsblood crest. But outside of school hours, the fucker is strutting around campus looking like Mr. GQ or Daniel Craig in the Bond movies. Pure tailored, polished style.

Fucking asshole.

He basically looks like someone took every physical characteristic I find attractive in a man, assembled them into one beautiful package, and then ruined the whole thing by installing Lamiano’s personality.

“Whatever,” I mutter. “He’s…objectively attractive. I guess.”

Vesper drags her eyes from the phone and rolls them at me. “You guess.”

“Yeah.”

“Objectively,” she snickers.

“I said what I said.”

She laughs. “What you said is complete horseshit. C’mon. All other things aside, you’d actually say no to fucking this man?” She twists the phone back to me, shoving another obnoxiously attractive photo of King Dickhead in my face.

“Yup,” I lie. It’s such an egregious one that even my vagina rolls her eyes.

Vesper snorts. “Dude, you’re ridiculous. That man is perfection. Ten out of ten, would smash.”

Rage snarls inside me before I quiet it down.

“I can promise you your opinion will change the second you meet him and he opens his gaping asshole of a mouth.”

She snickers. “That bad?”

“Totally,” I mutter. “Like, I’m being forced to marry this control freak because he fucked up my thing with Bigsby and knocked him into the vat of acid⁠—”

“I’m sorry, did you say vat of acid?”

Oops.

I’ve already filled Vesper in on the whole Carl and building-on-fire thing. I maybe have neglected to mention the vat of acid.

“Yeah,” I shrug.

She frowns. “The condemned building with a pedophile club on the top floor had vats of acid in the basement?”

“Well, I mean, not originally. But then I filled⁠—”