For several seconds after the answer finally reached him, Nico remained exactly where he was, as though some essential instruction had failed to arrive with it. He had known. Rationally, of course he had known; a man did not spend months carrying a ring through airports, hiding it from the woman who knew most of his habits better than he did, conspiring with half his family and reducing himself to tears in his own courtyard because he genuinely expected rejection. Yet expectation had apparently been a poor substitute for hearing her say it. The word seemed to strike somewhere low beneath his ribs and then expand, slow and overwhelming, until his chest hurt from trying to contain it. His eyes closed briefly. His shoulders loosened. A laugh escaped him that began almost soundlessly and then fractured on the edge of another breath, his head dropping because the relief was suddenly too enormous to look directly at. He covered his mouth for a moment, not to hide from her but because he had discovered, with some indignity, that there were limits to how many emotions one man could be expected to express gracefully in a single evening.

When he looked up again, there was nothing polished left in his face. His eyes were red from everything that had preceded the answer, his lashes still damp, and the smile spreading slowly across his mouth had none of the deliberate quality he usually wore so easily. It was almost stunned. Boyish, even, in a way very few people ever managed to draw out of him. “You said yes,” he breathed, and the words held enough disbelief to make it sound as though she had just revealed something far more improbable. A quieter laugh followed when he shook his head, his gaze refusing to leave her. “I know that was the point of all this, but apparently nobody explained to me what happens after you actually say yes.”

Her profanity only made the smile wider. Nico gave a helpless little huff of laughter, his brows lifting with the beginnings of offended vanity even while another tear made its way down his cheek. “That is an incredibly hostile thing to say to the man you just agreed to marry,” he murmured, dragging the heel of his hand beneath one eye with little success. The complaint lasted only a second before amusement softened it. “And I’m not going to apologize for the face. I’ve done enough tonight. I planned the courtyard, I found the ring, I survived several relatives having opinions. God handled the face. Take it up with Him.”

Then she came down onto the stone with him, oxblood silk gathering around her knees, and whatever joke Nico might have added disappeared before it reached his mouth. He watched her close the distance with a tenderness that rearranged his expression completely, his attention catching on the sheer absurd beauty of the sight before him: the dress she had bought without knowing what the evening would become, now pooled carelessly over old paving stones because preserving it mattered less to her than reaching him. Nico had imagined putting the ring on her standing beneath café lights, had imagined her looking down at him, had imagined dozens of elegant versions of this moment without once considering that she might simply kneel there with him and reduce the entire carefully constructed scene back to the two of them.

Her hands found his face, and Nico leaned into them before pride could suggest otherwise. His eyes closed for half a second beneath the slow sweep of her thumbs, the dampness on his cheeks no longer something he was even remotely interested in managing. One of his hands came around her wrist, fingers curling gently there, not moving her touch but anchoring himself inside it. “I am breathing,” he insisted when she instructed him to do precisely that, although the uneven pull of air through his lungs weakened the argument considerably. His mouth tilted. “This is breathing. It’s Italian breathing. More dramatic.”

The absurdity of it threatened another laugh, but the humor fell away when her voice softened around the declaration that followed. Nico’s eyes opened again. He had heard her tell him she loved him more times than he could count, in rooms far less beautiful than this one and circumstances both easy and terrible, but something about receiving it here—while he was still kneeling in front of her with no defense left between what he felt and what she could see—made the words seem newly dangerous. His fingers tightened almost imperceptibly around her wrist. He turned his face into her palm and kissed it once, slow and quiet, letting his lips linger there for a heartbeat because anything he said immediately would have been too much or too little. “I know,” he whispered eventually, not with arrogance but with the soft certainty of somebody who had learned to trust being loved. Then his mouth curved faintly against her skin. “Thank God.”

The kiss that followed gave him somewhere else to put the emotion. Nico met her without hesitation, one hand sliding behind her neck while the other remained wrapped lightly around her wrist, and there was no attempt at restraint once he felt her deepen it. The salt of tears, hers or his, blurred at the edge of his mouth; he tasted it and nearly laughed into the kiss because there was something absurdly intimate about both of them ruining what might otherwise have been a perfectly cinematic moment by crying all over each other. Instead he kissed her more firmly, his thumb disappearing beneath the loose fall of brunette hair at her nape, until breathing became an unavoidable requirement rather than a suggestion.

When she pulled back far enough to mention his cousin and the fireworks, Nico closed his eyes with immediate suffering. The groan that left him was quiet but heartfelt. “You have no idea,” he said, forehead still near hers. “There were sketches.” His expression took on the grave disbelief of a man recounting a genuine trauma. “Color coding. Timing charts. At one point he said the words ‘pyrotechnic emotional arc’ with a straight face.” Nico shook his head slowly. “I love him, but some people should never be given a budget.”

Her assessment of the courtyard quieted him again. He followed her glance across the familiar space without needing to turn fully toward it; he already knew every corner by memory, had spent too many hours that day scrutinizing arrangements that now seemed almost irrelevant beside the reason he had made them. The fact that she understood what he had tried to protect—that he had never wanted to replace their courtyard with some grander version of itself, only illuminate what already belonged to them—settled warmly through him. “I didn’t want someplace beautiful because it was impressive,” he said after a moment. “I wanted someplace that would still be ours when all of this came down.” His gaze returned to her, soft and steady. “Tomorrow those candles are wax on the stone, the flowers start dying, we’ll probably leave glasses on that table for two days because neither of us wants to bring them in. And it’s still the place where you said yes.”

The admission that privacy itself had mattered reached him with equal force. Nico’s life had taught him to expect an audience even when one was not physically present. Moments could be stolen from a distance, translated into headlines, flattened into photographs, discussed by strangers before he had decided what they meant to him. He had learned to live with it, sometimes even to enjoy pieces of it, but he had never stopped valuing what escaped. His gaze stayed on her as he answered, quieter than before. “That was important to me too. Nobody else needed to watch you decide. Nobody else needed your face when you understood what I was asking.” His thumb moved once against her wrist. “People can know later. Tonight belongs to us before it belongs to anybody.”

Only after that did Nico allow himself to notice the way she finally looked at the ring.

He watched her watch it.

The shift in him was subtle but unmistakable. Some small trace of his natural vanity returned, not because of what the ring had cost or because he expected admiration for having purchased it, but because choosing it had become an unexpectedly intimate exercise in knowing her. He had rejected anything that seemed to announce itself before it announced her. He had wanted something with enough presence to belong comfortably on Lilith Valentine’s hand and enough restraint not to compete with the woman wearing it, something that looked discovered rather than ordered from a catalogue by a man told engagement rings required a certain number of zeros. When she murmured her quiet recognition of his choices, satisfaction warmed his eyes. “Of course I did,” he echoed, almost under his breath, and the smile that accompanied it carried exactly the smugness she was about to accuse him of.

The accusation only made him sit a little straighter. “Smug is a cruel word,” he informed her, adopting a wounded dignity entirely undermined by the tears still drying on his face. “I prefer vindicated.” His attention flicked down toward the antique box and then back again. “And yes. Every damned inch.” He had debated flowers until a florist had begun looking at him as though fame had finally destroyed his sanity, rejected arrangements that looked too conventionally romantic, insisted the old ceramics remain visible, moved candles by hand because something about the first arrangement had felt too symmetrical. “If I was only doing this once, I was going to do it properly.”

The observation about the ordinary parts of his speech hit harder than any compliment about the setting. Nico’s expression softened immediately, the self-satisfaction draining away. He remembered almost cutting those details. Milk had seemed ridiculous beside forever. Bathroom bottles had hardly sounded worthy of a marriage proposal. Hearing her from another room was not the sort of declaration that would have survived anybody advising him on how proposals were supposed to sound. Yet those had been the pieces that returned whenever he stripped everything else away. “Because it is the prize,” he told her, simple and certain. “The rest is incredible. I’m not pretending I suddenly hate the ridiculous life we have. I like beautiful shit. I like good hotels and expensive wine and seeing you in dresses that make me forget basic mathematics.” A faint smile touched his mouth. “But none of that is what makes me frightened of losing you.”

His gaze remained steady when the humor receded. “It’s knowing there’s somebody in the other room.” The words came quietly. “That’s it. That’s the whole fucking thing.”

Her assurance that she intended to keep all the decorative parts earned an immediate breath of relief. “Good,” Nico said, hand pressing briefly to his chest. “For a second I thought engagement had made you humble. I was going to call everything off.”

He listened differently when she began talking about change. The teasing around his tear-streaked condition earned a small roll of his eyes, but the promise beneath it—to keep learning him instead of demanding permanence—settled somewhere much deeper. Nico had never particularly feared aging, but he understood the terror of becoming somebody a person had not agreed to love. Careers changed people. Grief did. Success, failure, boredom, illness, years. The idea that neither of them needed to remain frozen inside tonight made forever feel more believable rather than less. “Good,” he murmured, his thumb moving slowly across the inside of her wrist. “Because I have no intention of becoming easier.” His mouth curved. “More mature, perhaps. Better dressed, definitely. Easier? Absolutely not.”

The attack on his future music received precisely the offense it deserved. Nico stared at her for a beat before his eyebrows rose. “At fifty my music is going to be insufferable,” he conceded gravely. “But that doesn’t mean it won’t also be brilliant.” His eyes narrowed. “And you’re going to sit through the entire eleven-minute experimental track before telling me you hate it. Marriage requires sacrifice.”

Nonna, however, was another matter entirely. The mention of her made Nico tip his head back with a groan of realization. He had spent so much time concentrating on secrecy that he had not fully considered the aftermath of success. “Oh, she’s going to be unbearable.” The certainty was immediate. “She is going to say she knew from the first time she saw you. Then my mother will say she knew before Nonna knew. Then three aunts will produce completely different dates and fight about it until Christmas.” His eyes briefly closed. “And somehow all of them will claim personal responsibility for us getting married.”

The fondness beneath the complaint made the words warmer than irritated. When Lilith made the distinction that mattered—that marriage was not her being accepted into something already complete but both of them constructing their own life—Nico went still in a different way. He nodded once, slow and certain. “Yes.” There was no need to turn that answer into something prettier. “Exactly that.” His gaze settled on hers. “I don’t want to put you inside my life like there was some empty place waiting and you happened to fit it. I want us to make the thing together. Some of it looks like my family. Some of it looks like yours. Some of it looks nothing like either.” His expression warmed. “That’s ours.”

Then came the formal rebuttal of his earlier accusations, and Nico’s seriousness disappeared with almost comic speed.

He listened to the defense of her bathroom collection as though presented with compelling but ultimately insufficient evidence. “Tragic and curable,” he repeated solemnly. “Excellent. I look forward to the educational seminar explaining why four bottles apparently do the same thing but I’m a barbarian for suggesting that.” Her defense of the shoes received a much sharper reaction. Nico pointed at her with his free hand. “No. Absolutely not. The shoes are attempted homicide. You cannot put something with a weapon attached to the heel in the middle of a dark room and then tell me the problem is my eyesight.” He shook his head. “When I die at forty-six because I stepped on couture, everyone at the funeral will know exactly what happened.”

The chair produced the deepest injury.

Nico stared at her.

“That chair was mine before you.”

A beat passed.

His expression sharpened into the offended dignity of a monarch witnessing a coup.

“You know what? Fine. Keep the chair. Apparently this engagement is already a hostile acquisition. First the bathroom, then the wardrobe, now furniture.” He gestured vaguely around the villa. “In two years I’ll be living in one drawer and paying property taxes.”

Her laughter dismantled him before he could sustain the performance. Nico’s mouth gave in first, a grin appearing while he watched her wipe beneath her eye and take inventory of the damage the evening had done to her appearance. His gaze followed hers briefly toward the oxblood silk pooled over the courtyard stones, and the sight lodged itself immediately somewhere permanent in his memory. Not pristine beneath boutique lighting. Not styled for a photograph. Wrinkled where she had knelt down beside him, candlelight moving over the folds. “Good,” he said when she lamented that the dress would always remind her. His voice had gone unexpectedly soft again. “That was expensive. It should earn its keep.”

Then she extended her hand.

Everything changed.

Nico’s gaze dropped to it and remained there for several seconds, all humor temporarily forgotten. The ring had been abstract while it sat in a box, even while he carried it in his pocket. It became something entirely different with her left hand waiting between them. His throat moved as he swallowed, and some new form of emotion threatened the little stability he had recovered. “My fiancée,” he repeated when she gave him the word, almost experimentally.

A slow smile spread across his face.

“Fuck.”

He liked it far too much.

“My fiancée.”

The second time carried unmistakable possession—not ownership, never that, but delight in the fact itself, the almost decadent pleasure of finally having language for what they had just become. “Yeah,” he murmured. “That’s going to be a problem.”

Nico took the ring from its box with more care than he had shown nearly anything else all evening. His fingers were still trembling faintly, and he made no effort to hide it. For one suspended moment he held her hand in his and looked down at the empty place where the ring belonged, then lifted his eyes once more as though some instinct insisted upon seeing her before the act became real.

He slid it onto her finger slowly.

There was no flourish afterward.

His thumb simply passed over the band once, gently, almost reverently, and Nico stared.

The sight of it there affected him more than expected. He had imagined it so often that he ought to have been prepared, but imagination had not accounted for her hand remaining recognizably hers around it, for the strange intimacy of something he had chosen becoming part of the familiar gestures he knew by heart. That hand would hold coffee tomorrow morning. Turn pages. Point at him accusingly. Disappear into his while they walked somewhere. Now the ring would move with all of it.

Nico let out a breathless laugh.

“I chose very fucking well.”

He glanced up.

“On both counts.”

Her attempt to revise history was met with increasing disbelief. Nico listened to the proposed version of events—dignified contemplation, strategic suffering, pensively considering her answer—with his mouth gradually opening in offense. “No,” he said once she had finished. “Absolutely fucking not. We are not rewriting this because you dislike the historical record.”

He leaned fractionally closer, eyes bright.

“You cried, told me to fuck myself, complained that I was too beautiful and then agreed to marry me.” His grin sharpened. “That is exactly how I will tell it at every possible opportunity.”

The claim that she had considered his face produced a tiny nod. “That part I believe.”

Her next kiss erased the triumph before he could enjoy it properly. Nico’s hand settled automatically against the back of her neck again, but this time there was something new in the sensation when her fingers touched him—the faint unfamiliar edge of the ring against his skin. He noticed it immediately. The awareness sent a ridiculous little thrill through him that he was grateful she could not hear, though the smile threatening against her mouth probably betrayed enough.

When she reminded him about the eighty years, Nico did not retreat into humor immediately.

He looked at her for a long moment.

“Hold me to it,” he said.

His thumb swept lightly beneath her eye, gathering the last dampness there.

“If I’m seventy and pretending I never said any of this, bring me out here and point at the stone.” A small smile. “Tell me I cried so hard I almost dehydrated.”

Then his expression settled.

“But I’ll remember.”

The certainty was quieter than the rest.

“I know I will.”

Her promise not to waste those years wishing he were easier made something inside him soften with almost painful gratitude. Nico had spent too much of his life being loved partly in spite of himself, too aware of the places where charm ended and temperament began. He did not mistake her acceptance for permission to remain thoughtless, but there was enormous relief in knowing she wanted the changing, difficult person rather than an edited version. “Good,” he murmured. “Because you’re not easy either.”

His smile made the statement affectionate rather than accusatory.

“Thank God.”

The instruction to come home anyway stripped even that away.

Nico’s eyes held hers.

For a second, nothing moved in his face except the slow rise of his chest. He understood exactly what she was offering and exactly what she was asking in return. Not the romantic assurance that neither would ever leave a room angry or need distance or hurt the other accidentally. Something harder. Return.

“Okay,” he said softly.

His fingers tightened around hers.

“That’s the rule.”

A beat.

“We come home anyway.”

He let the silence remain afterward, because unlike earlier it no longer felt like something he needed to fill. The courtyard had changed without changing at all. The candles still burned. The café lights remained above them. Somewhere behind him waited a table set for dinner and the torta she had carried home with such pride. His knees were beginning to object to the old stone, his trousers were almost certainly dusty, and he had cried enough that any photograph taken now would destroy several carefully maintained assumptions about his coolness.

He had never felt better in his life.

A laugh rose through him without warning, broad and warm and entirely free of nerves. Nico dropped his head for a second as it moved through him, then looked back up at her with a brightness in his expression that almost made him look younger. “We’re engaged,” he said, as though announcing it himself might finally make his brain accept the fact.

Another laugh.

“Jesus Christ.”

His gaze dropped immediately to the ring again.

“We’re fucking engaged.”

The temptation to attach some traditional version of his surname to her lasted approximately half a second before good judgment intervened. Nico’s mouth opened, then closed. His eyes narrowed with amusement. “I almost just said something that would have turned our beautiful engagement into a political summit about names, and I have decided I enjoy being alive.”

He pressed a brief kiss to the back of her ringed hand instead.

“We’ll negotiate later.”

The torta finally reclaimed its rightful place in the evening when she reminded him of it, and Nico turned his head slowly toward the box with theatrical gravity. His expression became solemn enough to suggest the future of their marriage genuinely rested upon pastry.

“Right.”

He looked back at her.

“The second most important event of the evening.”

Nico shifted to stand, one hand briefly bracing against his thigh as his knee reminded him that elaborate declarations on stone came with physical consequences. He offered his hand toward her automatically, his gaze dipping once more toward the dress surrounding her before returning to her face.

“I made a lifelong commitment before tasting the torta,” he observed. “That was reckless.”

The concern lasted less than a second.

“But I stand by my decision.”

As soon as they were upright, Nico caught her left hand again before either of them could move toward the table. He lifted it between them and looked at the ring with unabashed satisfaction, turning her hand just slightly beneath the candlelight so that it caught against the stones.

His eyes softened.

There it was again.

The new reality.

Nico brought her hand to his mouth and pressed a slow kiss just beneath the ring, his lips remaining there long enough that the gesture lost any teasing quality it might initially have possessed.

“My fiancée,” he murmured against her skin.

This time the word did not sound surprised.

It sounded settled.

Then he lifted his head, the irreverent glint beginning to return around the edges of his expression. “Now feed me before I become emotional again. I’ve already cried enough tonight that if my mother hears about it, I’m going to spend the next twenty years denying this proposal ever happened.”

His gaze moved pointedly toward the pastry.

“And for the record, I will lie beautifully if necessary.” The corner of his mouth lifted. “But if you actually managed to make Nonna’s torta correctly on the first attempt, I may have to propose again.”

Lilith had thought saying yes would be the part that unsettled her most. Apparently she had underestimated the effect of watching the answer become real in increments: the ring settling against her finger, the warmth of his mouth against her hand, the unmistakable pleasure with which he kept discovering the word fiancée as though it had been invented specifically for him. Every repetition tugged another smile out of her, softer than the last, until she stopped pretending she had any interest in moderating it. She looked down once at the ring and then immediately back at Nico, because beautiful as it was, the man who had put it there remained considerably more compelling. “You are enjoying that word far too much already,” she said, although there was no criticism anywhere in her voice. Her free hand slid up along his jaw, fingertips lingering there with shameless affection. “Keep saying it, though. I haven't decided I'm tired of hearing it.”

The warmth in her expression deepened at the quiet agreement they had reached beneath all the jokes, something more consequential than any line about decades or aging. Lilith did not need to make another declaration out of it; the promise was simple enough to deserve being left simple. She leaned in and kissed him once at the corner of his mouth, then again properly, lingering because she could and because the strange new fact of their engagement had made touching him feel both exactly the same and subtly different. When she drew back, her nose nearly brushed his. “That one stays,” she murmured, eyes holding his. “Whatever else we get wrong, however spectacularly either of us manages to be an ass, we find our way back.” Her thumb moved slowly along his cheek. “I can live very happily with that rule.”

His refusal to let her improve the story of her own reaction should probably have offended her more than it did. Instead, Lilith's mouth curved with wicked delight, because he had made the crucial mistake of assuming historical accuracy could possibly favor him. “Oh, darling,” she said, almost pityingly. “If we're suddenly devoted to the truth, then we're going to be very devoted to it.” She tilted her head, considering him with exaggerated sweetness while her eyes glittered. “You don't get to preserve my profanity and tears while mysteriously developing perfect composure in your version. Your mother is getting everything. The red eyes. The shaking hands. The fact that you cried more than once.” Her smile became positively radiant. “Actually, I think Nonna deserves the full account too. She'll appreciate the drama.”

The more she considered it, the more pleased she became. There would be no tidy family legend in which Nico delivered a flawless proposal while Lilith dissolved beautifully at his feet; if he insisted upon accuracy, she would make certain accuracy was comprehensive. “We either both look magnificent in retrospect or neither of us does,” she informed him, smoothing her thumb beneath one of his eyes with a tenderness entirely at odds with the threat. “Personally, I think we looked magnificent anyway. A little damp, perhaps.” Her gaze lingered over his face, so openly enamored that the teasing could not disguise it even if she had wanted it to. “But if you tell them I told you to fuck off before agreeing to marry you, I am absolutely telling them you nearly dehydrated from emotion.”

She kissed him again because she had apparently lost all interest in rationing affection tonight. Lilith had always liked his face—an understatement so ridiculous it nearly made her smile against his mouth—but something about seeing it stripped of nerves now, bright with relief and happiness, made her want to keep touching him simply to reassure herself that the evening had actually happened. Her hand remained cupped against his neck when she eased back. “And I hope you understand,” she said, quieter now, “that seeing you like that didn't make you less impressive for even a second.” Her eyes moved gently over his features before returning to his. “Quite the opposite, actually. Which is irritating, because your ego needed absolutely no assistance.”

His brief flirtation with the subject of her name, however, deserved more than the cautious retreat he had apparently decided upon. Lilith watched the hesitation appear and vanish on him, and amusement slowly lifted one brow. “There is nothing to negotiate,” she said, with the calm confidence of someone correcting an unnecessary complication. She let that sit for half a second, enjoying the opportunity to make him wonder which direction she intended to take it, before her expression softened. “Lilith Valentine isn't going anywhere. She's far too expensive to retire, and the world has already invested an unreasonable amount of time obsessing over her.”

The next part came more quietly. It was not difficult to say, exactly, but hearing it in her own voice gave the thought a weight it had not possessed while existing privately. Her gaze dropped for a moment to the ring before lifting back to him. “They can keep Lilith,” she said. “The records, the photographs, the interviews, whatever ridiculous thing strangers decide she's doing next. But that isn't the name you use when it's three in the morning and we're half asleep, is it?” A small smile touched her mouth, impossibly fond. “You call me Emilia.”

She let her fingertips drift from his neck to the open collar of his shirt, smoothing the fabric without any real need to. “And when we get married…” Lilith paused there, not from hesitation but because the sentence itself pleased her enough to deserve a second. When. Not perhaps, not eventually in some abstract future. When. “Emily Romano sounds rather beautiful to me.” Her eyes brightened with a hint of mischief. “Though I expect you to continue calling me Emilia. You've committed to the Italianization at this point. It would be embarrassing to retreat.”

There was something extraordinarily intimate about giving him that distinction. Lilith Valentine belonged wholly to her—she had built the name, inhabited it, made it real until there was nothing false about the woman attached to it—but Nico possessed access to a name that existed beyond marquees and photographs, one softened through his own language until Emilia had become something that sounded almost uniquely his when he said it. Marriage did not require sacrificing one version for the other. She could remain Lilith Valentine everywhere she wanted to be and still feel a private thrill at imagining Emily Romano appearing where the rest of their shared life required it. “So,” she added, smoothing a nonexistent wrinkle from his shirt, “you were very wise not to begin a debate. There isn't one.”

Her mouth quirked when her attention returned to the collection of accusations he had levelled against her possessions. “I will concede exactly nothing about the shoes,” she informed him. “If couture finally takes you out at forty-six, I will make sure the memorial is tasteful.” She gave him a solemn look that lasted perhaps two seconds before affection ruined it. “And I will personally explain to everyone that you died as you lived: dramatically, beautifully, and refusing to admit I was right.” The chair received an even less generous response. “As for the furniture, you should consider it an honor. I only annex things I genuinely like.”

She was still smiling when she glanced at her hand again. The ring caught the courtyard light as naturally as though it had been there for years, and Lilith rotated her wrist almost absently before looking back toward Nico. The little movement should have been vanity, perhaps, but what she felt was less satisfaction with the jewelry than fascination with its presence. It was already participating in familiar gestures—touching him, pointing while she argued, brushing hair away from her face—and that normality pleased her more than she expected. “You're right about one thing,” she admitted, lifting her hand between them and regarding the ring with an appraising tilt of her head. “You chose extremely well.” Her eyes slid back to him. “On both counts, obviously. I wasn't going to let you become unbearable without correcting the order of importance.”

The thought of his family's inevitable reaction sent another quiet laugh through her. She could already imagine the overlapping voices without needing to catalogue them, everyone claiming to have known first, everyone revising their own role upward until the engagement somehow became the culmination of a Romano-wide strategic campaign. Rather than resist the thought, Lilith found herself inexplicably charmed by it tonight. “Your family is going to become completely intolerable,” she said, still smiling. “And I intend to enjoy every second of it until they become unbearable enough that I start hiding with you somewhere upstairs.” Her expression softened again. “I like that they'll be happy, though. I like that this is going to make them happy too.”

She did not linger there, because this evening still belonged first to the two of them. Instead, Lilith hooked a finger lightly into his shirt and drew him toward her for another kiss, shorter this time but no less affectionate. “And before you start,” she murmured when she released him, “I heard you about fifty-year-old experimental music.” One eyebrow lifted. “I will listen to the eleven-minute monstrosity once. I will give thoughtful notes. I will then spend the following decade reminding you that love has limits.” Her smile warmed. “Fortunately for you, mine seem to be embarrassingly generous.”

The pastry waiting nearby finally drew her eye, and the shift from life-altering declarations to dessert felt so thoroughly appropriate that Lilith laughed under her breath. Of course this was where their engagement evening was going. They had gone from tears and eighty-year promises to arguing about skincare, surnames, furniture, and whether she had successfully executed his grandmother's recipe. She found the whole progression perfect. “All right,” she said, touching his chest once before reluctantly stepping away. “You've survived the emotional portion of the evening. Now comes the genuinely dangerous part.”

She moved toward the table with the easy familiarity of someone no longer treating the courtyard like a proposal set. The torta waited where it had been left, carrying considerably more pressure now that Nico had elevated it into the evening's secondary event. Lilith looked at it with the narrowed consideration of an artist confronting work she had already decided was either excellent or somebody else's fault. “I should warn you that your grandmother had opinions,” she said as she reached for what she needed. “Several of them. Simultaneously. Your aunts had competing opinions, which was even more useful.” She glanced toward him, eyes bright. “I was essentially conducting pastry diplomacy under hostile conditions.”

Despite the joke, she handled the tart with care. She had paid attention that afternoon, more attention than she had perhaps admitted while protesting every correction and pretending she was not deeply invested in getting his favorite dessert right. Tonight, after everything he had done for her, the small domestic act of serving him something she had made with his family felt unexpectedly intimate. Not grand. Not symbolic enough to require discussion. Simply something loving she could give him in return while the ring he had chosen flashed faintly each time her left hand moved.

Lilith cut the first piece, arranged it with enough care to satisfy her own standards, and then paused with the fork poised above it. “You realize your response is now under extraordinary scrutiny,” she warned, looking at him with narrowed eyes that were far too affectionate to constitute a genuine threat. “I have been corrected in two languages today, covered in flour, and emotionally ambushed in couture. Choose your next expression wisely.”

Her composure lasted until she looked at him properly again. The playful warning softened almost at once, and she found herself smiling in that helpless way she seemed incapable of stopping tonight. There he was: her fiancé, still slightly red-eyed from crying, standing in the courtyard where he had asked her for eighty years while her ring caught the candlelight between them. Lilith's chest tightened with such uncomplicated affection that she did not bother trying to turn it into anything clever. “Come here, amore,” she said warmly. “You asked for the boring parts. Apparently they begin with me feeding you dessert.”

She lifted the fork toward him herself, the first bite of torta balanced carefully on it. Her other hand came lightly to his arm as she offered it, a small anchoring touch more affectionate than necessary. “First bite is mine to give you,” she decided, her eyes meeting his with a mixture of anticipation and barely contained amusement. “After that you may feed yourself like a grown man.”

Once he had taken the bite, Lilith lowered the fork but did not immediately reach for another. She stayed exactly where she was, close enough to touch him, studying his face with shameless intensity as though the answer to this particular question might rival the one she had given only minutes earlier. Her brows lifted expectantly, and the corner of her mouth threatened a smile she refused to release too soon. She waited for his expression to change, for the judgment to arrive, and most importantly for him to tell her exactly what he thought.

Nico had not expected the word to become addictive quite so quickly, but there was something about hearing her acknowledge it—about watching the faint, private smile it kept pulling from her—that made restraint seem unnecessary. Fiancée. It had always been a perfectly ordinary word when applied to other people, useful and vaguely formal, something that appeared in interviews and introductions and stories about couples who had already decided what came next. In his mouth now it felt entirely different. Specific. Intimate. A word that meant she had chosen him and he was allowed, finally, to say so without qualification. When her fingertips lingered along his jaw and she gave him permission to keep using it, the satisfaction that moved through his expression was almost indecent. His hand settled easily at her waist as he murmured, “Dangerous thing to tell me, because I was already planning to be unbearable about it,” and the smugness in his voice only sharpened when his gaze dipped once to the ring before returning to her.

The promise beneath the jokes drew him closer in a way the ring had not managed by itself. Nico listened as she returned them to the rule they had arrived at together—come home anyway, no matter what—and there was something almost solemn in the way his expression changed despite the warmth still lingering around it. He had made grander promises minutes ago. Eighty years. A lifetime. Every version of them neither of them had met yet. But this one felt more useful. More difficult. Anyone could promise eternity beneath candlelight; the work was finding your way back to one another after saying the wrong thing at one in the morning, after fear dressed itself up as anger, after pride made distance easier than apology. His thumb moved slowly along her side while she kissed him, and when she drew back he gave the faintest nod, as though they had just settled something that did not need decorating. “That one stays,” he agreed quietly. “Even when one of us deserves to sleep outside.”

Her enthusiasm for historical accuracy, however, deserved far less reverence. Nico’s face changed by degrees as she threatened to provide his mother and grandmother with the full account of the evening, amusement first, then disbelief, then the kind of theatrical outrage that suggested she had just proposed an actual crime. “Absolutely not,” he said, although the immediate lift at one corner of his mouth ruined any authority the objection might have carried. “My mother does not need details. My mother needs a tasteful summary in which I was composed, masculine, and only very slightly moved.” The mention of Nonna made the situation worse. Nico closed his eyes briefly, already able to imagine the satisfaction on his grandmother’s face when Lilith inevitably told the story exactly as threatened. Nonna would not merely appreciate the drama. She would treasure it, preserve it, enlarge it, and reproduce it at every family gathering for the next thirty years until Nico’s emotional collapse became ancestral folklore. “You’re enjoying this too much,” he informed her when he opened his eyes again. “And if Nonna hears I cried more than once, there will be no controlling the narrative. By Christmas I will have been sobbing on the ground while you heroically agreed to marry me out of pity.”

His attempt at outrage became impossible to maintain beneath the tenderness of her thumb beneath his eye. Nico’s expression softened despite himself. The idea that they had looked magnificent while visibly ruined amused him enough that a quiet laugh moved through his chest, and he glanced down briefly as though examining the evidence. His clothes were probably dusted at the knee from the stone. Her silk had already lost whatever immaculate quality it possessed when she stepped out of the car. Both of them had cried. Neither looked remotely like the polished versions of themselves the outside world tended to receive. “A little damp,” he repeated with dry approval. “That’s generous.” Then she threatened dehydration, and Nico stared at her with wounded dignity before insisting, “I was not dehydrated.” The pause that followed weakened the protest considerably, and the next sentence escaped before good judgment could intervene. “I was emotionally well-lubricated.” Nico blinked once, realized what he had said, and immediately started laughing, his head dropping toward her shoulder for a second because there was no recovering the phrase after it existed. “No. Forget that. Nobody ever repeats that. This engagement is now under confidentiality.”

Her next kiss rescued him from himself, and Nico gave into it with obvious gratitude. The ease with which she kept reaching for him had begun to affect him almost as much as the engagement itself. He knew affection from Lilith in all its forms—the public touch meant for nobody else, the private softness that appeared only after doors closed, the sudden, irreverent affection that interrupted arguments and mornings and unfinished sentences—but tonight there was something freer in it. Less guarded. He felt it in the way her hand stayed at his neck after the kiss ended, in the way she seemed content to simply keep contact between them as though the ring had removed some invisible requirement to ration how much she let him see.

The reassurance that followed stripped another layer of bravado from him. Nico’s eyes held hers while she told him that his vulnerability had not diminished him, and for once he did not immediately turn the sentiment into a joke. The urge was there; it always was. Some clever remark about already being magnificent, perhaps, or a declaration that tears simply improved the architecture of his face. Instead he let the words settle. There was a particular intimacy in being told that the thing he had least controlled about the evening had not made him less desirable in her eyes. His thumb moved absently against her waist while he absorbed it, and when he finally answered, “Good,” the word came quietly enough that there was no vanity in it. Only after a second did his mouth curve again. “Though obviously the ego was inevitable. You’ve been encouraging it for years.”

The subject of her name caught him differently. Nico had expected resistance only because he respected it enough not to presume otherwise. Lilith Valentine was not some temporary identity she had worn until marriage supplied a replacement. It was hers in the fullest sense, built through work and history and ambition and enough public recognition that the name itself could walk into a room before she did. When she dismissed the possibility of retiring it, Nico gave an immediate nod that said he had never expected anything else. “I know,” he said simply. “I wouldn’t ask you to.”

Then she gave him Emilia, and Nico went very still. He had used the name so naturally for so long that he had nearly forgotten what it meant to anyone outside the little private world between them. Emilia had developed gradually, not as a correction or a reinvention but as an intimacy. Something that appeared in sleepy conversations and low voices, in the softness after arguments, in the absent way he called for her from another room. It belonged nowhere public. It existed because his mouth had made it and she had let it stay. Hearing her distinguish it from Lilith Valentine did something dangerously effective to his already compromised emotional state. His eyes dropped briefly toward her hand, then lifted again as he repeated, “Emilia,” with almost none of the playfulness it sometimes held.

Then came Emily Romano, and Nico’s expression emptied with impact. His lips parted slightly and for perhaps two seconds he simply stared at her, the kind of stillness that meant some internal mechanism had completely stalled. He had imagined marrying her. He had imagined the ring on her hand. He had imagined mornings after a wedding, family dinners, hotel reservations under names nobody recognized, decades of shared life. He had very deliberately not imagined what she might choose to call herself, because that belonged to her and presumptions about it felt cheap. But she had just given him the answer anyway. “Emily Romano,” he repeated slowly, and the words changed his face. A smile arrived, but it was softer than the ones that had accompanied fiancée, almost disbelieving. He looked down for half a second as though the combination had caught him somewhere embarrassingly tender, then back up again. “That does sound beautiful.”

His accent thickened naturally around the surname, making Romano feel less like a title and more like something familial and lived-in. Nico’s fingers tightened gently at her waist as he added, “And Emilia stays. Obviously. I have invested too much in it. I refuse to abandon years of linguistic work.” The humor returned just enough to keep him from tearing up again, though his eyes remained suspiciously bright. “And for the record, I was never going to debate you. I enjoy arguing with you about many things. Your name was never going to be one of them.” Her declaration that no debate existed earned a tiny, approving nod, and he murmured, “Good. We’ve already resolved our first marital crisis. Very efficient.”

The couture homicide dispute brought him back to safer territory almost immediately. Nico listened to the description of his hypothetical memorial with increasing offense, though the solemnity she gave it nearly made him laugh before she had finished. “Tasteful?” he repeated as though she had insulted him. “If I die because of one of your shoes, the memorial had better be spectacular. I want candles. Orchestra. Very flattering photographs. And absolutely no photograph from 2012. I had no eyebrows.” He narrowed his eyes when she described him dying as he lived and informed her, “Refusing to admit you were right is not a character flaw. It is a commitment to intellectual rigor.” The furniture annexation received an even slower stare. Nico glanced toward the chair in question as though reconsidering his entire history with it. “You only annex things you like,” he repeated. “That is exactly how imperial powers justify expansion.” His gaze dropped meaningfully toward her ringed hand before he added, “First the chair. Then the bathroom. Then my surname. I see the strategy now.”

The accusation held no actual concern, especially when his eyes immediately followed the movement of her left hand. Nico watched the ring turn beneath the café lights, watched it already become absorbed into gestures he knew, and his attention softened almost without permission. Her approval of his choice produced visible satisfaction, but when she corrected the order of importance, his mouth curved into that familiar, arrogant smile. “Fine,” he conceded. “You first. Ring second. Me third.” He let the offense settle for a beat before adding, “Very close third. I’m learning humility already.”

The thought of his family celebrating drew a different kind of warmth from him. Nico knew exactly how unbearable they would become, and there was something comforting in the certainty. They would talk over one another. Somebody would cry louder than necessary. Somebody would accuse someone else of having known and not shared. Food would appear regardless of the hour. His mother would touch Lilith’s face. Nonna would inspect the ring and then pretend she had no interest in such things while examining every detail. When Lilith admitted she was glad they would be happy, Nico’s eyes softened. “They’re going to lose their fucking minds,” he said with unmistakable affection. “My mother will cry. Nonna will pretend she isn’t crying and then insult anybody who notices. My aunt will claim she chose the dress because destiny personally called her this morning. And at some point my cousin is going to mention the fireworks again.”

The offer to hide upstairs when the family became too much earned an immediate nod. “Absolutely. That is also a rule now. We make an appearance, accept enough food to avoid offense, and disappear before someone starts planning the wedding without us.” Nico leaned slightly closer, conspiratorial despite the open courtyard around them. “If necessary, I know three exits from this house they don’t think I know.”

The kiss she pulled him into interrupted whatever further escape plans he might have offered. Nico’s hand came automatically to the small of her back, holding her there for the brief duration of it, and when she released him to address the future eleven-minute experimental song, his eyes narrowed with exaggerated suspicion. “Once?” he repeated. “You’re agreeing to a lifetime commitment and suddenly rationing artistic support?” He considered her promise of thoughtful notes, then gave a reluctant nod. “Fine. But when critics call it revolutionary, I will remind you that you lacked vision.” The confession that her limits were embarrassingly generous made his expression soften with unmistakable satisfaction. “I know,” Nico murmured. “It’s one of your more questionable qualities.”

The torta shifted the evening so completely that Nico could almost feel the emotional pressure break apart into something easier. He watched her move toward the table and was struck by the absurd perfection of the transition. Ten minutes earlier he had been on one knee asking for the rest of her life. Now she was threatening him over custard. Somehow the second thing did not diminish the first. If anything, it completed it. Nico followed at an unhurried pace, one hand sliding into his pocket now that the ring box had served its purpose, his attention remaining on her rather than the dessert at first. The courtyard had returned to being theirs almost immediately, exactly as he had hoped it would.

Her description of pastry diplomacy made Nico laugh under his breath. “Hostile conditions?” he repeated. “You voluntarily entered a Romano kitchen during dessert preparation. That is not diplomacy. That is military occupation.” He leaned one hip lightly against the edge of the table, arms folding while he watched her handle the torta with far more care than her earlier complaints had suggested. Nico noticed the details because he always noticed more about Lilith than he admitted. The deliberate cut. The way she arranged the first piece rather than simply dropping it onto a plate. The brief concentration in her face. The flash of her engagement ring when her left hand moved.

Something about the entire picture reached him with the quiet force of his own proposal speech. There she was. His fiancée. In their courtyard. Serving him the dessert his grandmother had taught her to make. Nico swallowed once and decided with considerable determination that he absolutely would not cry over pastry.

Her warning about his reaction brought a slow lift of his brows. He unfolded his arms and looked from her to the tart as though being briefed before a dangerous operation. “Extraordinary scrutiny,” he repeated. “So what I’m hearing is that honesty is no longer one of the values we’re bringing into the marriage. Good to know.” The list of what she had endured that day made him grin. Corrected in two languages. Covered in flour. Emotionally ambushed in couture. “You make it sound like a hostage situation,” he said. “You spent the day shopping in Rome and eating in my grandmother’s kitchen.” He paused just long enough to reconsider before conceding, “Although, yes. The second one can become hostile.”

When her expression softened, so did his. The joke disappeared almost as soon as she called him closer, and Nico pushed away from the table and closed the remaining distance without needing to be asked twice. The words about boring parts landed somewhere immediately familiar, and his gaze dropped once toward the fork she had raised before returning to her face. “Exactly,” he said softly. “This is what I meant.” There was something almost unbearably domestic in allowing her to feed him the first bite. Nico could have taken the fork. Could have made another joke about being capable of feeding himself. Instead he let the moment be what she wanted it to be, one hand coming lightly around her wrist, steadying nothing, simply touching her because the habit had become impossible to resist.

He leaned in and took the bite, then Nico stopped completely. His eyes stayed on hers while he chewed once, twice, the expression on his face deliberately unreadable. He could feel how intensely she was watching him and, because he was fundamentally incapable of behaving when presented with such an opportunity, allowed the silence to stretch. His brows drew together very slightly. He looked down at the plate, then back at her. Another slow chew followed before Nico inhaled through his nose and gave a quiet, noncommittal, “Hm.”

It was vicious, and he knew it immediately.

The faint uncertainty that threatened her expression nearly destroyed his performance, but he held it for another heartbeat because he had suffered enormously tonight and believed himself entitled to one small act of revenge. Then the mask broke. His eyes widened slightly and his head tipped back with a low, appreciative sound before he reached for the fork himself and took another bite from the piece, abandoning all pretense of suspense. “Oh, fuck you,” he said around the beginning of a laugh, shaking his head as he finished chewing. “That’s good.”

Not acceptable. Not impressive for a first attempt. Good.

Nico looked down at the tart again as though mildly offended by the result. “No, actually, that is really fucking good.” He took another bite before she could reclaim control of the portion, the lemon balanced correctly, bright enough to cut through the richness without becoming sharp. The custard had set properly. The crust held without turning dense. Pine nuts toasted across the top exactly as they should, familiar enough to pull half a dozen childhood memories through him in a single mouthful. That familiarity altered his expression. Nico chewed more slowly this time, and for a moment he was eight years old stealing pine nuts, twelve and pretending he had not eaten the corner of one cooling on the counter, twenty and arriving home too late, finding a slice covered in the refrigerator because Nonna had complained the entire evening that he never visited while making certain there was food waiting when he finally did.

Now Lilith had made it. Not alone, obviously. There had been an army involved. But her hands had been in it. Her attention. Her stubbornness. Her decision to learn something that mattered because it belonged to the people he loved. Nico looked at her again, the teasing draining from his face as he said, “You learned it.” The words came more softly than anything the tart itself required. He glanced once at the piece on the plate, then back at her. “You actually learned it.” A small smile appeared, warm and slightly overwhelmed. “My grandmother taught you how to make my torta.”

He sounded as though the fact had only just become real now that he could taste it. Nico set the fork down before his emotions found another humiliating direction to travel, and both hands came to her waist instead, drawing her a fraction closer between him and the table. “You know this is unfair, right?” His voice had gone low and fond. “You can’t let me spend an hour explaining why I want to marry you and then immediately provide evidence.” His forehead lowered briefly toward hers, his smile barely there. “This is exactly the shit I was talking about.”

There was no spectacle in it. No stage. No audience. Just her making something because he loved it. Nico kissed her once, gently, then again at the corner of her mouth as though one had not quite been enough. When he drew back, his eyes were bright but dry, and he seemed very pleased with that achievement. “Tell Nonna I said it’s almost as good as hers,” he murmured, only for sudden alarm to cross his face almost immediately. “No. Absolutely do not tell her that.” Nico shook his head quickly. “Tell her it was terrible. Tell her I suffered. If she knows you can make this, she’s going to decide you no longer need supervision, and then I lose the possibility of two tortas.”

His expression settled into exaggerated seriousness while his hands remained comfortably at her waist. “I have to think strategically now. I’m responsible for a fiancée.” There it was again, and Nico smiled as soon as he said it. Fiancée. Still not tired of it. Probably never going to be.

The first sign that Nico had finally abandoned his little campaign of psychological warfare was the change in his face, and Lilith felt the tension leave her shoulders so quickly that irritation arrived almost on its heels. She had known the torta was not a disaster when it came out of the oven; too many Romano women had inspected it from too many angles for a genuine catastrophe to have survived the kitchen. Still, feeding Nico his first bite had made every correction from that afternoon suddenly feel consequential, and the deliberately unreadable pause afterward had managed to find the one small pocket of uncertainty she had left. By the time his approval became impossible to mistake, Lilith was staring at him with her lips parted in affront and one hand still wrapped around the fork. “You insufferable asshole,” she said, the words drenched in relief and affection rather than anything remotely resembling anger. “I was actually worried for a second. I hope you're deeply ashamed of yourself.”

She was smiling before she finished the reprimand, which rather destroyed its severity. Worse, the more genuine appreciation she saw in him, the less interested she became in pretending she was not absurdly pleased by it. Lilith had wanted the tart to be good because she was competitive enough to dislike doing anything badly, but that had never been the whole of it. This was his dessert, tied to his grandmother and his childhood and a kitchen full of women who had spent the afternoon instructing her with the terrifying confidence of people who considered recipes an extension of moral character. The fact that it tasted right to him mattered in a way praise from anyone else simply would not have. She reached up and touched his cheek, her expression melting despite every attempt to maintain indignation. “You could have spared me the suspense and still kept your reputation as a menace, you know.”

His evident concern over what she might report back to Nonna made Lilith's eyes narrow with immediate delight. “Oh, no. Don't involve me in whatever dessert-hoarding scheme you're developing.” She used the fork to carve off a smaller bite for herself and tasted it now that she could do so without simultaneously watching his face for signs of impending tragedy. The filling was creamy, the lemon bright without becoming aggressive, the crust much better than she had feared after the argument it had given her earlier. Lilith chewed thoughtfully, then gave a small nod of satisfaction. “Once we're married, perhaps I'll develop the sort of catastrophic loyalty that requires me to conspire with you against your relatives. At the moment, however, I am merely your fiancée, and I still have women in this family I intend to impress.”

The distinction amused her, but there was sincerity beneath it that she did not bother disguising. She was not trying to persuade the Romanos to tolerate her; that particular question had been answered long before tonight. They had already folded her into meals, arguments, plans, kitchens, traditions and the sort of familiar interference that would have felt invasive from almost anyone else. That was precisely why she cared so much about meeting them halfway. Lilith took another bite, slower this time, before looking back at Nico. “If I intend to spend the rest of my life walking around with Romano attached to me somewhere, I cannot continue assaulting your language every third sentence and relying on cheekbones to distract everyone from the gaps in my culinary education.” Her mouth curved. “It would be disrespectful to the institution.”

She let the joke settle before her gaze softened. “And before you say anything irritatingly sensible, I know I don't have to prove myself to them.” Her fingers moved idly over the stem of the fork, the new ring catching a glint of candlelight with the movement. “That's exactly why I want to make the effort. They've never behaved as though affection is something I have to earn from them.” The next admission arrived more quietly, although there was no reluctance in it. “There are people who share my blood who have managed to make family feel considerably less like family than yours does.”

Lilith did not linger over that comparison or allow it to sour the warmth of the evening. It was simply true, and Nico was one of the few people before whom a truth could remain uncomplicated rather than becoming an invitation to excavate it. “So yes,” she continued, turning the fork lightly between her fingers. “I care whether your grandmother thinks I respect what she teaches me. I care whether your mother is glad I'm going to be part of things for good. I care whether your aunts eventually stop correcting my pronunciation every time I become overconfident.” A beat passed before her brows lifted. “Although that last one may be an unrealistic ambition. They seem to enjoy it far too much.”

She cut another piece from the torta and lifted the fork toward Nico again, this time without the nervous scrutiny that had accompanied the first offering. “Here. Since apparently I've passed the first examination, you may have another.” The intimacy of feeding him had stopped feeling ceremonial almost immediately, becoming something easy and slightly indulgent instead. Afterward, she stole the next bite for herself and made a pleased little sound she would deny under oath if anyone other than Nico ever claimed to have heard it. “That's annoyingly good,” she admitted. “I was prepared to credit myself with perhaps forty percent of the success, but I may raise that to fifty-five.”

The dessert wine waiting nearby provided a natural next occupation for hands that otherwise kept finding their way back to him. Lilith set the fork down long enough to reach for the bottle and poured two modest glasses, watching the amber-gold liquid catch the candlelight before she replaced it. She slid one toward Nico and kept the other, lifting hers briefly as she regarded him over the rim. “To surviving your family kitchen,” she said, then reconsidered with a slight tilt of her head. “No, actually. To being invited back into it after today's performance. Much more impressive.”

She took a sip and let the sweetness settle against the lemon and custard still lingering on her tongue. It was good enough that she immediately took another, then set the glass down and returned to the torta with the complete lack of restraint appropriate to a woman who had just become engaged and therefore had no interest in pretending dessert required pacing. Another small bite disappeared. Then one more, divided from the edge with the fork before she held it out toward Nico again. “I hope you understand this is temporary generosity,” she informed him. “Tomorrow I revert to the woman who orders dessert, insists she only wants one bite of yours, and then eats half of it.”

Somewhere between wine and the diminishing piece of torta, Lilith became aware of how thoroughly the courtyard had settled back into itself. The place no longer felt arranged for a singular event, despite the candles still glowing along the stone and the flowers still making every ordinary corner look slightly more deliberate. It had become theirs again with astonishing speed. Her heels had begun to feel ridiculous after kneeling on stone and crying into her fiancé's face, so she slipped them off beside the table and nudged them aside with one bare foot, flexing her toes against the cool ground. The relief made her sigh. “There. Engagement glamour officially concluded. If anyone arrives unexpectedly, they can accept me barefoot or leave.”

Her gaze dropped almost automatically to the ring as she reached for her glass again. She still had not adjusted to encountering it in motion. Every time her hand entered her peripheral vision, there was a tiny moment of recognition before pleasure followed, bright and private. Lilith turned her wrist once, admiring it without the studied appraisal she might have given somebody else's jewelry. “This is going to be disastrous for my productivity tomorrow,” she observed. “I'm going to spend half the morning discovering that I have hands.”

The thought made her laugh, but it also gave her an idea. Lilith reached for her phone and unlocked it, then paused with her thumb hovering over the screen. There were a thousand polished photographs of both of them in existence already, images with professional lighting and immaculate styling and photographers who understood precisely which angles belonged in print. She suddenly wanted none of those. “I want one picture,” she said, lifting her gaze toward Nico. “And before you become suspicious, no one else gets it. Not tomorrow. Not when we announce anything. Not when we're ninety and somebody makes a documentary about us.”

She opened the camera and immediately switched it to the front-facing lens. The image reflected back at her was objectively imperfect and therefore, tonight, almost precious: hair no longer exactly where it had begun, makeup softened around eyes that had been crying, lips no longer perfectly painted. Nico was no better off, which delighted her enormously. Lilith's mouth curved as she leaned closer to fit him into the frame. “I specifically want us looking like this,” she explained. “Before either of us becomes presentable and ruins the evidence.”

She took one photo, glanced at it, and immediately laughed. “Oh, that's terrible.” It was not. That was exactly why she loved it. She took another without correcting anything, this time turning her face enough that her cheek pressed closer against his while she held her left hand somewhere naturally visible between them rather than presenting the ring like an advertisement. “There. That one stays forever.” Her expression softened as she studied it for another second. “We look completely wrecked.”

Instead of deleting it, Lilith marked it as a favorite and locked her phone again. There was something deeply satisfying about possessing a photograph the rest of the world would never be entitled to, especially when so many images of their lives existed beyond their control. This one did not need to prove that the ring was beautiful or that the courtyard was romantic or that they were glamorous enough to justify anyone's interest. It only needed to remind them what their faces looked like after everything had changed. She set the phone facedown on the table. “If that photograph ever leaks, by the way, I will know it was you. There are only two suspects and I trust myself enormously.”

Another bite of torta disappeared before Lilith reached for her wine again. The evening had developed the delicious looseness that follows something enormous once there is no longer any need to anticipate it. She could feel the adrenaline still humming beneath her skin, but it had softened into restlessness rather than nerves, leaving her with the odd desire to wander around the courtyard touching things Nico had arranged simply because she now knew why they were there. Her gaze landed on the dark flowers nearest the table. “I do have one complaint,” she said, studying them thoughtfully. “You've made the flowers so offensively perfect for me that I can't even accuse you of outsourcing your taste.”

She leaned forward enough to touch the edge of one dark calla lily with the pad of her finger. The petals felt cool and almost waxen beneath it, dramatic without becoming obvious, exactly the kind of thing she might have chosen for herself if she had somehow been given the absurd task of styling her own proposal. That was what she kept discovering tonight: details that did not merely look beautiful but felt informed. Lilith let her hand fall back to the table and glanced toward Nico again with a fondness that made teasing him almost difficult. “Do you know how annoying it is to be this accurately understood?” she asked. “There is nowhere for me to improve the aesthetic. You've deprived me of an entire category of criticism.”

Her eyes drifted over the courtyard once more, and this time something else caught her attention: not the carefully finished arrangement, but the evidence that real people had made it. A candle slightly less aligned than the others. A flower stem turned at an angle she doubted Nico would have chosen if he had been fussing over everything alone. The faint suggestion that too many Romano opinions had probably been involved before everyone vanished. Her smile sharpened. “I would pay an obscene amount of money to have seen what happened here before I arrived.” She lifted her glass. “Actually, I won't have to. Your family is physically incapable of keeping a good story from me.”

The idea pleased her so much that she shifted closer to Nico beside the table, one bare foot crossing lightly behind the other beneath the silk of her dress. “I'll have the full version by breakfast. Who argued about the candles. Who moved something after you told them not to. Who nearly ruined the surprise. Which aunt decided she was the only person with functioning eyes.” Lilith took another sip, eyes gleaming over the rim. “You do realize I am about to gain access to an extraordinary archive of embarrassing Nico material, don't you?”

That thought opened an entirely new and entertaining dimension of engagement. Dating Nico had already granted her considerable access to family stories, but becoming his fiancée was almost certainly going to loosen whatever remaining standards of discretion the Romanos possessed. She could imagine photographs appearing from drawers, childhood stories delivered over lunch, teenage catastrophes volunteered without prompting. Lilith looked almost indecently pleased. “God, this really is an excellent arrangement for me.” She reached over and traced one fingertip affectionately along his sleeve. “A beautiful ring, a bellissimo husband eventually, and expanded access to witnesses from your formative years.”

She let the word husband sit there without dressing it up. It still created that tiny internal shift whenever she used it, not because the idea felt strange but because it suddenly belonged to an actual future instead of a hypothetical one. Lilith smiled into her glass before setting it aside. “Although you should know I'm going to be insufferable while we're engaged.” Her brows lifted with serene confidence. “There is now a temporary period in which I can introduce you as my fiancé simply because I enjoy watching the word affect you.”

The remaining torta gave her something to do with the affection threatening to make every sentence embarrassingly sincere. She took another forkful, this one larger, and then cut a second for him before stealing a trace of custard from the edge with her fingertip. “I can also now say things like ‘my fiancé hates that’ in situations where your opinion was neither requested nor relevant.” Lilith tasted the custard from her finger with perfect composure. “Your views are about to become extremely useful props.”

She paused, then smiled as another possibility occurred to her. “And when someone flirts with me badly, I can finally say, ‘You'll have to do better; my fiancé once cried in an Italian courtyard and offered me eighty years.’” Her eyes brightened with wicked amusement. “Completely unfair standard. Devastating for the competition.”

The humor faded naturally when she looked at him again, replaced by that almost embarrassingly tender fascination she had been carrying all evening. Lilith reached across the small distance and let her hand settle warmly against his chest, not because she needed anything from him but simply because she wanted contact. “I am very in love with you tonight,” she said, and immediately narrowed her eyes as though irritated by her own phrasing. “More conspicuously than usual, I mean. Don't become excited. The underlying amount has not changed.”

She let out a quiet laugh and smoothed her palm once over the fabric beneath it. “You're going to be intolerable tomorrow.” There was no real complaint in it. If anything, she looked forward to seeing what the certainty of being engaged did to him once the emotional shock wore off and his usual confidence returned at full strength. “You'll wake up, remember you're somebody's fiancé, and develop an entirely new strut. I can already see it.”

The prospect amused her enough that she set her wine down beside the remains of the torta and stepped away from the table, leaving both behind for later. Barefoot now, she crossed toward the middle of the courtyard where the old stone held the day's fading warmth beneath her feet. The lights overhead gave everything a soft gold cast, less dramatic from here than when she had first entered and more intimate for it. Lilith turned back toward Nico and lifted one hand, palm open in invitation. “Come here.”

She did not need music. That was precisely why she wanted it. After a night so carefully planned, there was something appealing about creating one thing that had not been arranged at all. Lilith waited only long enough for him to be within reach before sliding her arms up around his shoulders. “I know there is no music,” she said, settling comfortably close. “I'm choosing to view that as avant-garde rather than poorly organized.”

Her cheek rested briefly against him, and for a few moments she allowed herself the rare luxury of doing absolutely nothing productive with her happiness. No clever observation. No planning. No attempt to preserve the moment by naming every detail. She simply stood barefoot in an expensive dress beneath café lights, held the man she was going to marry, and let the absurdly ordinary sounds beyond the courtyard continue around them. The quiet did not ask anything of her.

Eventually, Lilith tipped her head back enough to look at him. “Tomorrow,” she said, “I'm going back into that kitchen.” Her mouth curved when she anticipated how ridiculous the declaration might sound after everything else that had happened. “Not because this torta wasn't good. It's excellent, and I intend to become unbearable about that too. But if I'm going to be a Romano, I refuse to remain the woman everybody politely moves away from the stove.”

The playful determination in her expression softened around something more personal. “I want to learn the things that matter to them because they matter to me now.” She did not need to explain much more than that. The Romanos had already given her the strange comfort of being assumed into tomorrow without requiring her to earn every invitation anew; she wanted to answer that generosity with attention of her own. “One day I want Nonna to hand me something without hovering because she knows I won't destroy it. That may take thirty years, but fortunately you've just promised me eighty.”

Her smile widened before she leaned up to kiss him, slow and affectionate, lingering long enough that the conversation could wait. When she settled back against him, her eyes were still bright with a mixture of wine, happiness, and everything the evening had rearranged. “And if my Italian improves enough that I can eventually argue with your entire family at full speed, that's simply a bonus.” She brushed her thumb along the back of his neck. “You may regret encouraging this.”

Lilith remained there for another moment before a final thought made her smile against him. “Actually, no. I take that back.” She lifted her head, her expression settling into exaggerated confidence. “By the time I'm fluent, you'll be married to me. Far too late to escape.” The smugness lasted only until her gaze caught on his face again and softened helplessly. “Lucky you.”

Nico should have been offended by how thoroughly she enjoyed the word fiancée when it came from him, except he was enjoying it even more and therefore had no moral ground from which to object. Every time she smiled at it, something in him reacted with the same ridiculous little surge of satisfaction, as though he had personally accomplished the invention of engagement rather than simply participated in one. When her fingertips lingered against his jaw and she encouraged him to keep saying it, his mouth curved slowly, the expression equal parts smug and hopelessly enamored. “My fiancée,” he repeated on purpose, drawing the phrase out just enough to be obnoxious about it. “No, I’m sorry, I think I need another minute. It sounds very good with my voice.” The joke was easy, but his hand settled over hers where it touched his face with unmistakable tenderness. “You’ve made a terrible mistake giving me permission.”

The quieter promise beneath everything else mattered more. Nico listened to her define the rule again—whatever happened, however ugly either of them managed to make things, they came back—and the easy satisfaction in his face softened into something steadier. He liked that she did not turn it into an oath grand enough to collapse under its own weight. There was relief in the simplicity of it. Home anyway. Not perfection. Not the childish fantasy that people who loved each other would somehow stop being capable of hurting one another. Just return. Nico’s thumb moved slowly over the back of her hand while she kissed him, and when she pulled away he stayed close enough that their foreheads nearly touched. “Good,” he murmured. “Because I can promise you right now that at some point I’m going to be spectacularly wrong about something and still insist on being right for at least six hours.” His mouth tilted. “You too, obviously. I’m trying to make this fair.”

Her threat of comprehensive historical accuracy should have alarmed him more than it did. Instead, Nico looked at her with the resigned expression of a man who knew he had already lost control of the family narrative. She was right; the moment the story reached his mother, there would be questions. The moment it reached Nonna, there would be revisions. By the time it circulated through the rest of the family, nobody would remember which details belonged to reality and which had been improved for entertainment. “You’re cruel,” he informed her, though the fondness in his voice made the accusation useless. “Completely merciless. I give you a ring and you immediately weaponize my tears against me.” His gaze narrowed when she threatened to tell them he nearly dehydrated. “For the record, if you tell Nonna I cried that much, I am telling everyone you took so long to answer that I saw my entire life flash before my eyes.”

He let her have the victory anyway, mostly because the touch beneath his eye ruined his ability to maintain indignation. Nico’s expression softened beneath her fingers, and there was something deeply satisfying about the way she refused to separate his vulnerability from his attractiveness, as though those two things had never been in conflict to begin with. He had known intellectually that she would not think less of him for crying; Lilith was not a woman who required masculinity to remain emotionally illiterate in order to respect it. Still, hearing her say it reached somewhere different. “Good,” he said quietly, and for once he did not decorate the word. The seriousness lasted perhaps two seconds before his mouth curved again. “And yes, the ego is unfortunate. But now you understand the burden you’ve chosen to marry.”

The distinction she made around her name struck him with enough force that all the teasing drained away. Nico had never once believed Lilith Valentine needed to disappear in order for her to become part of his life. That name belonged to her in too many ways: public, professional, personal, historical. It had survived too much and become too much to be folded neatly into somebody else’s surname because tradition said so. So when she made it clear that Lilith Valentine remained exactly where she had always been, he nodded without hesitation. “I wouldn’t want her gone,” he said. “She’s terrifying. I’m very attached to her.”

But Emilia was different.

Nico’s eyes changed when she said it. He had called her that so often it had become instinct, the name slipping naturally into sleepy mornings and murmured conversations, into the soft place between argument and apology, into the tone he used when nobody else was meant to hear him. It had never been a public reinvention. It was simply the shape her name took in his mouth when he loved her most privately. Hearing her acknowledge that distinction out loud made something in his chest tighten again. “Emilia,” he repeated, quieter now, almost reverent in spite of himself. “That one is mine.”

Then she gave him Emily Romano, and Nico stopped smiling altogether for a moment.

Not because he disliked it. Quite the opposite. The words landed with a startlingly physical weight, as if she had taken something he had been too careful to imagine and placed it directly into his hands. He looked at her for several long seconds, blinking once as though recalibrating around the sound of it. “Emily Romano,” he repeated, slowly enough to feel every syllable. His accent softened the edges of the surname, giving it a warmth that made the combination sound less formal than lived-in. A smile finally appeared, but it was smaller than usual, nearly shy by his standards. “That is… fuck.” He laughed softly under his breath. “That is very beautiful.”

The insistence that Emilia remain pulled him back toward himself. Nico’s hand slid to her waist again, his thumb pressing lightly into the silk there. “Emilia stays,” he promised. “Obviously. I refuse to abandon years of excellent work.” His eyes warmed. “And I wasn’t going to argue with you about the rest. I have many interests. Dying over a surname is not one of them.” A beat passed before his mouth twitched. “Also, apparently there is no debate, so congratulations to both of us on resolving our first marital dispute before the wedding.”

The shoes remained another matter entirely. Nico listened to her hypothetical memorial plans with increasing offense, though he betrayed himself almost immediately by laughing when she described his dramatic demise. “Tasteful?” he repeated. “No. If couture murders me, I want excess. I want candles everywhere. I want a choir. I want photographs where I look twenty-seven regardless of my actual age.” He considered it gravely. “And absolutely no candid family pictures. My relatives cannot be trusted with archival material.”

Her defense of the chair did not receive the same flexibility. Nico stared at her for a moment, then glanced toward the chair as though the piece of furniture itself had betrayed him. “You annex things you like,” he repeated. “That is exactly what every empire says immediately before somebody loses a coastline.” His gaze dropped deliberately toward the ring now resting on her hand. “First the chair. Then half the bathroom. Now my surname has apparently entered the occupation zone.” His expression sharpened with amusement. “I should probably hide the guitars.”

The ring kept catching his attention no matter how hard he tried not to make it obvious. It flashed whenever she moved her hand, turning ordinary gestures into small reminders that their lives had shifted. He watched her rotate her wrist and heard her acknowledge that he had chosen well, and satisfaction returned to him with almost indecent speed. When she corrected the order of importance, Nico accepted the demotion with exaggerated dignity. “Fine. You first. Ring second. Me third.” He paused. “But I want the record to show I am an extremely strong third.”

The idea of his family becoming intolerable warmed him more than he expected. He could already see it unfolding with painful accuracy. His mother crying. Nonna pretending not to. His aunt claiming prophetic credit for the dress. Cousins appearing from nowhere. Food multiplying across tables until nobody remembered who had made what. Everyone talking over everyone else while insisting they were listening perfectly well. Nico smiled at the thought, the expression softer than the complaint deserved. “They are going to be impossible,” he agreed. “My mother will probably call five people before we finish telling her. Nonna will act like she arranged this from heaven personally. And yes, somebody will absolutely try to begin planning the wedding before we’ve finished dessert.”

Her suggestion that they hide upstairs once the chaos became too much received immediate approval. Nico leaned closer, lowering his voice conspiratorially even though nobody else was there. “I know every escape route in every house my family owns,” he told her. “That is not paranoia. That is survival.” His brows lifted. “You’ll learn.”

Her willingness to endure one future eleven-minute experimental song drew a deep sigh from him, though he was visibly amused. “Once?” Nico repeated, scandalized. “I offer you eighty years and you give me one listen?” He shook his head as though deeply disappointed in her priorities. “Fine. But when history recognizes it as my masterpiece, I expect a formal apology.” Her admission that her limits were embarrassingly generous made him look at her with the kind of satisfaction that bordered on insolent. “Yes,” he said. “I’ve noticed. Very fortunate for me.”

The torta changed the rhythm of the evening in exactly the way Nico wanted. There was something almost perfect about watching her move from declarations about family and names directly into dessert, as if the enormous and the ordinary had finally stopped pretending they belonged to separate categories. He followed her toward the table with one hand in his pocket, watching the engagement disappear into the familiar movements of their life rather than remain suspended above it. That was what he had wanted when he planned the courtyard. Not a scene they would preserve untouched. Something they could immediately live inside.

Her account of pastry diplomacy made him laugh. “You voluntarily entered a Romano kitchen during dessert preparation,” he reminded her. “That is not diplomacy. That is choosing violence.” He leaned against the table and watched her cut another piece, his attention lingering on the flash of the ring while her hand worked. The sight still startled him. Fiancée. Ring. Her hands doing something ordinary. He could already tell he was going to spend an embarrassing amount of time over the next several days noticing it.

When she lifted another bite toward him, this time without the tension of an examination, Nico accepted it easily. His hand settled around her wrist out of habit, and the second bite tasted even better now that he no longer had the obligation—or temptation—to torment her. “Still good,” he confirmed after swallowing, smiling at the satisfaction in her face. “Annoyingly good, actually.” He looked down at the tart again as though it had personally challenged him. “Fifty-five percent is ambitious, though. I think Nonna would appeal that ruling.”

The dessert wine gave him something else to do besides stare at the ring, though he managed to keep doing that anyway. Nico accepted the glass she slid toward him, lifting it lightly in response to her toast. “To being invited back,” he agreed, amusement warming his voice. “A much more meaningful achievement than surviving. Everyone survives the kitchen. Not everyone receives a second assignment.”

He took a sip and watched her abandon any pretense of restraint with the dessert. The sight made him grin. Lilith had spent years cultivating an almost effortless relationship with elegance, but Nico had always liked the moments when elegance became secondary to appetite, irritation, laughter, exhaustion, whatever real thing happened to take precedence. “I know your dessert strategy,” he told her when she warned him about future theft. “You say you don’t want any, then you take a bite, then somehow I’m holding an empty plate and you’re explaining that technically I offered.” His eyes narrowed playfully. “Marriage will not protect you from accountability.”

The removal of her heels made the courtyard feel even more like itself. Nico watched her nudge them aside with one bare foot, and the image pleased him in a way he would have struggled to explain to anyone else. Hours of planning had gone into making the space beautiful, and somehow the first truly satisfying detail was her shoes abandoned beside the table. “Much better,” he said. “Now it actually looks like us.”

Her fascination with the ring every time her hand moved did not escape him. Nico saw the tiny pauses, the way her attention caught unexpectedly whenever the stones entered her peripheral vision, and the realization delighted him. “Tomorrow?” he repeated when she predicted disaster for her productivity. “You’re optimistic. You’ve already looked at it seventeen times.” His mouth curved. “And yes, I counted.”

The request for one private photograph changed his expression at once. Nico understood the instinct before she finished explaining it. Their lives contained too many images that belonged partially to everyone else: red carpets, stages, airports, restaurant exits, photographs made public before the memories attached to them had even settled. A picture nobody else received had a different value entirely. When she made it explicit that this one would remain theirs—even decades later, even if someone eventually tried to turn their lives into retrospective entertainment—Nico nodded without teasing her. “Ours,” he agreed. “That’s it.”

Then the front camera appeared, and Nico saw their faces.

He immediately laughed.

They looked terrible by their own standards and perfect by every standard that mattered tonight. His eyes were still visibly red. Her makeup had softened from tears. Neither of them possessed the immaculate quality a photographer would normally demand before capturing something intended to survive forever. When she called the first image terrible, Nico looked over her shoulder at it and smiled. “It’s horrible,” he agreed. “Keep it.”

The second was better only because it tried even less. Her cheek pressed closer to his, his face still visibly wrecked, the ring present without becoming the entire point. Nico looked at the image after she took it and went quiet for a moment. There was something strangely affecting about seeing evidence of the evening without any of its deliberate beauty around them. Just two people who had cried hard and were absurdly happy afterward. “That one,” he said softly. “Yeah.”

Her threat about leaks earned immediate offense. Nico pressed a hand to his chest. “You wound me. I would never.” His eyes narrowed. “Also, you are absolutely the more likely suspect. You’ll accidentally send it to someone while trying to show them a completely different picture and then blame technology.”

The looseness settling over the evening was visible in him too. The proposal no longer sat between them like something fragile that might disappear if handled incorrectly. It had become fact. Nico drank, watched her eat, watched candlelight move across the courtyard, and let the adrenaline drain out of him by degrees. When she began inspecting the flowers, his attention sharpened with the pleasure of someone about to receive judgment on something he had worked very hard to pretend he had not obsessed over.

Her approval made him unbearably pleased.

He tried to hide it.

Failed.

“Accurately understood,” he repeated, brows lifting. “That sounds almost like a compliment.” Nico took another sip of wine. “Be careful. I’m already engaged to you. If you start openly admitting I have taste, I’ll become impossible.”

The suggestion that she had been deprived of criticism made his smile broaden. “Yes. That was intentional. I wanted one night where you had no notes.”

He knew immediately when she began noticing the imperfections around the courtyard. The candle that had been shifted. A stem angled incorrectly. Small evidence that his family had been involved whether he wanted to admit it or not. Nico groaned before she even finished speculating. “No,” he said. “You do not need the behind-the-scenes version.”

The request was futile, and he knew it.

“There was arguing,” he admitted finally. “A lot of arguing. One aunt believed there were too many candles. Another believed there were not enough candles. My cousin moved one of the flower arrangements after I told him specifically not to touch anything because apparently he has a death wish.” Nico took another sip. “My mother kept asking if I had eaten. Nobody understood why I thought that was irrelevant.”

His expression darkened theatrically as she predicted gaining access to embarrassing childhood material. That, unlike the proposal details, represented a genuine threat. “No,” Nico said immediately. “Absolutely not. Engagement does not grant archive privileges.”

He knew from the look on her face that the objection was meaningless.

Nico pointed at her. “There are photographs that never leave certain houses.”

A beat passed.

“There was a phase.”

He narrowed his eyes.

“Several phases.”

The delight on her face made him regret everything.

Her description of the arrangement—beautiful ring, future husband, expanded witness access—earned a low laugh. “Bellissimo husband,” he corrected automatically, vanity returning on instinct. “If you’re going to exploit me for family intelligence, at least maintain standards.”

But the word husband struck him almost as effectively as Emily Romano had.

Nico’s expression softened again. Husband. Not fiancé this time. Not some vague someday. A specific role waiting for him on the other side of a wedding they had not yet planned. “Say that one again later,” he murmured, and the way he said it made clear he had filed the word somewhere dangerous.

Her threat to use fiancé gratuitously only made him grin. “Please do,” he said. “Introduce me that way to everyone. Waiters. Drivers. People asking for directions. Someone handing us a parking ticket.” Nico’s eyes gleamed. “I want maximum misuse.”

The idea of his opinions becoming conversational props delighted him just as much. “Perfect,” he said. “I look forward to having strong positions on restaurants I’ve never visited and people I’ve never met.”

Then she weaponized his proposal against hypothetical bad flirting.

Nico stared at her.

His mouth slowly curved.

“That is vicious.”

He looked almost proud.

“You are going to tell some poor bastard he has to compete with eighty years and public emotional collapse?” Nico shook his head. “Nobody deserves that.”

The affection beneath the joke became impossible to ignore when her hand settled over his chest and she admitted to being conspicuously in love with him. Nico’s eyes softened immediately, though the line about the underlying amount remaining unchanged earned a tiny huff of amusement. “No, no,” he said. “Too late. I heard more in love. I’m keeping that.”

He covered her hand with his.

“You can issue corrections tomorrow.”

Her prediction about his future strut earned exactly the reaction she expected. Nico straightened slightly as though testing the concept already. “New strut?” he repeated. “I had an excellent strut before.” His expression became thoughtful. “Although fiancé does require something more distinguished. Less bachelor arrogance. More devastating domestic confidence.”

He took one experimental step.

“Like that?”

The fact that she left the table and moved into the center of the courtyard drew his attention away from the performance immediately. Nico watched her cross the old stone barefoot, oxblood silk moving around her ankles, candlelight and café lights softening everything around her. When she lifted her hand toward him, he did not make her wait.

He set his glass down and followed.

The absence of music made him smile when she mentioned it. Nico slid one arm around her waist as hers settled over his shoulders, drawing her close enough that whatever constituted dancing no longer required much movement at all. “Avant-garde,” he agreed. “Very sophisticated. People will pretend they understand it.”

He began moving anyway.

Barely.

A slow shift of weight, nothing choreographed, no rhythm except the one they decided on together. Nico’s cheek rested briefly against her hair as she settled into him, and for the first time since she came home, he stopped anticipating the next thing. There was no ring left to reveal. No speech waiting in his throat. No reaction to survive. Nothing needed from him except presence.

The quiet felt earned.

When Lilith eventually lifted her head and announced that she was returning to Nonna’s kitchen the next day, Nico’s brows rose with genuine surprise. “Tomorrow?” he repeated, looking at her as if she had just volunteered for military service. “You became engaged tonight and your first ambition is to improve your standing with my grandmother?”

His mouth curved with affection before the teasing could sharpen.

“Very Romano of you, actually.”

The seriousness beneath her determination reached him quickly. Nico understood that she was not talking about torta anymore. She was talking about participation. About learning the things that mattered because the people attached to them mattered. He knew enough about her history to understand that family had not always arrived as something safe, generous or uncomplicated, which made the deliberate way she kept stepping toward his all the more meaningful.

His hand moved slowly up and down her back while she spoke.

“You don’t have to become good at any of it for them,” he reminded her, but his tone held no attempt to stop her. “I know you know that.”

A pause.

“But I understand why you want to.”

His gaze softened.

“And they’ll understand too.”

The idea of Nonna eventually trusting her unattended in the kitchen drew a quiet laugh. “Thirty years is optimistic,” Nico murmured. “She still watches my mother.”

He considered it.

“She watches herself.”

His mouth brushed lightly against her temple. “It isn’t personal.”

The reference to eighty years returned the smile to his face. “Exactly. Plenty of time. By year forty, maybe she lets you touch pastry unsupervised.”

Her ambition to argue fluently with his entire family earned something approaching genuine delight. Nico leaned back just enough to look at her properly. “Oh, I want that,” he said. “I want that very badly.” His eyes brightened. “The first time you interrupt three aunts at once in perfect Italian, I’m opening champagne.”

He already knew what would follow. They would be thrilled and horrified in equal measure. Lilith would become exponentially more dangerous once language stopped slowing her down. Half his family would regret every correction they had ever given her while simultaneously taking full credit for her fluency.

“You’re going to be terrifying,” Nico decided. “They’ll be so proud.”

Her warning that he might regret encouraging the transformation only made him laugh. “No. I have spent years helping you become more dangerous. I’m not developing principles now.”

Then she corrected herself and reminded him that by the time fluency arrived, escape would no longer be available.

Nico’s expression softened before she even finished.

Lucky you.

For a moment he simply looked at her.

The teasing answer was there. He could have told her he was already trapped, claimed she had annexed him alongside the chair, accused the ring of being part of some elaborate Italian legal strategy. Instead, the words disappeared when faced with the uncomplicated truth beneath hers.

His hand lifted from her waist and cupped the side of her face.

“Yeah,” he said softly.

The smile that followed was small, almost private.

“Lucky me.”

Nico leaned down and kissed her slowly, without any intention of turning it into something larger. The kiss carried none of the desperate emotion from immediately after the proposal and none of their usual teasing urgency. It was simply affectionate, lingering and certain, his thumb resting against her cheek while they moved almost imperceptibly beneath lights that no longer needed to impress either of them.

When he finally drew back, he stayed close enough that his forehead touched hers.

“My fiancée,” he murmured once more, because apparently he still needed to hear it.

Then, with a faint smile against her mouth, “Emilia Romano.”

The name was not technically hers yet.

That was exactly why he liked saying it.

Nico’s arm tightened gently around her waist, returning them to the slow, nonexistent dance. “Eighty years,” he reminded her, voice low and warm. “You’d better learn a lot of recipes.”

Lilith’s expression changed at the sound of the name before she could decide what to do with it. There was still something deliciously premature about it, enough to send a small thrill through her every time Nico tried it on as though testing how naturally the syllables belonged together. She did not correct him. Instead, her fingers slipped higher at the back of his neck, and the smile she gave him was so openly enamored that it made any attempt at dignity rather pointless. “Careful,” she murmured. “You keep saying that like you’re trying to make me impatient.”

The reminder about eighty years brought a quiet laugh out of her, warm against the narrow space between them. Lilith tipped her head just enough to study him, considering the culinary burden apparently attached to such an ambitious lifespan. “Oh, I intend to learn plenty,” she assured him. “But I’m establishing expectations now: longevity does not mean you receive eighty years of homemade dinner on demand. Some nights your beloved wife will be glamorous, exhausted, and ordering pasta from somewhere that knows our address by heart.” Her eyes glinted. “Marriage is about realism.”

She let herself settle back into the slow movement between them, her body fitting easily against his while the old stone cooled beneath her bare feet. The lack of music had stopped feeling noticeable. There was enough rhythm in the occasional brush of fabric, the distant sounds beyond the courtyard, the small adjustments required when neither of them was making any real effort to dance properly. Lilith rested her cheek against him again and smiled to herself. “Although,” she added after a moment, “I do like the idea of becoming frighteningly competent in your grandmother’s kitchen. Mostly because I enjoy having unreasonable goals.”

The image came easily now: not a ceremonial version of herself performing domesticity for approval, but some future afternoon in which she moved through that kitchen without needing to ask where anything lived. The thought pleased her because it was specific rather than symbolic. She could imagine arguing over seasoning, being corrected on a word she absolutely knew she had pronounced correctly, learning which pan nobody was allowed to touch and which instruction was technically optional despite being presented as divine law. “Eventually I want them to stop giving me the beginner tasks,” she said, lifting her head again. “I want to be trusted with something that has actual consequences.”

Her mouth curved as she considered the likely timeline. “Not tomorrow, obviously. Tomorrow they’ll hand me something impossible to ruin and hover anyway.” She brushed her thumb lightly along the back of his neck. “But one day your grandmother is going to walk away from me while something important is on the stove, and I’ll know I’ve won.”

The word won made her smile because it was ridiculous and because Nico would understand exactly what she meant. The Romanos were not a challenge to conquer, nor did she regard their affection as some prize requiring flawless execution. She simply liked becoming good at the things that mattered to people she loved. There was pleasure in attention, in learning the details well enough that care no longer required explanation. Lilith had always believed devotion without observation was mostly noise.

Her gaze traveled briefly toward the abandoned table. Their wine sat beside the half-finished torta, her heels discarded nearby, her phone face down beside the plate holding the private photograph neither of them intended to share. The entire tableau looked almost more intimate now than the carefully prepared courtyard had when she first arrived. Evidence of use had taken over from arrangement. Lilith smiled faintly. “Look at that,” she said, nodding toward the table. “You spent all day making everything beautiful and we’ve already made a mess of it.”

There was unmistakable approval in her voice. She liked the flowers where they were, liked the candles burning unevenly, liked that the perfect evening had already acquired abandoned shoes and half-eaten dessert. It made the whole thing feel lived in rather than preserved. “Much better,” she decided. “Now it looks like something actually happened here.”

Her attention returned to Nico immediately, and the softness that had been following her around all evening settled over her expression again. She had become almost absurdly tactile since saying yes, unable to resist touching his collar, his cheek, the back of his neck, the line of his shoulder. Lilith was normally affectionate with him anyway, but tonight the impulse seemed to renew itself every few seconds. Her fingertips traced absent patterns at the base of his neck while she looked at him. “I’m going to be extremely annoying about you for at least forty-eight hours,” she warned. “Possibly longer.”

She considered that and amended it with a tiny lift of one shoulder. “Actually, indefinitely. But the next forty-eight will be particularly bad.” Her smile sharpened. “There will be staring. Gratuitous use of ‘my fiancé.’ Probably unnecessary touching.” She moved fractionally closer, proving her own point. “You’ll survive.”

Lilith was quiet for several slow shifts of their bodies before another thought surfaced. “You know what I’m curious about?” she asked. Her eyes narrowed with amused suspicion. “How many times today your family nearly gave this away.” She already knew enough about the Romanos to distrust the existence of an entirely seamless conspiracy. “Because I refuse to believe that many people knew something enormous and every single one of them behaved normally.”

She started mentally reviewing the day without turning it into a full retrospective, catching small moments that had seemed meaningless at the time and suddenly acquiring new possibilities. A pause that may have lasted a fraction too long. Someone steering conversation away from where Nico might have been. An aunt being just slightly too pleased with herself. Lilith’s brows rose as the evidence reorganized itself. “Oh, they were awful at it, weren’t they?” she said, delight beginning to creep into her voice. “I simply wasn’t looking for anything, so they got away with murder.”

That realization entertained her far more than it offended her. She could already imagine interrogating them one by one the following morning, encouraging contradictions until the entire operation collapsed into competing versions. “I’m going to find out who almost ruined it first,” she announced. “Then I’m going to rank them by competence.” Her smile became sweetly malicious. “Someone is absolutely coming last.”

The prospect of breakfast with his family sent another little current of happiness through her. Tonight belonged to them, and she had no desire to rush toward anyone else, but tomorrow’s chaos now existed at the edge of her imagination as something to look forward to rather than avoid. Everyone would know. There would be too many voices, too much food, hands reaching for hers to inspect the ring, questions overlapping before either of them answered the first. Lilith exhaled a quiet laugh. “Your mother is going to look at my hand before she looks at my face, isn’t she?”

She already knew the answer well enough that she did not require one. “And Nonna will pretend she’s evaluating the ring when really she’s evaluating you.” Her fingertips slid lightly along his collar. “Which I support. You should remain under supervision.”

Another slow turn carried them slightly farther beneath the café lights. Lilith let herself follow without thinking about where her feet were going, the hem of her dress brushing the stone around her ankles. There was something almost adolescent about the sheer pleasure of dancing badly with the man she loved immediately after becoming engaged, and she found she did not mind the lack of sophistication at all. She had had sophistication in abundance. This was better because it was unnecessary.

Her gaze dropped briefly toward his chest before returning to his face. “You realize I’m going to remember exactly how you looked tonight forever,” she said. The words came without teasing this time. “Not the clothes. Not even this.” She gestured vaguely toward the lights and flowers without taking her hand from him for more than a second. “You.”

Lilith’s expression softened further. “Red eyes. Completely destroyed composure. Still somehow convinced you were devastatingly attractive.” A small smile appeared. “Which, unfortunately, you were.” She let that sit without adding another joke to protect it. “That’s the part I’m keeping.”

The thought of the photograph returned, and with it a surge of gratitude that she had taken it while neither of them had repaired anything. She liked knowing there would be proof someday, even if only for themselves, that the moment had not looked like the polished version strangers might eventually imagine. They had looked happy enough to be inelegant. Lilith suspected that would matter more to her with time rather than less.

She tilted her head slightly. “And I’m serious about that picture never leaving us.” Her voice was not severe, merely certain. “We can give everyone else something beautiful later. They can have whatever polished photograph makes them happy.” The corner of her mouth lifted. “But that one is mine.”

The possessiveness was directed as much toward the memory as the image itself. Lilith had shared enough of her life publicly to know that keeping something did not require shame or secrecy; sometimes privacy was simply another form of value. She leaned in and pressed a kiss to his cheek, then another closer to the corner of his mouth. “I like having something nobody else gets.”

Her gaze caught on the ring again when her hand shifted at his shoulder, and she laughed softly at herself. “Eighteen,” she announced. “Possibly nineteen.” The counting joke from earlier had stuck. She turned her hand just enough to let the stones catch the warm overhead light. “I’m not even pretending this is normal behavior anymore.”

Lilith examined it for another second before deliberately returning her attention to Nico. “It’s very beautiful,” she said. “But I think my favorite thing about it is that I can tell you chose it.” She did not mean merely that he had purchased it. The distinction mattered. There was something of his eye inside the design, his understanding of what she would wear comfortably rather than what some jeweler might have identified as appropriately grand. “It looks like something you thought about until everyone around you begged you to stop having opinions.”

That possibility amused her enormously. “How many people did you torture over this?” she asked. “Be honest. Was there a jeweler somewhere reconsidering his career by the end?” Her brows lifted. “Because I know you. There is no world in which you simply pointed at something in a case and said, ‘That one.’”

The very idea was absurd. Lilith’s smile stayed as she slipped her arms a little more comfortably around him. She did not need an answer immediately; she could imagine enough of the process to enjoy it. She pictured Nico rejecting details for being too obvious, too conventional, too much, not enough. The thought that he had spent time thinking about her hands when she had been elsewhere living an entirely ordinary day made affection tighten pleasantly beneath her ribs.

“I’m going to ask you everything eventually,” she warned. “Not tonight. Tonight I’m enjoying the mythology.” Her eyes gleamed. “Tomorrow, however, I want the full production notes. Ring, flowers, family conspiracy, all of it.” She paused. “Especially which relative suggested the worst idea. Fireworks already gives one cousin an impressive lead.”

The humor remained between them for another moment before Lilith’s attention settled back into something quieter. She touched his face again, palm resting lightly along his cheek as though she still had not exhausted the pleasure of being allowed to. “You did very well, amore.” The praise was simple, almost tenderly matter-of-fact. “Not because it was perfect. Because it was us.”

She leaned up and kissed him once, slowly enough that the thought did not need further explanation. When she pulled back, she kept close, her nose nearly touching his. “And now I’m going to make one demand about the rest of tonight.” Her voice acquired just enough authority to suggest he should take the next words seriously. “No calls. No messages. Nobody comes back because they suddenly remembered something in the kitchen.”

Lilith’s expression warmed into a smile. “I want another glass of wine with you. More torta. Maybe this terrible silent dancing for a while longer.” Her thumb brushed lightly along his cheek. “Then whatever happens after that happens because we felt like it, not because anyone planned it.”

The prospect felt luxurious. There was nowhere they needed to be, nobody entitled to immediate notification, no obligation to turn the engagement into an event schedule while the feeling of it was still new. Lilith had no interest in discussing venues or dates or press or any of the practical machinery that would inevitably arrive later. Tonight could remain small enough to fit inside the courtyard.

She shifted closer, resting her head against him again as they continued moving almost imperceptibly. “Tomorrow I become terrifyingly committed to Italian grammar and pastry,” she said after a comfortable stretch of silence. “Tonight I’m taking the evening off.”

A smile moved against him. “You may enjoy your fiancée exactly as she is.”

Lilith stayed there another moment, then lifted her head with renewed mischief. “Although I should warn you: the moment I learn enough Italian to understand what your aunts say when they think I’ve missed something, the entire family dynamic is going to change.” Her eyes brightened. “There will be no warning. One day I’ll simply answer.”

The image pleased her so much she nearly laughed. “And when they all stare at me in horror, I expect you to look proud.” Her hand slid warmly from his cheek to the back of his neck. “No rescuing them. They created the problem.”

She kissed him again, quick and affectionate this time. “Eighty years is more than enough time to become fluent, master the kitchen, steal the rest of your furniture, and uncover every humiliating photograph your mother owns.” Lilith’s smile was radiant now, the happiness beneath it impossible to disguise. “You really should have negotiated harder.”

Then she rested against him once more, entirely content to let the slow, imaginary dance continue. The evening no longer needed another extraordinary moment to justify itself; it had already become something she knew she would remember in pieces rather than in one grand sweep. Candlelight. Bare feet. Lemon on her tongue. His face after she said yes. The unfamiliar weight of a ring moving with her hand.

Lilith closed her eyes for a moment, smiling against him. “Bellissimo fiancé,” she murmured with affectionate satisfaction, trying the phrase purely because she could. “I think I’ll keep you.”

Nico had already discovered that Emilia Romano was dangerous to say aloud, but watching the name reach her proved considerably worse. The change in her expression was small enough that someone who knew her less intimately might have missed it; Nico did not. He caught the flicker before amusement settled over it, the way her fingers climbed higher against his neck as though proximity might somehow compensate for the fact that he had just introduced a future neither of them technically occupied yet. Her warning that he was going to make her impatient produced exactly the satisfaction it should not have, his arm tightening by a fraction around her waist. “That sounds less like a warning and more like an incentive,” he murmured. He liked the name because it belonged slightly ahead of them, close enough to imagine and still unavailable enough to feel illicit. “Emilia Romano,” he repeated once, softer and entirely on purpose. “No. Still good.”

Her attempt to establish realistic expectations for eighty years received far less resistance than the solemnity of her announcement suggested it deserved. Nico listened to the vision of his future wife refusing domestic servitude in favor of glamorous exhaustion and delivered pasta with thoughtful seriousness. “Thank God,” he said eventually. “Because eighty years of compulsory home cooking sounds less like marriage and more like a labor violation.” The idea of some restaurant eventually knowing their address and their usual order amused him more than it should have. “I fully expect nights when neither of us cooks, nobody puts on real clothes, and we spend thirty minutes arguing about what to order before getting the same thing we always get. That is the realism I was proposing.”

He settled back into the almost-dance, his palm broad and warm against the small of her back while their movement continued without rhythm or purpose. When she admitted that becoming dangerously competent in Nonna’s kitchen appealed to her because it was unreasonable, Nico laughed against her hair. “There she is. I was worried for a second you were becoming wholesome. Now I understand. It’s competitive.”

The future she described was clear enough that Nico could see it too: Lilith moving through Nonna’s kitchen without stopping to ask where a utensil belonged, reaching instinctively for the correct pan while three separate women offered contradictory instructions she no longer needed. “You know the beginner tasks are not entirely about competence,” he warned. “They are also about hierarchy. You could become a Michelin-starred chef and one of my aunts would still hand you parsley because she remembers the first time you touched dough incorrectly.”

Her definition of victory—Nonna eventually walking away from the stove while Lilith remained responsible for something important—made him laugh outright. His grandmother’s trust did not manifest in praise so much as absence of supervision. “That’s actually accurate. The day she leaves the room while you’re responsible for something that can burn, call me immediately. I don’t care where I am. That deserves champagne.” He considered it. “Although maybe confirm she meant to leave before celebrating.”

He understood what sat beneath her determination without needing her to explain it further. Lilith paid attention to the things that mattered to people she loved with a precision Nico had learned to recognize as its own form of devotion. He had seen it in music she remembered despite pretending not to care, details about his schedule he had forgotten himself, the way she learned which family stories were funny and which ones carried old bruises beneath them. The kitchen was simply another language she had decided was worth understanding, and he knew better than to diminish that by reassuring her against an insecurity she had not expressed.

When she directed his attention toward the table, Nico followed her gaze and immediately understood what she meant. The courtyard he had obsessed over for hours had already begun undoing itself. Wineglasses stood at imperfect angles beside a torta missing several pieces. Her shoes had been abandoned where no designer would have approved. A fork rested against a plate streaked with custard. Their private photograph lay facedown beside everything else while several candles had burned low enough for wax to collect beneath them. What had looked arranged when she entered now looked occupied. Nico smiled. “Much better. Apparently the correct aesthetic was always mild destruction.”

Perfection had served its purpose; it had given her the first sight he wanted her to have, then surrendered gracefully to them. By tomorrow the flowers would still be beautiful and the stone would still carry spilled wax, but the courtyard would no longer be a proposal setting. “Now it looks true,” he said.

Her warning about becoming particularly annoying over him for the next forty-eight hours made one eyebrow rise. Nico had no intention of discouraging the renewed physical affection. When she promised staring, unnecessary touching and gratuitous references to her fiancé, he regarded her with theatrical concern. “Terrible. I don’t know how I’ll endure it.” His hand moved deliberately lower along her back. “Be patient with me.”

The question about how many times his family had nearly ruined the surprise wiped the smugness from his face. Nico knew immediately that denial was pointless. Too many people had been involved, and secrecy had occasionally depended less on discipline than on Lilith having no reason to be suspicious. “They were not all awful,” he said carefully. “Some understood the assignment. Others developed very creative definitions of subtle.” His aunt’s enthusiasm over the dress had come dangerously close to becoming incriminating, and at least one cousin had needed to be interrupted before completing a sentence Nico still intended to hold against him. When Lilith concluded that the conspiracy had succeeded primarily because she had not been looking for one, he sighed. “Unfortunately, yes. You were the most competent person involved, and nobody had even briefed you.”

Her announcement that she intended to rank everyone by performance made his eyes narrow. “No rankings,” he said automatically, then reconsidered with the expression of a man remembering his own grievances. “Actually, fine. I know who comes last, but I’m not telling you. I want independent confirmation.” His mouth curved. “If we’re humiliating my relatives, we’re doing it properly.”

Breakfast appeared in his imagination almost exactly as it had in hers, and he could see the entire thing before it happened. The secrecy tonight had been necessary precisely because tomorrow would be the opposite: loud, communal and impossible to control. “Hand first,” Nico confirmed when she predicted his mother’s priorities. “Then face. Then hand again. Then she’ll hug you and somehow inspect the ring over your shoulder while pretending she isn’t.”

Nonna’s inspection would be subtler only in her own opinion. Nico could already picture the old woman taking Lilith’s hand, studying the ring as though she possessed professional qualifications in gemstones, then turning the same scrutiny onto him with questions about where he found it, why he chose it and whether the jeweler had tried to cheat him. “Nonna will absolutely be evaluating me,” he said. “I’m optimistic.”

Their movement carried them farther beneath the café lights, neither of them particularly good at what they were calling dancing. Nico followed whatever small shift she made, occasionally guiding her around a chair or uneven section of stone without breaking the loose embrace. The elegance came accidentally from proximity rather than skill, and he suspected that was why it felt better than any formal dance either of them had endured where choreography mattered more than the person in front of you.

Her statement that she would remember how he looked tonight forever stopped him more effectively than any teasing had. Nico held her gaze as she separated him from the clothes, lights and flowers he had spent so long arranging, keeping instead the version of his face he would probably have chosen to erase from any public photograph. Red eyes. Failed composure. Vanity surviving somehow through tears. The description made him smile faintly. “Then keep him,” he said. “Nobody else gets that one anyway.”

The private photograph became an extension of the same idea. Public photographs could commemorate the engagement when they were ready; there would eventually be some polished image people associated with this period of their lives. It would not be that one. “It stays ours,” he promised. “When we’re ninety and someone offers an obscene amount of money for unseen photographs, we lie and say it never existed.”

The announcement of eighteen—or possibly nineteen—made him laugh as his eyes followed hers downward. “Nineteen,” he corrected with unnecessary confidence. “I counted.”

Her explanation of what she liked about the ring reached precisely the part of his vanity that was least superficial. Nico cared considerably more that she recognized his thought inside it than that she admired the object itself. She was correct that pointing into a case had never been an option. He had gone into the process convinced he would know the right thing when he saw it and discovered almost immediately that this gave him permission to reject nearly everything placed in front of him. His mouth curved as she described some imagined jeweler reconsidering his profession. “He’s fine,” Nico said, which was not remotely an answer and therefore confirmed everything.

“I did not torture anyone,” he clarified. “I asked questions. Many questions.” His expression took on defensive dignity. “There were settings that looked too new. Stones that were beautiful but felt like they were trying to become the entire personality of whoever wore them. Rings that looked expensive in a very loud way, which is different from looking beautiful.” He glanced briefly toward her hand. “And I kept thinking I would recognize yours when I saw it.”

He had. The search stopped feeling abstract the moment he looked at one design long enough to imagine it moving on her hand—holding a wineglass, turning a page, touching his face, pointing at him during an argument. “The jeweler survived,” he assured her. “Barely.”

Her warning that she would eventually demand the production notes made him smile. There was enough material without revisiting tonight’s family operation yet: the flowers had taken calls, the antique box had prompted opinions, and the ring itself had nearly become a second occupation. “Tomorrow. Almost full disclosure.” His eyes narrowed. “I reserve the right to protect sources.” The mention of fireworks still earned an immediate grimace. “And yes, he remains last.”

Her simple praise caught him without warning precisely because she did not make it grand. The quiet assurance that he had done well because the night had felt like them reached him more cleanly than any compliment about the setting. He turned his face slightly into her palm and admitted, “That was the only part I was afraid of getting wrong. I didn’t want to give you somebody else’s perfect proposal.”

Her kiss kept him from saying more. Nico leaned into it until she drew back to begin making demands, all of which required no negotiation. No calls. No messages. No family suddenly remembering some imaginary object they needed from the villa. Nico glanced toward the house and then back at her. “Already handled. My phone is inside. On silent. Everybody was told it can wait until morning.”

Her list for the rest of the night—wine, torta, more terrible dancing and absolutely nothing scheduled beyond that—earned immediate approval. There would be plenty of time for dates, venues, family opinions and questions neither of them had yet considered. Tonight he wanted enough hours for the engagement to belong only to them before it became information. “Perfect,” he said.

When she rested against him again, Nico’s chin settled lightly near the top of her head and their barely perceptible movement resumed. Her decision to postpone her transformation into a terrifying scholar of grammar and pastry until tomorrow made him laugh quietly. “Generous. I was worried I’d lose my fiancée to verb conjugations before midnight.”

The warning about what would happen once her Italian became good enough to catch conversations people assumed she had missed delighted him. Nico already knew exactly how the first incident would unfold: an aunt would say something quick under the assumption Lilith had only caught half of it, Lilith would answer flawlessly, and silence would fall across a family that otherwise considered silence a medical emergency. “I’m not rescuing anybody,” he promised. “I’m going to sit there and enjoy it.”

Her requirement that he look proud received a faintly offended lift of his brows. “Look proud? Emilia, I’m going to take credit. I’ll say I taught you everything while my entire family screams that I barely helped.”

Her final inventory of what eighty years gave her time to accomplish made Nico progressively more appalled. Fluency he could support. Kitchen mastery he had encouraged. Furniture theft remained contested but survivable. The family photographs crossed a line. “No. Absolutely not. We need a postnuptial agreement specifically addressing childhood photographs.”

The suggestion that he should have negotiated harder earned a resigned breath through his nose. Nico looked at the woman already wearing his ring, barefoot in their courtyard while calmly outlining a decades-long campaign against his furniture, dignity and photographic history, and found the terms still absurdly favorable. “Maybe. But I was emotional. You exploited a vulnerable man.”

Then she settled against him again, and Nico let the quiet stay quiet. Candle flames had thinned as they burned lower. Lemon and wine still lingered faintly on his tongue. Her bare feet moved against old stone while oxblood silk brushed his legs whenever they shifted. None of it required another declaration.

Then she called him bellissimo fiancé.

Nico tipped his head back just enough to look down at her. “Bellissimo,” he repeated. “Good. I was worried engagement might lower your standards.”

The declaration that she thought she would keep him made his mouth curve. His hand slid from her waist to the small of her back, bringing her fractionally closer. “Good,” he murmured, resting his forehead lightly against hers. “Because I’m very attached to my fiancée.”

Nico kissed her once, slow and warm, then drew back only far enough to look at her again. “Lucky me.”