For one heart-stopping moment Sia only blinks at me, her face expressionless in the pale glow of the city seeping through the window.

The moment is broken when a radiant grin flashes across her face. “Gio,” she says, a laugh in her voice. “What?”

“Marry me.” My confidence grows. Yes. This is right. The rightness feels like the final puzzle piece sliding into place, and giddiness chases after it. I squeeze Sia’s hands. “Don’t you see it?”

“I see how it’d never work.” There’s still that hint of a laugh bubbling up, but Sia’s expression is serious. “We can’t get married. We’ve known each other for five seconds. Who would marry us?”

“No.” I can see the hope written on her face. It’s as obvious as a fucking sunrise, but I get it—I’d be reluctant to believe, too. After all the running we’ve done. After we’ve been shot at. After I almost killed her. “We’ve known each other for a lot longer than that.”

“But we were kids when—”

“Tell me you don’t still feel it.” I’m a dick for interrupting her, but my blood is singing with this solution, with this unbearably right decision. “Tell me you don’t feel how good it is to be together. Tell me it doesn’t feel right.”

Sia bites her lip. “Our families—”

“That’s exactly it.” This is the crowning achievement of the whole plan. If I marry her, she’ll be my family. “This is the only way that our families will ever join. This is the only way they’ll ever accept you.” I laugh out loud. “My family—they never go after their own. Become a Moretto, Sia, and you’ll be safe for the rest of your life.”

Her shoulders slump, a tiny movement, but it’s obvious she’s imagining the sheer relief of it. No more running. No more hiding. No more brothers shooting at her head.

“It’s impossible, Gio.” Sia’s voice drops to a whisper. “They’d never accept me. We’d always have to keep moving. I don’t know any city in the world where—” She swallows hard. “Where you can completely disappear.”

“I don’t want to disappear. I want them to see you for who you are—an innocent.” She’s so gorgeous in the half-light, her naked body so lithe and smooth, and my cock pulses against my pants. “Although you’re not quite as innocent as you seem.”

Sia catches the dirty undertone to my voice and her blue eyes flash with want. She raises one of my hands to her chest and presses it there, over her heart, my palm tantalizingly close to the nipples I’m desperate to play with. “Are you sure about this? It’s—it’s a serious thing, getting married, and I wouldn’t want to—”

I close my eyes and block everything out.

The hotel room.

The never-ending day.

The orders from my father.

Everything, except the beat of Sia’s heart under my palm.

It’s fast but steady, and maybe I’m imagining it, but her skin warms under my touch. I feel every movement of her, every breath, every shudder, every tremble. Right now, there is no such thing as Ricci and Moretto—there is only Gio and Sia.

I breathe her in.

She smells like shampoo and a hint of me, and underneath that there’s the sweet scent of her desire. How close we got, damn it. How close.

I search every inch of my soul for a warning. A thought that tells me to back away, that marrying her would be a mistake, that it’s not the clean salvation I thought it was.

There is nothing. Only a great, pulsing hope, like I’m standing on the edge of reality, a step away from jumping into the life I’m supposed to have. The life I always, even as a teenage boy, wanted. With my hand over her heart, I can admit it in the deepest parts of myself: I always wanted Sia more than anything else, so powerfully that it was too much to put into words.

It made sense, then, that we shouldn’t end up together. How many people end up with one woman? How many people follow the same person from middle school to marriage and never stray, never look at another person? Practically no one. I thought that’s how life went—you met someone who made you burn with life, and you let that fade away until you found someone who did the same thing for you.

I never did.

And yes, we are in a time of turmoil. Yes, our first priority right now is staying alive, not having a sweeping romance that everyone will remember for the rest of time. It’s tense and gritty and hard, and it’s not the way I would have chosen to fall in love.

I didn’t, not really. I fell for her all the way back in school, the first time I saw the sun play in her hair.

All I need to do now is buy time to explore every inch of her, every nuance.

I need to buy the rest of our lives.

I open my eyes. “I’m sure, Sia. I’ve never been more sure of anything in my life.”

She exhales, and I hear the acceptance in that breath. “But how? How could we do that?”

“You didn’t answer my question.”

Her mouth curls up into a coy smile. “You didn’t ask me a question.”

I shift my grasp so that her hands are in mine again. “Sia, I don’t give the slightest fuck what your last name is or was or will be. Will you marry me?”

She looks into my eyes, deeply, searching, and then gives a little nod that’s so full of excitement and relief that it breaks my heart. “Yes. But Gio—”

“I know where to go,” I tell her. “I know what to do. But we’re going to have to move fast.”