Serpent King's Bride: A Dark Mafia Romance Trilogy

“Ma, please don’t worry,” he said, and even without seeing him, I could picture the furrow of his brow, the subtle clench of his jaw.

I leaned closer, pressing my ear against the door, my breath held tight in my chest. This felt important, it felt human. This was a connection, however fraught, to someone who mattered to him.

Evelyn was on speaker, but her voice was muddled, harder to hear.

“Justin can handle himself, you know that,” Nathan continued, the subtle rasp in his voice betraying his effort to stay calm. “He won’t give up the guy’s name because he doesn’t want Ba to go after him. He’s protecting him, like…like I would do.”

There was a sigh on the other end, and even without seeing her, I knew Evelyn Zhou was carrying the weight of the world on her shoulders. A mother torn between her husband’s iron will and her son’s desperate love.

“Ma,” Nathan’s voice dropped an octave, a steel thread weaving through the tenderness. “I’ve stood between Justin and Ba before. Remember when he came back from Hong Kong? I got in the way then. I have the scars to prove it and I would do it all over again.”

Evelyn’s response was muted, but it didn’t need to be loud for its significance to echo through the room, through Nathan’s tightly coiled frame.

I closed my eyes, thinking back to the first time I’d seen the jagged lines tracing his skin—a map of pain and protection that he wore like armor. At first, I thought they were just the marks of a man with his job; cruel, unmoved, merciless.

But it wasn’t just that.

They were more than just remnants of past fights; they were a testament to his defiance, to the lengths he’d go to shield those he loved from the cruelty of his father’s world.

And in that moment, as Nathan’s words hung heavy in the air, I felt a shift within me. Fear mingled with something else—an unbidden respect for the man on the other side of the door.

It made desire pool between my legs, which surprised me. But it steeled my resolve, too. I was sure of it then: I wasn’t going anywhere.

I took a deep breath, trying to calm my racing heart. When I finally knocked on the door, Nathan looked up, his face reverting to the unreadable mask he presented to the world.

“Can I come in?” I asked, my voice steady despite the pounding of my heart.

He nodded once, a silent sentinel guarding realms of pain and power I could only begin to understand. As I stepped into the room, an oppressive silence settled between us, broken only by the faint hum of the city in the distance, the ocean waves just beyond the balcony. Nathan’s eyes remained fixed on mine, searching, perhaps, for signs of weakness or deceit. But I offered neither; only the unspoken acknowledgment of shared secrets and the weight they carried.

“I overheard you talking to your mom,” I said at last, a clumsy attempt to bridge the chasm that lay open, raw and daunting, between us.

“What did you hear?” he asked.

“Not much,” I said. “That she’s worried. That she loves you.”

“Well, she shouldn’t,” he replied, his tone flat, but I heard the faintest crack in his voice. “It makes you soft.”

“Or maybe it makes you stronger,” I countered quietly, challenging him to consider a truth he had long dismissed.

I realized that this standoff was going nowhere when his gaze bore into mine, but he said absolutely nothing.

I took a deep breath, filling my lungs with the tense air of his room.

“Look, Nathan,” I began, my voice steady despite the tremors I felt within. “You were right.”

He waited for me.

“You were right–it’s too risky for us to do anything else, but I want you to know that this isn’t the reason I’m doing this…getting married, I mean.”

He raised his eyebrows, hurt flashing in his eyes for a split second before he fixed his face.

“We’re still getting married. I’m still in this. I’m still here, with you.”

A muscle twitched in his jaw, the only sign that my words had struck a chord.

“This marriage…” he said after a moment, the word sounding more like a death sentence than a future. “It’s just another lie, Abby.”

“It’s more than that,” I insisted, leaning closer, daring to breach the distance between us. “It’s our shield. It’s how we survive this.”