Page 39 of Modern Romance September 2025 5-8
Dragos’s Broken Vows
Millie Adams
For Voltron, the instigators behind many shenanigans and the receivers of many outraged texts. If not for you, this one wouldn’t exist.
CHAPTER ONE
Cassandra
I’M THE MADwife in the attic.
The realization hits me like a closed fist, and my knees buckle with the force of it. I lean against the wall, hand pressed to my heart.
I stare around the room at the paintings I’ve done over the last six months. Each one a testament to my degrading mental health, growing darker and darker, the last one a black hole with only a spot of brightness at the center. The light at the end of the tunnel? Or a fall into nothingness? I can’t tell anymore.
The trouble with dreaming of finding your own Mr. Rochester is that it’s tempting to believe you’ll be Jane Eyre.
That’s the hubris of youth and inexperience. The belief you’ll be different somehow than all those other girls. The belief that you can save him when no one else could.
I admit defeat, then and there.
I can’t save Dragos Apostolis. Not from his inner demons, or himself. I can’t saveus.
When I’m alone in this house—and I am far too often, wandering the halls like the ghost of a girl who used to believe in love—I forget how I ended up here.
I can forget the way my world stopped the first time I saw the man I now call my husband.
Six foot five, broad shoulders, short black hair. His eyes a surreal crystalline blue, a scar on his cheek keeping him from looking too close to pretty. His knuckles were tattooed in severe black ink, one letter on each finger, the words in Romanian.
I found out what it meant later. He spelled it out for me, counting on those fingers as he thrust them into me.
Even now that memory makes me shiver.
That’s my madness, though, and I know it.
I knew he was dangerous from the first, even though he was dressed in a bespoke suit, a guest at the exclusive fundraiser I was waiting tables at to make ends meet while I studied abroad in London, away from my small town, away from my loving family.
But I wondered, how dangerous could he be?
I had been a very naive girl. Though not naive enough not to realize the definition of a bad-boy fantasy, and at twenty I’d held onto my virginity for far too long and I’d been overcome by the desire to beg him to take it.
I hadn’t had to beg. Though he likes me to do it.
But I’m not pathetic enough to do it, not anymore.
That first night is still burned into my memory. He approached me with the smooth grace of a shark cutting through the water, and I was stunned that the man who had caught my attention and held it had sought me out.
As I stand there, in my perch in the attic, looking down at our manicured garden—hismanicured garden—I see that night play out in my mind.
I’m holding a tray of drinks when the man comes over and lifts it up off my hand and sets it on a nearby table.
“It’s my job to carry that.”
His eyes are so dark they’re nearly black. They catch mine, then they rake over my body so intently it feels like a touch. “Your hands are far too lovely for such a menial task. I can perhaps think of a better use for them.”
His accent is gorgeous, though I can’t place it. I know I shouldn’t be thinking about his accent. I should be angry that he’s made such an indecent comment. I’m not.
“As far as I’m aware I take answers from my boss. And not from you.” I’m not sure what instinct spurs me to come back at him like that. To engage in what might’ve been banter if this were a meet-cute.
