THE DEVIL'S DEVOTION

Nazario Cruento buried a woman once. He swore he'd never bury another piece of himself in someone again.

He kept that promise for years. Women came and went - beautiful, eager, forgettable. He gave them nothing that mattered, because nothing had mattered since he was young enough to believe love was safe.

Then he sees her. Alone in a corner booth, laughing at her phone like the whole world could burn down around her and she wouldn't notice. She isn't performing loneliness. She isn't performing anything. And Nazario Cruento - a man who has never once gone unnoticed in his life - realizes he is invisible to her, and it wrecks him.

She gives him nothing but a maybe. He tears through an entire company, building by building, manager by manager, until he finds her voice on the other end of a phone line. He doesn't ask her name. He already knows.

What he learns after undoes him completely. She's quiet with the world and unhinged behind closed doors - loud, wild, ridiculous, gloriously herself the second a door shuts and no one's watching. She loves like her adoptive mother taught her to love - with her whole chest, mothering and devoted all at once, before she's even sure she's allowed to. Her apartment isn't a home. It's the only place in the world she's ever let herself be fully seen.

She lets him in anyway.

And for the first time since he buried the girl he was supposed to marry, Nazario Cruento feels something he thought had died with her.

He falls. Not gently. Not like before. He falls the way a man falls when he thought he'd never fall again - hard, fast, terrified, unrecognizable even to himself.

So when it's time to go home, he doesn't ask her to visit.

He decides she's already his.

Zuri thinks it's a vacation - weeks away from work, from noise, from a world that's never made room for who she really is. Nazario knows the second she steps off that plane, she's never leaving again.

Then his mother meets her.

And decides that whatever Nazario has found in