Chapter 35 Bella
BELLA
“Haven’t you figured it out by now, malyshka?” Slava asks me back.
He’s right. I have.
But if I’ve figured it out by now, then why am I still asking him? Maybe I need to hear her name pass through his lips again so that I can see just how much she still matters to him.
So I can understand just how badly my betrayal has cut him.
And maybe, just maybe, once he finds out that terrible truth about me, we can find a way to go back to the people we were. Go back to the way that we were. Go back to hating each other.
Because as long as we can hate each other, I—no, we—can walk away from this with some shred of our hearts still intact.
And before I can hurt him any more than I’ve already hurt him.
“I want to hear you say it,” I reply in a small voice. “Just so that I’m sure.”
He nods, and threads his fingers into mine. I want to pull them back because I don’t deserve his gentleness. I deserve only his anger and his hate. But my arm refuses to move, and so I sit there on the edge of the desk.
His hand tightens. And just like on Don Leo’s yacht, I can’t feel his heat reach me anymore.
“It was Gia.”
My eyes squeeze shut, and the sting of tears is sharp in my nose.
“How?”
“I fell in love with her,” Slava breathes. “Seven years ago.”
Love.
That word sounds foreign coming from him. Everything I’ve ever seen about this man suggests that he has no capacity to love. And yet he does. I’ve seen it. From the closet he keeps locked away, the tightness with which he embraces Alessandro, and the anger that burns every time he sees my necklace.
No, I correct myself. Not my necklace. Gia’s necklace.
“We met at a gallery opening in Manhattan. She was there to escape from her familial obligations. I was there because…” A ghost of a smile flickers on his face, bitter and brief. “Because I wanted to see something beautiful that no one had died for.”
His voice is tender and raw as he speaks about this memory, and even though I know Gia is dead and gone for seven years, I can’t help the bitter jealousy and shame clawing at my throat.
“She wore this deep blue dress that made her look like she’d walked out of a Renaissance painting. And when I introduced myself, she knew exactly who I was,” he continues, and every word drags me further down into the depth of my shame and jealousy. “She didn’t flinch. Didn’t even try to leave.”
“And that was when you fell for her? Right from the start?”
“Right from the start.” The bitter smile appears again. “She laughed. And I was lost.”
As I listen to him tell the story of his love, I can see a shadow of the Slava that existed before grief carved him into the man I know.
Ludmilla was right. A part of Slava’s heart really did die with Gia.
“This was our place,” he says, glancing around the room. “We spent seven months here in secret from her family. She told her family that her trips to France were nothing more than art trips. And they believed her.”
He tells me how they hid it. Private trips to France that she claimed to her family were art trips. And each trip brought her here to this chateau and the man her family wanted to put in the ground.
“Then she got pregnant.” My voice is hoarse as I say it.
Slava nods. “Then she got pregnant, and we decided that we couldn’t hide anymore. So, we eloped.”
He reaches down into the desk, pulls open a drawer, and takes out a picture frame. In it, there’s a photo of a woman I’ve never seen before but somehow recognize.
Dark hair, warm eyes, and a smirk of a smile that carries both joy and defiance. She’s in a radiant wedding dress, and there, at her throat.
A seven-pointed star with the diamond at its center.
I reach up and touch it, and hate myself more and more.
“Seven points for the seven months of secrecy.” His voice is thick and low now.
“The diamond she deserved something that would last forever. Gold because silver was too common, too ordinary, and too expected for a woman who had never been any of those things. And as long as we were here in France, her family could never touch her.”
He puts the photo back into the drawer, and reverently closes it shut.
“How did she die?”
He closes his eyes, and his jaw works for a moment before he opens them again. And when I look into their winter-gray, I see nothing but hate.
“We trusted the wrong person.”
My heart stops. “Luca…”
“Luca,” Slava says. “He was her driver, and she thought she could trust him with our secret when we returned to Queens for Alessandro’s baptism five years ago.”
I gasp. “But why did you come back?”
“Gia wanted our son to know his roots. Against all good judgement, she wanted him to be baptized in New York. I tried to argue against it, telling her that it’s not safe.” He sighs. “But she was adamant about this one thing. So we went back.”
I want to cover my ears and stop listening. With every word, the image that I had of Luca—the protective big brother who would do anything to keep me safe—cracks a little bit more.
And sooner or later, it’s going to shatter.
“When we got back, Luca reported her return to Don Leo.” Slava’s voice is flat now, drained of everything but fact. “He told them everything. The trips to France, Gia’s pregnancy, and her marriage to me. He sold Gia’s entire life for a chance to rise in the D’Ambrosio ranks.”
Slava’s eyes meet mine, and there’s no mercy in them.
“Her family took her from me, and Don Leo killed her himself.” Slava invades my space. “To preserve his family honor.”
The room is spinning. The desk beneath me feels like it’s dissolving. I grip the edge like they’re the only solid things left in the world.
Slava’s fingers reach out and grip the seven-pointed star, and it feels like the necklace is strangling me.
“And Luca stole this for himself.”
The room is too small. The walls are too close. I am drowning in the wreckage of everything I thought I knew about my brother and about myself.
“So I killed him,” Slava says. “Him and Don Leo’s oldest son Vinny. I wanted Don Leo to know what it felt like to lose something precious.”
“That’s not the story Luca told me.”
“No,” Slava says. “I imagine it isn’t.”
“He gave me the necklace three weeks before he died. Told me he’d bought it himself. That he’d saved up for months because I deserved something beautiful.”
“He lied.” Slava’s hand moves up the gold chain until it closes around my throat. “He was a traitor and a thief who stole a woman’s life for a promotion.”
His fingers tighten ever so slightly, and his thumb presses against the pulse in my throat.
“He sold you a lie and made you believe he was something worth mourning.”
I am crying. I don’t know when I started, but tears are streaming down my face, hot and relentless. The brother I’ve been avenging was never real.
He was the villain all along.
“These clothes,” I manage, my voice breaking. “They belonged to Gia too, didn’t they?”
Slava’s expression shifts. Something softer, something sadder.
“Yes.”
I press a hand to my mouth, trying to contain the sob that wants to escape. I was jealous of her. I resented her presence in them.
I wore a murdered woman’s clothes, and hated her for it.
And before I slipped them on, I completed Luca’s betrayal.
If Luca was the villain, then what does that make me?
“And her family never found out about Alessandro?”
“No. They knew his baptism name, but not his real name.”
“Until now,” I whisper.
Until I told them.
“Until now.” He nods.
My hands move up and unclasp the necklace before I can stop myself. It comes undone easily enough. The chain falls away from my neck, and drapes over Slava’s fingers around my throat.
“Take it,” I whisper.
But Slava doesn’t move.
“It belonged to Gia,” I continue, my voice steady even though nothing else about me is. “Not to me. It was never mine. And it’s clear she still holds your heart.”
“Keep it.”
“I can’t—”
“Keep it, Bella.” He releases my throat, and then re-clasps the necklace around my neck. “Gia is dead. She’s been dead for six years, and nothing can bring her back.”
“Then why did you want to get it back so badly?”
“Because I wanted you to know the truth.” His eyes meet mine. “I wanted to destroy you with it. But now, I don’t know if I can anymore.”
“Why not?”
“Because things have changed between us.” His thumb traces the line of my jaw, impossibly gentle.
“In the short time we’ve spent together, I’ve seen the depth to which you can love.
The depth that your love will drive you.
You crossed enemy lines for your brother because he was the hero of your story but the villain in mine.
And your love drove you to walk into my life fearlessly. ”
The tears won’t stop. They’re running down my cheeks and I can’t even pretend to control them anymore. This man—this monster I came here to destroy—just handed me the most vulnerable thing he possesses.
And I’m sitting here covered in guilt I can’t confess, wearing the skin of a woman who never should have died.
He tilts my chin up and wipes away at my tears.
The gesture feels familiar and intimate, far more intimate than I deserve.
Slowly, drop by drop, heat returns. It moves from the tip of his finger through my chin, beads in my throat, and rolls down into my stomach like it has from the countless small touches he’s left on me.
But where each prior touch all carried some variation of dominance, control, and command, this one is different.
This one seems to tell me: Look at me and see me as I see you.
“You asked me what we are,” he says quietly. “And I don’t have a proper answer for you because I don’t know what to call us. But I know you’re not my enemy. Maybe you never were.”
“Don’t.” I pull back from his touch, put distance between us. “Don’t say things like that.”
He looks at me quizzically, genuinely confused for what might be the first time since I’ve known him. “Why?”
The tears are coming faster now, and the truth is pressing against my throat like a scream. I want to tell him. I want to confess everything about my betrayal—about the information I handed over without understanding what the costs were.
I want to fall at his feet and beg forgiveness for being exactly what Luca was: a traitor who traded someone’s safety for her own agenda.
But I can’t.
Because if I tell him, I’ll lose him. And losing him means losing this thing that’s starting to feel terrifyingly real.
“Bella.” He reaches for me, and I see tender insistence in his eyes, and it breaks something fundamental in my chest. “Tell me why.”
“Because I’m not who you think I am.”
His hand brushes my cheek, catching tears that won’t stop falling. “I know exactly who you are.”
No. He doesn’t. He really, really doesn’t.
I turn my face away from his touch, push myself back away from him, and run.
The hallway of the chateau rushes past me, and I can feel the ghost of Gia D’Ambrosio chasing through its dark corners. My feet carry me through a house holding six years of grief in its walls.
I run because I cannot bring myself to continue standing in front of a man who just handed me his entire heart.
And I know I can’t pretend like I deserve to have it.