Chapter 10
CHAPTER TEN
Matteo
I should have known.
The minute I stepped away, I should have expected she’d try something. Alessia Moretti doesn’t sit quietly in cages.
I round the corner and there she is, barefoot, clutching a vase, eyes wide and wild. Her hair is damp from the shower, the hem of my black shirt clinging to her thighs. She looks like sin and defiance and desperation all rolled into one.
For a heartbeat, I don’t move. I just take in the sight of her, fire burning in her eyes, chest rising fast with adrenaline. She’s beautiful like this, more dangerous than any Moretti soldier.
Then she raises the vase.
My body reacts before my mind does. I lunge forward, closing the distance in three strides. My hand shoots up, catching her wrist mid-swing, stopping the porcelain an inch from my head. The impact throws down my arm, her strength is surprising.
“You were going to crack my skull open with a vase?” My voice is low, lethal.
She doesn’t flinch. “If I’d had the chance, yes.”
For a moment, fury roars in me, but underneath it, desire coils like smoke. She’s the only person in this house reckless enough to look me in the eye and admit she meant to strike. Few men would dare. Fewer women. I had no idea that would be such a turn-on.
I twist the vase from her grip and shove it onto a nearby table, crowding her back against the wall in the same motion. My hand stays wrapped around her wrist, pinning it beside her head. Her pulse hammers against my palm.
“How did you get outside?” I snarl, my face inches from hers.
She bares her teeth in something that’s not quite a smile. “You’re mad if you think I’ll tell you.”
Christ. She’s infuriating. Defiant to the last breath. And it makes me want to break her.
“If you ever try something like this again, I won’t be gentle.” My grip tightens just enough to remind her who holds the power. “I’ll chain you to the bed and throw away the key.”
Her eyes blaze, but there’s no fear in them. Only stubborn fire. “Better a chain I can see than invisible ones you pretend don’t exist.”
The words hit harder than I expect, a punch of truth I can’t entirely dodge. I swallow the reaction just in time.
I lean closer, my breath brushing her damp hair. “Careful, principessa. Don’t test me.”
For a heartbeat, the air between us crackles.
Her chest heaves, lips parted, eyes flicking to my mouth before snapping back up. I see the war inside her, the hate and want, clashing until neither wins.
I step back abruptly, releasing her wrist before I forget myself. The imprint of her pulse lingers in my hand.
“Get inside.” My voice is ice again, honed sharp to hide the heat beneath.
She straightens, smoothing the hem of my shirt with trembling fingers, but she doesn’t obey immediately.
“Make me.”
My jaw tightens. The urge to throw her over my shoulder and prove exactly how little choice she has burns hot. Instead, I clamp down on it, forcing control.
“Inside. Now.”
This time, she moves. Slowly, but she moves. I follow, closing the door behind us.
She crosses her arms, glaring at me from the middle of the room. “So that’s your solution? Threatening to chain me like some animal?”
“That’s my promise.”
Her laugh is sharp but brittle. “You really don’t know what to do with me, do you?”
I take a step closer, letting her feel the weight of my shadow. “Oh, principessa. I know exactly what to do with you. The question is whether you’re ready to face it.”
Alessia
When Matteo drags me back inside, the room hums with the residual violence of what I tried to do and what I almost succeeded at.
He releases me at last and steps back, the silhouette of a predator folding into the calm of a king who’s just stifled a rebellion.
As I scan his poise, my eyes catch a corner of his shirt stained with blood.
If he dies, I won’t be bargaining. I’ll be bargaining with men who’d slit a throat for a favor. So I step forward.
“Your shirt,” I say, voice low and quick. “It’s bleeding through.”
He looks at me then, as if surprised by a new variable. For a ragged second his facade splits and a bare sliver of something like calculation or… concern slips through. Then he blinks it away.
“Leave it,” he says, too clipped.
“No.” The word comes sharp. I can feel the heat of his glare and yet drag a cloth from the nearby desk, my fingers steady because the thought of what follows if I don’t act is steadier still. “If you die, I don’t know what happens to me.”
The admission sits between us; plain, ugly, true. He looks at me like he is considering the possibility of throwing me out the next minute, then he loosens the cuff of his shirt, unbuttons his collar, and frees the arm just enough for me to take a look at the wound.
His skin is hot under the thin fabric. Blood beads at the collar and dark dots spread like bruises.
I get a cloth and some hot water from the bathroom and then I press the cloth to the wound.
He inhales, the sound sharp and instinctive.
My hands linger over the cut, dampening it, mopping it with small motions.
Up close, I see the wound more clearly — a shallow, ragged line. There’s dirt at the edges.
The heat of him is a living thing; the scent of soap and the iron tang of blood smells together around me. My fingers brush his ribs and I have a flash of unnamable thoughts that stab through me. He doesn’t jerk away while he watches my face, and hands working.
“Stop,” he whispers. The word is raw enough to shatter the quiet. “You have helped enough.”
“I have to clean it up properly to be sure it doesn’t get infected.” I press harder.
“Alright.” He responds. That’s shocking, I predicted he would refuse.
My thumb finds the edge of the tear and I press until the bleeding slows. He swallows around something, breath hitching, and his eyes drop to my mouth. For a beat we are simply human: two bodies, two breaths, two truths laid ugly and necessarily on top of each other.
He lifts a hand and covers mine. His palm is large, callused, and impossibly sure. The touch is calm and questioning. I look at him — at that flash of scar along his jaw, the way his mouth tightens and something collapses inside the careful walls I’ve been raising for forty-five days.
Then he leans down and kisses me.
It is a hit, not a caress: hard, desperate, as the room shrinks to the press of lips and the scrape of breath.
My body answers the way bodies do to fire—quick, stupid, wanting.
His hand tightens at my jaw, not brutal but not gentle either, and I taste copper and soap and the faint, clean sting of his wound.
The kiss eats me whole; hunger and fury coiled into one impossible need. For a terrifying second I forget I was kidnapped, the plans, the war, the men who would kill me if he left an empty chair. I lean out towards him, and he narrows the edge of his mouth.
Then I pull back, hard, as if the thought of surrendering is a betrayal to everything I survived.
He staggers back like I’ve cut him, eyes wide and furious, the raw hunger replaced by something sterner. For a moment the room is noisy with the sound of our breathing before he walks away without a word.
A second later I hear the key and once again I am locked inside, but this time I know one thing—I need to get out of here fast before I do something incredibly stupid… like sleep with my dead husband’s enemy.