Chapter 14 Beatrice
BEATRICE
It’s been days since the restaurant, and Giacomo has vanished from my life as if he never existed. No calls. No messages. No sudden footsteps outside my door. The silence should worry me, but instead it settles around me like stolen air—unnerving, addictive, far too easy to sink into.
I’ve been running every morning just to quiet my mind, pounding through the streets until my lungs burn and my thoughts blur. But no matter how far I push my body, no matter how hard I try to outrun the chaos, one name keeps slipping through the cracks, refusing to let me forget.
Matteo.
I haven’t seen him either. Not because he isn’t around—I know he is—but because I have perfected the art of taking alternate hallways, waiting for empty elevators, lingering at my door until I’m certain his has stayed closed.
It feels childish and impossible and yet absolutely necessary.
Being near him knocks me off-center, and I can’t afford that right now.
My legs burn as I take the final flight of stairs up to my floor.
Sweat cools against my skin, my mind still racing ahead of me, planning, fearing, hoping.
I push open the stairwell door and step into the hallway.
The cool corridor air wraps around me, a stark contrast to the heat still clinging to my skin from the run.
I reach into the pocket of my running shorts, fingers fumbling for my keys, but they slip through my damp grip, hitting the floor with a sharp scatter of metal.
“Great,” I mutter, bending down—but another hand reaches them first.
I look up, startled.
Matteo stands there.
His hair is damp, like he’s just come from a shower, curls falling messily onto his forehead.
His T-shirt clings to him in a way that makes looking at him feel like a dangerous choice.
His eyes track me with a quiet intensity, as though he’d been passing by for some other reason but now can’t seem to look away.
“Here,” he says softly, holding out my keys.
I straighten, my breath catching despite my best intentions. “Thank you.”
“You okay?” The question is simple, but his voice carries weight, like he’s asking something infinitely larger.
I force a smile—thin, brittle, nothing like the real thing. “Just clumsy today.”
He studies me for a moment too long, long enough that the air between us feels charged and unsettling. His gaze flicks from my eyes to my mouth and back again, not with hunger, but with a kind of restrained concern that makes my chest tighten.
“You don’t have to pretend with me,” he says, his tone low and steady, cutting straight through the facade I’ve been wearing for days.
My fingers curl around the keys, knuckles whitening. “That’s the problem,” I answer quietly. “I’m tired of pretending. Even with myself.”
Something shifts in his expression—recognition, maybe, or the kind of understanding that feels almost dangerous to receive.
I break the moment first, turning toward my door.
“Good day, Matteo,” I murmur.
His voice follows me—quiet, roughened at the edges, impossible to ignore.
“Good day, Beatrice.”
And even as I close the door behind me, that soft, restrained echo lingers against my spine, stronger than the run, stronger than my resolve, stronger than anything I want to admit.
The apartment is too quiet when I step inside—quiet in that hollow, echoing way that leaves too much room for thoughts I’ve tried to outrun since the gala and everything after.
My body still hums with the memory I shouldn’t be reliving, the one I warned myself to forget before it could burrow too deep, and yet it clings to me stubbornly, pulsing beneath my skin.
His mouth on me, coaxing pleasure so intense it stripped me down to something raw and real.
His hands anchoring me, steadying me, claiming me in ways I had never allowed anyone to do.
The startling revelation that for the first time in months—maybe years—I felt alive.
I shake the thoughts off, or try to, moving deeper into the apartment as if motion itself could silence the fragments of him sliding through my mind.
I drop my keys on the counter and kick off my running shoes, my socks damp with sweat, and that’s when I notice the envelope propped neatly beside a vase of lilies—white, flawless, arranged with precision.
A gift meant to soothe, to distract, to gloss over the tension and fear he pretends he never causes.
But tonight, the sight of them does not tether me to him. If anything, it pushes me further away.
My fingers tighten around the envelope as I unfold the note inside.
Gone for business. Two weeks. Big deal to close. Miss you already. —G.
Two weeks.
Two full weeks without the weight of his watchful eyes, without monitoring every tone, every expression, every breath. Two weeks without the carefully constructed smiles that have left my cheeks aching. Two weeks where silence might finally mean something other than dread.
A slow, unexpected breath slips from my chest. Relief—warm, illicit, unmistakable—moves through me like sunlight cracking through storm clouds.
I set the note beside the lilies and study them closely.
Their petals are soft, pristine, beautiful in a way that feels painfully ironic.
They are meant to signify peace, purity, remembrance…
yet here they sit, trying and failing to disguise the wounds beneath my skin that have been bleeding for months.
“It’s almost fitting,” I murmur, brushing my thumb across a petal. “People use these at funerals. I suppose a part of me has been dying.”
The realization doesn’t come as a sudden jolt. It’s been gathering for weeks, simmering beneath every forced smile, every controlled breath, every moment I told myself to endure just a little longer. Tonight simply strips away the last veil.
I lift my gaze and look around the penthouse—the floor-to-ceiling windows, the immaculate hardwood floors, the expensive art curated to impress anyone who enters. A cage disguised as luxury.
My home doesn’t feel like mine.
My life doesn’t feel like mine.
And then I see him in my mind—Matteo—his eyes molten and unguarded, his touch a contradiction of gentleness and possession, his kiss searing something awake inside me that I had long believed dead.
The memory strikes me with startling clarity, and something inside me shifts long before I can resist it.
Not a flicker. Not a whisper.
A breaking. A clean, undeniable snap.
“I can’t do this,” I breathe, and the words feel like a truth that has been waiting behind my teeth for far too long. “I can’t do this anymore.”
I can’t keep pretending I’m planning a wedding I never wanted.
I can’t keep dressing in gold and calling it freedom.
I can’t keep letting fear dictate the shape of my life.
I would rather face the debt, the shame, the consequences that come with leaving than let him carve away the last piece of myself I still recognize.
“I won’t marry him.” My voice steadies, gaining weight. “Not now, not ever. I don’t care what it costs me—my comfort, my reputation, my safety. I will burn everything to the ground before I become his wife.”
The vow hangs in the air like a brand.
I walk to the window and rest my forehead against the cool glass, watching the city below—messy, loud, chaotic, pulsing with people living their lives on their own terms. The sight carves something fierce and bright through my chest.
“When he comes back,” I whisper, “I’ll tell him. I’m done. I’m walking away. I’ll face whatever comes after.”
If I have to take out a loan, I will.
If I have to work myself raw, I will.
If I have to rebuild my life from ashes, I will.
Because the alternative is a lifetime of pretending I’m free while living in a gilded cage.
For the first time in months, I feel certainty settle into my bones—heavy, unshakable, resolute.
Matteo’s voice echoes in the back of my mind, low and commanding. Choose you, for you, bella.
And for the first time, I let myself believe those words.
“I will,” I say softly, turning away from the window as a sense of determination ignites in my chest. I walk toward the bedroom, not with fear, but with purpose.
Two weeks. Two weeks to free myself. Two weeks to reclaim the woman I was before all of this.
And this time, nothing—not money, not fear, not even Giacomo—will stop me.
The next morning, I wake with a clarity that feels almost foreign, as if someone has poured steel into my bones overnight.
For weeks I have been moving through life like a ghost in my own story, smiling when expected, speaking softly, swallowing every instinct that told me this was not my path.
I kept telling myself to adapt, to be grateful, to learn how to love the life that had been handed to me.
But I am done surviving on delusion. I want something real.
Something I built. Something that cannot be taken from me.
I shower, get dressed, and leave the penthouse with my head held higher than it has been in months.
I half-expect Matteo’s door to open as I pass, half-expect to see him leaning there with that unreadable stare that always knots something low in my stomach.
Every time I walk this hallway, a part of me braces for him—his height filling the frame, his eyes sweeping over me with that quiet intensity that says far more than his mouth ever does.
But the hallway stays empty. Quiet. Merciful.
And I’m grateful. Or at least I pretend to be.
After what happened between us, after the way he touched me like he could rearrange pieces of me I didn’t even know were broken, I need distance.
I need clarity. I can only survive one dangerous man at a time, and Matteo is…
too much. Too potent. Too capable of tilting the decisions I have barely begun to find the courage to make.
I step into the elevator, exhale slowly, and try to remind myself why I’m doing this—why I need to stay focused, why every breath has to be deliberate now.