Chapter 19 Matteo
Matteo
The storm building outside matches the violence churning in my chest. Isabella has been sleepwalking through the house all day since yesterday's revelations about her parents, and I can't reach her through the walls she's rebuilt.
But I can give her something back.
I find her in the library, curled in the leather chair by the window. She's not reading, just staring at pages like they might hold answers to questions she's afraid to ask.
"Bella." I pull her phone from my pocket, the device warm against my palm. "This belongs to you."
Confusion flickers across her face, those green eyes I've memorized going wide. "What?"
"Your phone." I hold it out, watching her pulse jump in her throat. "You should have it back."
She stares at the device like it might bite her, then reaches out slowly. Her fingers brush mine as she takes it, and that familiar jolt of electricity shoots up my arm. Christ, even now, even when she's hollow-eyed and distant, touching her sets my blood on fire.
"I don't understand." Her voice carries that breathless quality that makes me want to press my mouth to her throat. "Why now?"
"Because you're not my prisoner, tesoro. You're here because it's safe. Because I want you here." The endearment slips out naturally, the way it always does when I'm trying to gentle her. "There's a difference."
Hope blooms across her face, the first real emotion I've seen all day. She turns the phone over in her hands, thumb tracing familiar edges, and something in my chest loosens at the sight.
"Thank you," she whispers, and fuck me, the gratitude in her voice almost brings me to my knees. "This means everything."
I want to stay, to watch her reconnect with her world. But my encrypted laptop is chiming from the office, and I have business that keeps her safe.
Twenty minutes later, I'm staring at intel that makes my blood turn to ice. Chase's lieutenant tried to reach Isabella this morning. A fake email from her Columbia professor about stolen Byzantine manuscripts requiring urgent consultation.
Academic legitimacy. Her weakness.
The email never reached her because all her communications route through my secure server first. A precaution I never removed, even when I handed her the device back.
My phone buzzes. Marco.
*Found him. Vincent Torres. Warehouse in Queens. Want me to handle it?*
I flip my coin once, then palm it. *No. I'll handle this personally.*
The warehouse smells like rust and piss and terror. Torres sits tied to a chair, blood already trickling from where my men softened him up. His expensive suit is rumpled, his Harvard tie askew. The kind of polished academic that Isabella respects.
Perfect.
"Vincent." I roll up my sleeves, white fabric stark against my forearms. "You sent my woman an email today."
Recognition flares in his eyes, followed by pure terror. "I don't know what you're talking about."
I pull on leather gloves, the snap echoing in the empty space. "Columbia professor needs urgent consultation about stolen manuscripts. Creative. Almost believable."
"Chase said she'd come willingly if—"
My fist caves in his cheekbone. The wet crack bounces off concrete walls, blood spraying in a perfect arc across the dusty floor.
"Wrong fucking answer."
What follows isn't interrogation. It's art. I teach Vincent Torres exactly what happens to men who try to manipulate Isabella Callahan. Who think they can use her brilliant mind, her scholarly passion, her desperate need to help people as weapons against her.
By the time I'm finished, my knuckles are hamburger and my shirt is ruined. But the message is crystal clear. Touch what's mine, and I'll turn you into abstract fucking art.
The drive back takes forty minutes through winding mountain roads. Rain starts halfway there, fat drops hitting the windshield like tears. I should feel satisfied. Should feel that familiar post-violence calm that settles in my bones after sending a message.
Instead, all I can think about is Isabella's face when she thanked me for her phone. The hope in her eyes. The way she said it meant everything.
I walk through the front door and find her in the kitchen making tea, honey-blonde hair catching the overhead light. She looks up when I enter, and all that hope dies instantly.
"Jesus." Her teacup rattles against marble as she sets it down. "What happened to you?"
I look down at myself. Blood under my nails, across my shirt, probably streaked on my jaw. The evidence of necessary violence written in crimson.
"Had to take care of something." I move to the sink, running cold water over split knuckles. Pink swirls down the drain like watercolor paint.
"Take care of what?" Her voice sharpens, demanding answers the way it does when she's analyzing a painting. "Who did you hurt?"
I reach for the dish towel, dabbing at the worst of it. The scent of her perfume mingles with the copper taste of blood in my mouth. "Someone who tried to contact you today."
Silence stretches between us, thick as the storm clouds gathering outside. When I turn, Isabella is staring at me with growing fury that makes my cock twitch despite everything.
"Someone tried to contact me," she repeats slowly. "When? I've been checking my phone all afternoon. No new messages."
The accusation in her voice slices clean through me. "Because I stopped it from reaching you."
"You..." She blinks, processing. Wind howls outside the windows as understanding dawns. "But you gave me my phone back."
"I gave you the device back, bella. Didn't remove the security protocols."
I watch the exact moment she gets it. The way betrayal blooms across her face like spilled wine, staining everything beautiful about this moment.
"You've been monitoring everything." Each word is surgical precision. "Even after giving it back."
"The dangerous contacts, yes."
"Who decides what's dangerous?" She moves closer, close enough that I can smell her shampoo, see the gold flecks in those furious green eyes. "You?"
I flip my coin, metal slick with blood. "I decide what threatens your safety."
"My safety." She laughs, but it's sharp as broken glass. "Or your control?"
The truth sits between us like a loaded gun. Because she's right, and we both fucking know it.
"It's not the same thing."
"Isn't it?" Now she's close enough to touch, close enough that I can see her pulse hammering in her throat.
My hands itch to grab her, to pin her against the counter and make her understand with my mouth, my body, the desperate way I need to keep her safe.
"You don't get to monitor my communications without telling me.
You don't get to filter my world like I'm some helpless child. "
"Someone was trying to lure you out. To use your mind against you."
"Then you tell me that!" Her voice cracks with fury, and the sound goes straight to my groin. Even angry, even betrayed, she's the most beautiful thing I've ever seen. "You don't make the choice for me and then pretend to give me freedom!"
I reach for her, needing skin contact, needing to feel her warmth. She jerks back so fast she almost stumbles.
"Don't." The word comes out broken, and it stops my heart. "Don't touch me right now."
The rejection cuts deeper than any blade Torres could have wielded. "Isabella, I was protecting you."
"You were controlling me." Tears gather in her eyes, and I want to lick them away, want to taste her pain and make it mine. "Just like he did. Making decisions about my life, giving me illusions of choice while pulling strings behind the scenes."
Thunder crashes outside, rattling the windows. The storm is here now, wild and violent as the chaos in my chest.
"I'm not him," I say desperately.
"No?" She backs toward the doorway, silk blouse whispering against her skin. "Then why do I feel like a hostage again?"
The word detonates in my chest, steals every breath from my lungs. Hostage. After everything we've shared, every time I've made her come screaming my name, every morning I've watched her sleep in my arms, that's still what this is to her.
"That's not..." I can't finish. Can't explain the difference between keeping her safe and keeping her caged when the result is identical.
"I trusted you," she whispers, and her voice breaks something fundamental inside me. "When you gave me that phone back, I thought we were building something real. Something different."
"We are. I am different."
"Are you?" She shakes her head, hair catching lamplight like spun gold. "Because you're still treating me like something to be managed instead of someone to be trusted."
I step toward her, hand reaching out on instinct. She flinches away, and the movement freezes my blood.
"Isabella—"
"No." Her palm creates a wall between us. "I can't do this anymore."
She turns to leave, and something primal claws up my throat. The thought of losing her, of watching her walk away thinking I'm just another man who wants to own her, rips through my chest like shrapnel.
"I love you."
The words explode out of me, raw and desperate and completely fucking true. They hang in the air between us like lightning, illuminating everything.
Isabella freezes in the doorway. I can see tension singing through her shoulders, the way her hands clench into fists at her sides.
"Fuck." The confession pours out now that the dam has burst, fifteen years of emotional walls crumbling. "I love you, Isabella. That's the problem. That's why I can't think straight around you, why I make these choices without asking."
She turns slowly, and there are tears streaming down her face. Those green eyes are wide, stunned, like I've just spoken in a foreign language.
"Matteo..." Her voice barely exists.
"I love the way you look at art like it holds secrets only you can unlock.
" The words spill out uncontrolled, my heart bleeding all over the kitchen floor.
"I love how you take your coffee black because you think adding anything is cheating the bean.
I love that you cry during thunderstorms and pretend you don't, like showing vulnerability might crack that perfect surface you wear. "
She's staring at me like I'm something dangerous and beautiful and completely alien. Like she's never seen me before.
"I love how you survived fourteen years with that bastard and still managed to stay soft inside. How you touch paintings like you're afraid they'll disappear. How you make that little sound in your throat when I hit that spot inside you that makes you—"
"Stop." The word is barely a breath.
"I can't stop." My voice cracks, breaks, rebuilds itself around the truth.
"I love you so much it's killing me, tesoro.
It's eating me alive from the inside out.
And I know I'm fucking this up, I know I'm hurting you by trying to protect you, but I don't know how to love you without being terrified of losing you. "
The silence that follows is deafening. Rain lashes the windows like tears while Isabella stands there with my heart in her hands, watching it bleed.
My legs feel unsteady. I've never said those words to anyone. Never felt this desperate, consuming need to give someone everything while simultaneously destroying them with good intentions.
"Matteo." She says my name like a prayer, like a benediction, like a funeral dirge. "That's not love. That's fear."
The truth lands like a physical blow, doubling me over. My hands grip the counter behind me, knuckles white against marble.
"When you love someone," she continues, each word carefully chosen, precisely aimed, "you trust them to make their own choices. Even when those choices scare you. Even when they might lead them away from you."
I want to argue, want to explain that the world is full of Vincent Torres and Chase Callahans who see her brilliance as something to exploit. But the pain in her eyes stops me cold.
"I've spent my whole life with people who claimed to love me while making decisions for me," she says quietly. "Chase said he loved me too. Said everything he did was to protect me."
The comparison is a knife between my ribs, twisting. "I'm nothing like him."
"Aren't you?" Fresh tears spill down her cheeks, and I want to catch them with my tongue, want to taste her pain and make it mine. "You're both powerful men who think you know what's best for me. Who think loving me gives you the right to control my choices."
"That's not..." But the words die because she's right. Every instinct screams at me to argue, to make her understand that what I feel is pure and desperate and nothing like Chase's calculated manipulation. But the result is the same.
I've built her a beautiful cage and called it love.
My chest feels hollowed out, scraped raw. The silver coin lies forgotten on the counter where I dropped it, as motionless as my suddenly silent heart.
"I need time," she says, backing toward the door. "I need to think."
"Isabella, please—" The desperation in my voice would embarrass me if I had any pride left.
"No." She shakes her head, more tears falling like rain. "You just told me you love me, and instead of feeling happy about it, I feel trapped. Do you understand how fucked up that is?"
The profanity on her lips, the raw honesty, breaks something inside me. She's right. I just gave her my heart, and she's running from it because I've made love feel like captivity.
"I love you," I say again, quieter now, the words scraped raw from my throat. "Christ, bella, I love you so much I can't breathe when you're not in the same room. But I don't know how to do this without trying to shield you from everything that might hurt you."
"That's the problem." Her voice is soft, final. "You can't love someone and suffocate them at the same time."
She's gone before I can find words to argue, leaving me alone with the taste of my first 'I love you' bitter as blood in my mouth.
I sink into the nearest chair, my legs finally giving out. Outside, the storm rages with the same violence that's tearing through my chest. Thunder shakes the house while I sit in the wreckage of the most important conversation of my life.
I told her I love her. The most honest words I've ever spoken, and they drove her away.
Because I don't know how to love her without caging her. Don't know how to keep her safe without suffocating her. Don't know how to be the man she deserves instead of the one who's slowly killing her with good intentions.
The coin catches lamplight from where it fell, but I don't reach for it. For the first time in seventeen years, I don't need something to do with my hands.
They're too busy shaking.