Elio #2
For a second, I am not even sure I heard her correctly. The words seem to hang in the air, suspended and too unreal to be true. That is the last thing I ever thought I’d hear. Not why did you leave? Or why weren’t you here to tell me? Those questions would almost be easier to handle. Not this.
I was ready for her anger, for her to blame and lash out at me because of her grief.
Nothing prepared me for this. I stare at her while trying to find the crack in her expression that says she does not mean it. That this is grief speaking for her and this temporary feeling is simply an impulse to run from reality. Anything but real.
She looks tired but there is resolve threaded through her posture. It sits in the lift of her chin and the way she holds my gaze without flinching.
Careful control wraps around every breath she takes, settling her shoulders back.
“Leaving for where?” I ask, though I already know that isn’t really the question I want to ask. I ask it anyway because the alternative is asking for how long, and I am not ready for that answer. Or worse, for her refusal to give it to me.
Her eyes flicker. “I don’t know.”
My mouth opens, then closes again.
She folds her arms tighter around herself. “My father is dead, Elio.”
I say nothing.
What is there to say to argue?
Her laugh is soft and joyless. “We haven’t even put him in the ground yet and people are already whispering about what comes next and who can be trusted.” She swallows. “I can feel it when people look at me. They think I know something.”
The shame that hits me then is hot enough to feel like a fever. I sat there during those meetings with my face carved out of stone and said nothing because to defend her too fiercely would have exposed us both. Now she stands in front of me carrying the damage of that silence.
My jaw clenches until it aches. “You think leaving will make you safer?”
The correction is immediate. “It will make me less visible to people who think I have something to do with my father’s death.”
My lips thin.
She is too smart to pretend true safety exists for people like us, but invisibility, distance, obscurity from the world we both grew up in… these are things that will make her harder to hunt if she can successfully disappear without anyone outside of her family’s administration knowing.
I take another step toward her before I can stop myself. “Tell me where you’re going.”
Those honey-gold eyes lift to finally look at me. “I will if you agree to come with me.”
Something violent flashes through me so fast, it leaves my hands curling at my sides.
Not at her, never at her. I would sooner cut off my own arm than turn that kind of violence on her.
No, what surges through me is aimed at the request itself and at the brutal, breathtaking recklessness of her standing in my apartment and offering me the one thing I have wanted from the moment she first looked at me
Come with me. As if it could be that simple.
Beneath the instinct to reject what she is asking, something uglier tears awake inside me. Want. So strong, it makes my chest feel split straight down the center.
For one ugly, traitorous beat, I see myself bridging the distance between us, grabbing her hand, and walking back to the elevator without another word.
I see highways swallowing the city behind us as we drive, and motels booked under false names while we strip ourselves of our past identities.
Sunrises spent in places where no one knows my face and no one says my last name with fear or loyalty or expectation.
I see her beside me through it all, alive and furious and so fucking beautiful, and for one moment, the fantasy is so vivid, it nearly passes for a memory.
Then reality rips through it like barbed wire catching on skin. My jaw locks so hard, pain blooms up the side of my face.
“How can you possibly ask that of me?” I say, the words bitten out between my clenched teeth.
She does not flinch, but of course she doesn’t. Isabella has never once been frightened off by the parts of me that scare everyone else. “You told me you would.”
The simple honesty of that statement almost makes me laugh. Instead, all I can do is stare at her because she is right. At the time, it had felt impossible enough to actually become true. She’d brought out a reckless side of me I never knew was there to begin with.
“You were supposed to mean it,” she says softly, and that softness cuts deeper than fury ever could. “Or at least I thought you did.”
If she had screamed at me, I could have met her there. If she had cursed at me, struck at me with the full weight of her grief, I would have known how to handle it.
Men like me are built for violence and trained to endure and return it in equal measure.
But this quiet hurt… there is no armor against it. Nothing to save me from the deep pain that pools in my gut.
“I did mean it.” I hear how raw I sound the second the words leave me.
For the first time since seeing her after stepping out of the elevator, something truly fragile crosses her face.
She looks away from me then, turning slightly back toward the window and the city below.
The skyline glitters against her reflection, pale in the glass and ghosting over the lights beyond.
“Then come with me.”
Christ, I want to.
“I can’t, Isabella.”
She turns to face me fully then. Her eyes shimmer with unshed tears she refuses to let fall. When she speaks again, her voice is quieter. “Was any of what you said real, or was I just a convenient distraction?”
For one suspended second, the room goes soundless around me. I drag in a breath that does nothing to loosen the pressure in my chest.
If she had only been a distraction, this would be easy. I could let her go and cut ties without ever feeling guilty over it. Telling her this was all a mistake, or a fleeting hunger finally satiated, would keep this simple where it was supposed to remain.
But the truth of the matter is that Isabella has never been a fleeting moment for me.
She was the first woman who made me think about leaving before I even realized I was trapped.
Every moment I let myself imagine a life outside my family and the responsibilities it carries had been a fantasy turned anchor that I held onto like a lifeline.
Maybe in another life, this could be real.
Maybe in another life, I would have been born a mechanic or a ranch hand or a man who fixes roofs and comes home with sawdust on his boots instead of blood under his nails.
Maybe in another life, I would have met her in a city that did not require bodyguards and coded language and men willing to kill for a surname.
Maybe in another life, I would have loved her in the daylight and asked her to stay in ways that did not sound like a threat to both our futures.
In another life, I would have burned the syndicate to the ground for her.
But this is not that life.
This is the one where my family’s name is a noose slowly tightening around my neck.
One where choosing her openly would not just damn me but paint a target on her so bright, the whole underworld would take aim and fire.
In this world, women have always bled for crimes they never committed except being loved by the wrong man.
And that is simply a life I can not damn her to.
“No,” I whisper.
She dashes them away angrily, furious at herself for letting them fall and even more so at me for being the reason behind it.
The sight of her crying does something catastrophic to my heart. The tightening around it turns vise-like, stealing the breath from my lungs where the pain becomes unbearable.
“Fine.” She steps back.
“Isabella,” I say immediately, moving toward her.
“Don’t,” she whispers.
My hands flex uselessly at my sides, every instinct in me screaming to close the distance and catch her face, to force her to look at me until she understands exactly why I’m doing this.
All I can actually do is stay rooted to my spot as she steps around me and heads for the elevator.
“Goodbye, Elio,” she says.
I don’t turn back around to watch her slip between the elevator doors when they open. Nor do I watch as the numbers tick down to the ground level.
I simply stare out at the city skyline and feel my heart shattering in two.