Elio #2
Her laugh is soft this time. “Does it matter? I turned him down.”
My patience is already starting to thin and we’ve barely made it through the beginning of this conversation. “Yes.”
She lifts her chin a fraction, that old, infuriating pride refusing to bow even when severely outnumbered. It used to thrill me, that small upward tilt of defiance. I used to want to pull her closer and argue until we ended up in my bed with the fight still burning between us.
“He wanted me to help him against a syndicate trying to move and take over some of his territory.” Her eyes roam me from head to toe slowly while she says it. By the time her gaze returns to mine, there is a brutal kind of understanding there. “I see now that the family must be yours.”
So, just as Alessio suspected, after all.
It shouldn’t surprise me. Alessio all but said it outright before I came in here. Bianchi has been losing ground ever since our war started over two years ago.
He would need someone clever to help him out of the mess he’s created, someone detached enough to see the angles his own people have missed with enough experience to understand how men like us build defenses and where they crack under pressure.
Who better for the job than a former ally?
Perhaps Davide also knew that if revenge had still been living inside her after all these years, he would only need to knock once on her door to wake it.
Tending to that fire, nursing it until it could grow on its own and lay waste to whatever he deemed necessary, that would make for a perfect weapon he would not need to monitor once it gained its own traction and pushed forward to fight his battles for him.
Isabella is not ordinary, no matter how soft her alias made her seem.
She is the exact polar opposite, which makes her the exact type of person never to underestimate regardless of the circumstances. Being at the helm of a syndicate and cultivating strategies to crush enemies are exactly what my family has been after to contain.
Now with her in the mix of it, even with her promise of turning him down, it changes everything.
Before I’m conscious of it, I close the distance until we are merely inches apart, towering over her smaller frame.
She doesn’t back down, though that shouldn’t at all surprise me.
Realistically, she never has. This woman could stand toe-to-toe with an underboss of any syndicate, friend or foe, and make him question not only his strategy but the center of his own convictions.
My hand lifts before I can stop it, fingers brushing a loose strand of chestnut hair away from her face. The contact is barely anything, more of a whisper of skin against her silk-soft hair—the smallest theft I’ve ever taken for myself.
When she flinches, the movement is slight, but I feel it like a knife jabbing between my ribs and twisting. Even though she does not pull away, that small motion is enough to almost make me back off. A smarter man would. A better man would apologize and leave.
But I am neither.
After eight years of starvation, touching her like this sends a wave of electricity pulsing through my veins. For one cursed second, I am not in this reinforced room in a safehouse with disabled cameras and my own family circling.
I am in my apartment eight years ago with her hair spread out on white sheets and her mouth on mine, our limbs tangled together as I bury deep inside her.
My fingers hesitate when they brush her cheek. Some sick part of me, some starving, jealous, self-destructive part, opens its mouth and asks the question I have been trying not to let fully form since the second I saw that boy but have been dying to know, nonetheless.
“Who is he?”
Confusion tightens around her eyes. “Who?”
“Your son’s father,” I say. “Tell me his name.”
Isabella’s eyes widen for a fraction of a second, then narrow to dangerous slits. “That’s none of your business.”
I grab her upper arms when she moves to push me away, not hard enough to bruise but firm enough to feel the defined muscle beneath her sleeves.
The contact burns through me. “Tell me, Isabella.”
Her mouth twists, and all that Russo fire rises to the surface. “Fuck you.”
The words should make me release her. Instead, they strike sparks off the jealousy to tear through me. The thought of a nameless man touching her makes me see red.
A phantom with hands where mine used to be, a man who might have watched her belly swell with a child, might have stood beside her in a hospital room while I was miles away, ignorant and loyal to a family that has taken everything from me and labeled it as duty.
My mouth twists into a deep frown. “Did he know exactly how to touch you, how to make you forget your own name? Or did you think of me every time another man was inside you?”
I should stop. I know that I need to. But the jealousy has teeth now, and it is chewing through every voice of reason faster than I can kill it. I hate myself the instant they leave my mouth, though not enough to take them back.
There is still too much poison moving through me to be sorry about it now, too much rage at a man I cannot kill because I have no idea what his identity is.
Who helped her build the life I had no right to want and no strength to choose? Who was there when I wasn’t?
I want to know like a gaping wound needs pressure to keep the heart beating, like a starving man needs food to keep his feet moving one in front of the other.
I want a name to hate, a target to picture for all of these ugly feelings to focus on.
Having nowhere else to go, the person I hate most in this room is myself.
She shoves at my chest. “As if you have any right to know anything about me or my son.”
I move with her until her back meets the cold concrete wall beside the cot, caging her in with my body.
The room shrinks to the space between just her and me.
Her breathing comes faster now, chest rising and falling in sharp bursts.
Her eyes flare with rage, but beneath that, something more painful flickers.
An old current between us wakes, tangling up with too much damage to be anything considered uncomplicated. Desire, hatred, grief, betrayal, all of it churns together until the room feels oxygen-starved.
The jealousy within me does not die the longer I stare down at her trying to force myself back behind the disciplined neutrality I’ve always hid behind. It merely twists into something much darker.
I lean in until my forehead nearly rests against hers, my voice a rough growl. “Tell me.”
“No.”
My hands slide down her arms before I can stop them, pausing at her waist for one dangerous, suspended second. She goes rigid under my touch, and I feel the exact instant her body remembers me just as her mind rejects the memory.
The collision is there in the faint catch of her breath and the way her lashes flutter.
It is a cruel thing, the body, how it keeps records the heart tries to burn out of self preservation. For this one moment in time, the cycle we have never truly escaped reignites with the same fire that once consumed us both.
When my lips meet hers, it is a spark striking oil. The first taste of her after eight years nearly drops me to my knees. I am no longer an underboss standing in a locked room with an ally turned enemy.
Now I am simply a starving man beckoning at the altar of the only woman who has ever made hunger feel like devotion.
She makes a small sound against me.
Her hands come up between us, curling around the fabric of my shirt. Pathetically, I rationalize it as her way of pulling me closer, wanting me just as badly as I do her. Perhaps she’s just as lost in this as I am. Maybe even more so.
But then I feel her palms flatten, and without warning, she shoves me back with a surprising amount of strength.
The loss of contact is brutal.
I stumble back half a step before catching myself on the wall, my hand jutting out to keep me steady.
Her eyes are wide and furious and slightly wet with something that looks too much like hurt to be mistaken for anything else.
Her hand lifts, and the crack of her palm across my face slices through the room like a gunshot.
My head turns with the impact.
For a moment, neither of us speaks.
“You don’t get to do that,” she finally says after a while.
I look back at her slowly. The sting in my cheek is nothing compared to the thing splitting open behind my sternum. Her entire body is trembling with barely contained rage, her hand still slightly raised in the space between us.
There is no defense. Not one worth insulting her with, anyway. I could say I lost control, that seeing her again has dragged every dead thing in me clawing back to the surface.
After spending eight years trying to cut her out of my system, I thought I’d gotten every last fragment. But clearly, I was wrong. Because the second I touched her, the past yawned its mouth wide and swallowed me whole.
Though, none of that matters in the grand scheme of things. It does not matter that I wanted her, or that she remembers it too. What we are now is enemies and that will never change. Not as long as she’s helping Bianchi like Alessio suspects.
I step away from her with my jaw locked, every muscle in me coiled with the need to drag her back into my arms and finish what was started. But instead, I turn toward the door, the protector and the monster continuing to war inside me.
When my hand reaches the handle to leave, I look back over my shoulder at her. “This isn’t over, Isabella. I will be back.”
She says nothing in return.
The door locks behind me with brutal finality, and I stand in the corridor for a long time breathing hard. The jealousy from before curdles into shame so fast, I almost choke on it. My cheek still burns where she struck me, but the rest of me has gone cold.
For the first time since I walked away eight years ago, I am not sure how to move on from this, or her.
Christ.
What have I become?