Isabella
It’s been three days since Elio stormed out after our confrontation. Three entire days since his mouth on mine felt like a sin being dragged back to the surface from its gravesite.
I slapped him hard enough to make my palm ache and still somehow felt the echo of him under my skin long after he left.
Since then, there has only been sterile silence broken only by the slide of meal trays across my floor and the soft mechanical click of cameras that never stop watching me pace.
Pacing is all I can do to keep myself from surrendering. If I sit too long, my thoughts start to eat away at me. Every step keeps the panic moving through my body instead of letting it settle in my chest where it might finally crush me.
And I refuse to let that happen.
Though no matter what I do, I still feel Elio everywhere, his presence slowly suffocating me from every corner of this small room.
Sometimes, I catch the faint trace of his cologne when one of the enforcers steps in with my food, dark and clean beneath the usual smell of gun oil.
It hits me without warning and yanks me back so violently, I have to grip the wall until the wave passes.
Other times, I swear the camera moves to focus solely on me and not the entirety of the room, like he is on the other side of that feed watching me, those dark eyes tracing every inch of my body the same way they did when he was standing right in front of me.
Maybe I am giving him too much credit.
Maybe it’s not even Elio Conti watching me at all.
I tell myself I hate him. I repeat it like a prayer, holding it between my teeth like a blade that will cut the sides of my mouth the minute I relax around the edges of it.
I hate him for finding me, for dragging Matteo into this nightmare.
I hate him for touching me like the years between us were nothing, kissing me and making my body remember a version of him my heart has spent years trying to bury.
Most of all, I hate him for proving that the pull between us is not gone.
I thought it was.
God, I needed it to be. For years, I fed that old ache every ugly truth I had until I believed I had finally starved it dead. I reminded myself over and over of the way Elio chose his own blood and duty over me when I needed him most.
I poisoned the memory with abandonment. With childbirth alone under a false name, and every night I rocked Matteo through fevers and fears and had no one else there to comfort me too.
I ignored that small voice inside my head that wondered what kind of man could walk away from something before even knowing what he had left behind and if he ever felt there was some piece of him out there he had yet to discover.
Yet no matter what poison I fed that small flame inside me, it still lives.
The chemistry between us has always been a part of me that refuses to die no matter how many times I try to cut it out of me. It rises when I least expect it, dragging itself out of ash with blackened hands and hungry eyes.
That is the cruelty of whatever Elio and I once were and continue to be. We are stuck in this sick cycle neither of us wants to name.
I hate myself for still feeling the ghost of our old fire flare to life while my son is somewhere beyond my reach because of him.
But hatred has not made me immune to Elio the way I want, and that is the most dangerous truth I carry within me besides Matteo’s parentage.
Elio does not know, at least not yet, from what I’ve seen.
Or maybe he suspects it. Maybe that sharp mind has already done the math and that is why he asked about Matteo’s father with fury burning bright in his eyes.
I press my palm to my stomach as the acid in it rises.
I have only heard bits and pieces about where my son is now and how he is doing.
The enforcers are careful around me now, more than they were the first day, which tells me Elio has given them orders not to speak about it when they’re around me.
I have squeezed what I can from them, but no one lingers long enough to answer my questions completely.
Matteo has never gone to bed without knowing where I am, not once in seven years.
Even when he was a baby and I worked two jobs to keep food on our table, after I would come home exhausted enough to feel hollow, I would always be there to take him from his babysitter and sing him to sleep.
I told myself that as long as he was breathing safely in the room next to mine, I could survive anything.
Now he is somewhere in this safehouse surrounded by strangers where I cannot reach him. I cannot answer the questions he must be carrying in that bright, perceptive mind of his.
Why do they call you Isabella?
Why did they take us?
Why won’t they let me see you?
Who is that man?
That last question is the one that hollows me out the deepest. What do I tell him when the time comes?
The truth is a loaded gun aimed at my forehead with six bullets in the chamber. One I can’t think about or else I’ll be driven insane.
None of the men I have managed to question have given me any indication that Matteo is being mistreated, but that does not comfort me in the slightest.
Mistreatment is not only fists and hunger and bruises.
Sometimes, mistreatment is fear and confusion, being torn from the only safe thing you have ever known and placed behind a locked door by people who speak in clipped orders and carry weapons under their jackets.
There is no doubt in my mind that my child is suffering.
How can he not be?
His mother, the one constant in his life, is no longer with him. For seven years, I have been his fixed point, his answer to every nightmare, no matter what it is.
Now he is alone because Elio found us.
Because Davide knocked on my door, and Isabella Russo was never as dead as Marina Hayes needed her to be.
I sink down onto the edge of the cot, the thin mattress dipping beneath me with a tired creak.
The room is too cold, or maybe I am. I rub my hands over my arms, feeling the faint ache of sore muscles I overused while fighting men who were always going to overpower me eventually.
When I close my eyes, I see Matteo at three standing on a chair in our tiny kitchen, helping me stir pancake batter with more enthusiasm than skill.
At five, I watch him falling asleep with a picture book open across his chest. At seven, he is sprinting across a soccer field with his hair bouncing and his whole face lit with victory.
Then I see him being held by a stranger in my living room, eyes wide and terrified.
My breath catches so sharply, I press a fist against my mouth to keep the sound from escaping.
I hate this room. I hate this cot bolted to the wall. I hate the cold concrete beneath my bare feet.
I hate the camera perched above me like an unblinking eagle eye. I hate the fact that I have started measuring time by the slide of meal trays and the shift changes outside my door.
I can’t do this.
I refuse to let anyone keep my son from me any longer.
A faint sound comes from the camera above me, jarring me out of my thoughts.
It’s a tiny adjustment of the tilt of the lens, the mechanical sound almost politely quiet. My head lifts slowly, every nerve in my body tensing as I stare straight into the lens.
For a long moment, I say nothing. The little red light glows back at me. I have absolutely no confirmation that it is Elio watching from the other side.
It could be Alessio or one of their men bored from cataloguing my pacing and meal refusals for a report no one will read. But something deep inside me tells me I am right.
Maybe it’s because my body has always been cursed with a terrible awareness of him, a sick little compass that points toward Elio Conti no matter how far I run or how many names I bury myself beneath.
I slide off the cot and turn to face it fully.
The floor is cold beneath my feet. I smooth my hands down the front of my sweater even though there is nothing to fix. My voice is hoarse from disuse, but it does not shake.
“Come here,” I say.
The camera does nothing for a long moment. Only that hateful red light glows back at me. My chest tightens when slowly, it fades, and I stare at it for a long time.
I shuffle to the left.
The camera does not follow. Instead, it stays fixed in the same position, dead or disabled or pretending to be to catch me off guard. My hands curl into fists at my sides as I slowly turn to the door, then back to the lens again.
Surely, they wouldn’t leave me here to rot… right?
My heart starts to beat harder as the room grows smaller around me by the second.
I take one step toward the door, then stop myself.
If I’m being ignored for whatever reason, there will be no point in trying to bang my fist against the door to grab someone’s attention. Clearly, no one is coming to rescue me.
The lock disengaging on the door startles me. I turn quickly as the reinforced door swings inward.
For a second, everything in me goes still when Elio steps inside alone. His dark eyes lock on me with an intensity that steals the breath from my lungs.
He looks nothing like the polished underboss who invaded my house or the controlled monster who stood in this room three days ago with a question he knew I couldn’t answer.
He is disheveled in a way I have rarely seen. His jacket is gone, his shirt sleeves are rolled up to his elbows, revealing scarred forearms dusted with dark hair.
A fresh bruise blooms along his jaw, deep purple beneath the stubble shadowing his face.
There is a split near his lower lip, not fully open anymore, but angry looking enough to make my eyes catch on it before I can stop them.
His hair, usually pushed back from his forehead, is slightly mussed like his hands have been dragged through it too many times.
He looks… tired.
Elio closes the door behind him. The lock engages with a heavy finality that sounds like surrender and damnation all at once. He doesn’t speak to me and simply stares, his chest rising and falling slowly.
The silence stretches between us.