Isabella #2
My mouth opens to ask him what happened, then slowly shuts again.
It is not exactly my place to dig into the goings-on of life outside this containment room.
I am not his lover, nor his confidante. I don’t get the privilege of being the girl who watches him come back bruised from some ugly family errand and tend to the blood scabbing his knuckles.
That person is long gone.
But… then again, I have never been able to help myself when it comes to him. That has always been the first crack in my own armor.
“What happened?”
The corners of his eyes tighten. He gives me nothing for several long moments. Only that dark stare and the faint flex of his jaw tell me he has not solidified into a statue right in front of me.
The bruise along it moves with the tension, his face tensing from the pain just enough to be noticeable before he locks it down again.
It is a small thing—a blink-and-miss-it type. Unfortunately for him, I have spent most of my life surviving by noticing the things men try to hide.
“Nothing you need to worry about,” he finally says.
A humorless laugh slips out of me. “An argument with your family, then?”
His gaze narrows faintly. Not surprise, exactly. Elio Conti does not allow himself anything as vulnerable as that kind of emotion to slip through unless he is alone or dying. But something close to it flickers through his eyes before the shutters come down again.
A part of me, small and buried deep under my anger, is amused by it. He hates that I can still read him.
We hadn’t known each other intimately for long before everything between us shattered into oblivion, but I had been watching Elio Conti for a long while before we ever found ourselves tangled up at that gala.
Long before his mouth ruined me and those hands of his taught my body a language I spent years pretending to forget.
I had watched him across crowded rooms while the old men around us traded threats wrapped in polite smiles.
I’d admired the way soldiers stepped aside before he ever reached them and how his father’s lieutenants never failed to lower their voices whenever he came near.
Most people saw the Conti underboss whenever they looked at him.
That was the mistake people made with him. They mistook discipline for lack of feeling.
They looked at the expensively tailored black suits, the calm voice, the violence that never seemed to show itself until the precise moment it needed to strike, and decided he was nothing more than his father’s son.
I knew better, but maybe that was my first mistake. Maybe girls like me should never look for softness inside wolves.
My eyes flick up to the camera then. “You turned it off.”
“I did.”
“Why?” The question comes too quickly for my liking.
He glances at the camera then too, then back at me. “Because what happens in this room does not need witnesses.”
The room seems to shrink around us, drawing the cot, the concrete walls, the locked door, and us two ruined people into the same cruel little orbit that we can never seem to abstain from falling into.
My pulse stumbles once, then corrects itself with a hard beat. “That sounds like a threat.”
“It isn’t, Isabella.”
I hate when he does that. When he refuses to play the game and just lets the truth sit between us without dressing up any of it with that cruelty he’s shown me before.
I need this anger in me to stay strong enough to keep my body from remembering what it was like being with him when I still believed some parts of him felt human. If I don’t, I’ll do something reckless I know I will regret.
For a second, the room disappears. I am nineteen again standing in his apartment with the city bleeding gold light through the windows, thinking I am old enough to understand danger because I grew up among it.
Believing I could love a man like Elio and not be consumed by him because I would know better than to allow that to happen. Thinking the way he looked at me had meant I had found a place inside him no one else could reach.
Then morning comes and he is gone.
He left.
He chose them.
He let me wake up alone in that apartment.
Those are the familiar mantras I have told myself over and over for years. They have become a kind of private scripture, verses I repeat in the dark whenever memory grows teeth and sinks in deep into my heart.
I remember whispering them through sleepless nights with Matteo fever-hot against my chest, murmuring them to myself while washing bottles alone and every time my son laughed in a way that pulled Elio’s ghost from its grave.
I fold my arms across my chest, needing the barrier even if it’s useless. “I want to see Matteo.”
“I know.”
“So bring me to him.”
“I can’t do that.”
Of course he can’t, and I already know exactly why. His father will find out and question his judgment, his brother will see and interrogate him.
The entire Conti empire is built on those who pretend their hearts have been cut cleanly out of their chests at birth, and Elio, despite all his darkness and blood-soaked discipline, has always had the fatal flaw of feeling too much.
It’s a shame he’s never had the courage to do anything about it.
“You’re a coward,” I spit at him.
His eyes flash with a brief spark of anger. “You think I wanted this?”
“I think what you want has no bearing on what happens to me or my child. So what does it matter?”
His gaze holds mine. For a moment I think I see something flicker through him—pain, maybe.
Frustration?
Then his face hardens. “You aren’t in a position to be demanding anything regardless of whether or not I am feeling gracious enough to grant you a favor.
So long as you continue not to cooperate, this is how it will be.
In our world, that can be the only difference between life and death. You know that.”
There is the Conti in him again. The prince of a rotten kingdom, reminding the captive that mercy is a gift he refuses to grant those below him.
To him and the rest of his family I am nothing more than a means to an end, scum on the bottom of their shoes they can’t wait to wipe off on the nearest hard-edged surface.
“Our world?” I scoff. Unbelievable. Of all the things to say to me… he could have dressed up any other insult to masquerade as logic and he picks that one. “I left your world and built another one. Did you forget that?”
“And yet it found you anyway.”
All I can hear is Matteo laughing on that soccer field before everything came crashing down around us.
His hand in mine as we walked back home while he bartered for more toppings on his ice cream. Then his screams while Elio’s men dragged him from the only home he ever knew.
The rage washes over me so fast, it burns away every remnant of fear I have left. I take another step toward him before I think better of it, fury rushing up through my body hot enough for a slight feverish sheen to prickle at my skin.
“Because men like you keep dragging it to my door,” I snap.
He flinches then, though it’s barely perceptible. Not enough for most people to see, but I do.
The sight does not satisfy me as much as I wished it did. I want the satisfaction of feeling that deep sense of hatred I did the moment I found out my father was dead and he knew about it and left me anyway.
I want to look at the man who’s haunted my every waking moment and feel absolutely nothing but unfiltered rage.
For a moment, neither of us speaks.
He stands with his back toward the door. His eyes dance in the low light as they flit between my own.
I stand barefoot in front of him in a room he locked me inside, all the while pretending I cannot feel the terrible gravity between us waking up again.
It moves beneath the anger and the fear, beneath that iron wall I have spent years building between the woman I am and the girl I used to be.
It is the same pull that once drew me across crowded rooms toward him before I knew his mouth would become a memory I could never fully destroy. The same pulse that made his hand at my waist feel like danger and shelter all at once.
I see the ruin of him and remember that he was never only a monster to me once upon a time.
“What happened?” I ask again, softer this time despite myself.
His brows pull together slowly. “Why do you care?”
“I don’t.”
His mouth curves faintly, but there is no humor in it. “Still lying beautifully, I see.”
I lift my chin. “Still avoiding the question.”
He exhales through his nose and looks away for the first time, toward the blank camera, the cot, the concrete wall, anywhere but me. That tells me more than he probably wants it to.
Elio has always been able to endure direct fire whether it be accusations, threats, bullets, fists flying, but there have always been certain truths he can’t help turning from.
“Alessio and I...” He pauses. “Disagreed.”
A chill moves through me. My arms tighten over my chest. “About me.”
His gaze returns to mine. “Yes.”
“And Matteo.”
The silence that follows is answer enough to send pricks of anxiety racing up my spine. The room seems to shrink around me, narrowing in on the small space left between us.
I hate Alessio Conti more than I ever have his own brother. It is one of the few uncomplicated emotions left in me after everything that’s happened and has never once changed or softened as the years have gone on.
Even eight years ago, I remember he used to look at me like I was a rot spreading through both our family lines, as if my very existence threatened some grand design he had planned.
Alessio has always been the polished blade beside Elio’s darker fire, the one who smiles when he cuts because he believes restraint makes the cruelty he wields easier to swallow.
In my opinion, it is simply another side of the same coin his younger brother occupies.
“What did he say about my son?” I ask.
He says nothing, continuing to just stare at me.
“Elio.” His name leaves me quietly this time. That seems to get his attention because his shoulders stiffen. “What did he say?”
The bruise along his jaw pulses faintly as his teeth clench again. “It isn’t anything you need to worry about.”