Isabella
The days after that blur into a haze.
Elio’s touch still lingers on my skin like a brand—bruises on my hips shaped like his fingers, the faint ache between my thighs that reminds me every time I move how desperately our bodies craved each other even when our hearts are at war.
Since then, I avoid looking at the camera.
He hasn’t come back into the room since he gave me back Matteo. I try to not take that as a sign we’re being left alone and instead choose to prepare myself for what’s next to come.
I’m not naive enough to believe our business is finished. I know it’s far from over, especially since I know they have not gotten a satisfying answer out of me regarding Davide.
Matteo senses it too even though I try to shield him from the worst of my anxieties.
He watches me with those unnervingly perceptive eyes, asking few questions but absorbing every interaction I have with the guards who bring us food and water with the same kind of interest he’s inherited from his father.
“Are we in trouble?” he asks me once, curled against my side on the cot after our dinner meal, his voice small and quiet in the empty space.
I smooth my hand through his hair, fighting with myself to lie and tell him that I have figured out a way out of here.
I’m desperate to get his hopes up, to chase away that fear I can see still lingering in his gaze from being separated from me for so long. “No, baby. We haven’t done anything wrong.”
He tilts his head back to look at me properly. “Then why can’t we go home?”
The question hollows me out as my stomach gives a hard squeeze.
I already miss our little blue house with the porch flowers I always forgot to water and the fridge covered in school papers with their glowing remarks.
I miss the glow-in-the-dark stars on his bedroom ceiling I used to point to at night while he fell asleep, his soccer ball abandoned by the front steps that I nearly trip on running out to get to the mail, and his cleats kicked off by the door.
Our entire life has been reduced to simple, far away memories that seem impossible to reach now. Ones I’m afraid we will never go back to.
What will happen once the Contis no longer have the patience to keep us around?
They won’t let us go, I know that much. Our freedom will not be a prize granted to us even if I somehow find the information they are looking for.
So, what’s next, then? Death? Isolation in another prison cell farther away than this one?
I press my lips to his forehead. “Because home isn’t safe right now.”
He is quiet for a long time after that. Then he asks, “Is it because of your other name? Isabella?”
It sounds strange coming from him, the name I had been running from for the past eight years. My arms tighten around him before I can stop them. “Sort of.”
He looks at me for a long time. “Is that your real name?”
I pull back enough to look at him fully, brushing my thumb beneath one tired eye.
He looks so young and so old at the same time, my beautiful boy with fear already tightening his open features, causing unsettling lines to form creases around his eyes and mouth.
I smooth them away with my thumb, trying desperately to erase them before they become permanent.
“Yes.” I say finally, because I cannot keep filling his world with lies if the truth beneath them is already starting to crack and show through. “It was my first name. Marina is the name I have been using to keep us safe.”
His brow furrows. “So… Marina isn’t fake?”
“No. Marina is still me. She’s just… the quieter part.”
He thinks about that with the same little crease between his brows Elio gets when he is sorting through his emotions. Then Matteo asks, “Who is that guy? Elio?”
His father’s name hovers in the space between us like a swinging guillotine.
I could lie.
I should lie.
Some instinct, old and desperate, reaches for the familiar shelter of half-truths that I’ve used to escape the harsh realities of my past since he was born to protect him from this world.
I could tell him Elio is a dangerous man. It isn’t exactly a lie. That he knew me before, which is also true.
I look down at him, at the tired curve of my son’s face and the way his dark hair falls into his eyes from running my hands through it over and over.
My mouth opens to say just that, my lips forming the words right as they die on my tongue.
He is watching me with that unnerving stillness, absorbing every hesitation and detail he can see written all over my face even if he has no understanding as to why it’s there in the first place.
“He is… someone I knew a long time ago,” I finally say.
Matteo’s eyes narrow slightly. “Did you like him back then?”
The question nearly makes me laugh. Or cry. Maybe both, judging by the way my eyes begin to burn so suddenly that I have to blink and look away for a second, pretending to adjust the thin blanket over his legs.
“Yes,” I say softly. “I did.”
For a second, Matteo says nothing. His brows draw together as if he is trying to fit this new piece of me into the picture of the mother he knows.
The mother who makes pancakes and reminds him to floss his teeth before bed, who folds laundry on Sunday morning while humming under her breath the same tune from his morning cartoons.
His mother named Marina, not Isabella.
“Do you still?” he asks.
I don’t know how to answer that.
These are one of those questions children ask that unknowingly cut deeper than they will ever realize. Matteo doesn’t mean to rip open a wound like this.
His innocence has no idea the nerve it has just brushed up against. He is only trying to understand the impossible situation we have been put into.
“I don’t know what I feel,” I tell him.
It is the most honest thing I have said in days.
Matteo leans against me again, quiet.
One of his hands curls around the fabric of my sweater, the same way he used to hold onto my shirt when he was little and afraid of thunderstorms.
I run my fingers through his hair, gently untangling the strands. For a while, neither of us says anything.
“I don’t trust him,” he mumbles.
It breaks my heart to hear my sweet, bright boy already understanding that in this world, trust is not owed simply because a man stands tall or claims to be protecting you from some threat unseen on the other side of a locked door. He should not have to know that.
He should not have to sort adults into categories of safe or unsafe at seven years old.
That was the whole point of running. Of hiding and becoming Marina Hayes in a sleepy little town where the worst thing that happened was Monday morning traffic and being late to the field for his soccer practice.
“You don’t have to,” I say.
He exhales softly.
There is no real space on the cot for comfort when he curls into me. The mattress is too narrow for both of us, the blanket too thin to keep us warm in this cold, sterile room.
I curl my body around his anyway to try and keep him as comfortable as possible.
His body fits against mine the way it did when he was small, and for a while I can almost pretend he is three again, feverish and safe in my arms while the rest of the world leaves us alone.
I whisper the same bedtime stories I remember from our old life, his favorite about the moon rabbit who stole stars to make soup, and the stubborn little prince who turned himself into a bird so he could find his way home.
Matteo has heard them all a hundred times, but tonight he listens quietly without interrupting.
“The fox one, please,” he murmurs, his voice syrupy with sleep.
So I do.
I tell him about the fox who outsmarts hunters by pretending to be smaller and sweeter than she really is.
I tell the story barely above a whisper, one hand stroking through his hair while the other rests over his back, feeling the steady beat of his heart beneath my palm. By the time the fox escapes into the woods, Matteo’s breathing has gone slow and deep, his body going limp against mine.
In the background of my mind, the faint ache in my body reminds me of Elio every time I shift on the cot, a soreness that should feel only like shame and instead keeps twisting into something far more complicated.
Desire, I have found, is much crueler than hatred. At least hatred has a direction.
It knows what it wants to destroy. Desire crawls into the wreckage of what once was and stokes the embers of what should only be ash.
I hate what he has done to me. That he found us and pulled Matteo and me from the only peaceful life my son has ever known, locked us behind this steel door and somehow twisted it around to redefine it as protection.
I hate that his brother’s shadow stretches over my child, threatening him without reason. I hate that the Conti name, the very thing I ran from before Matteo had even taken his first breath, has finally found him.
Yet above all of that, my body remembers Elio like grief remembers the living.
The fact that after eight years of telling myself I had burned Elio Conti out of me, one moment with his mouth on mine was enough to prove there was still something viable under all that ruin.
I lie awake and let my strategist’s mind turn relentlessly.
There must be a fracture in this prison.
There always is.
My father’s voice returns to me in the dark.
No structure is perfect, Isabella. Men build prisons around what they fear and leave weaknesses where they overcompensate.
No cage is seamless. No fortress is without a fault line.
Use that to your advantage. Don’t allow yourself to believe they’ve outsmarted you.
I breathe in slowly.
The next opportunity that arises, I will take it.
Even if it kills me.