Isabella
Three days have passed since Elio walked through the gates of Davide’s safehouse with his hands raised in surrender. He is kept under constant guard in a secure guest wing with two armed men rotating shifts outside his door and cameras monitoring the hallway leading to his room.
Davide insisted on restraints at first. For the first twenty-four hours, Elio was allowed out of his room only with his wrists cuffed in front of him and two guns following every step, which he bore without complaint.
I overruled it after the first day. As suspicious as we all find it, he is here by choice. Binding him like an animal only feeds the tension already crackling between all of us.
Though I do avoid him as much as possible, throwing myself into planning sessions with whatever information Davide is able to extract about the Contis’ movement.
Every answer Elio gives us adds another line to the map spread across Davide’s war room table, helping me to create the structures for the trap that will inevitably be set for Alessio when the time comes.
Matteo stays close to me most of the time.
At first, he is barely out of arm’s reach, following me from the bedroom to bathroom to the sitting room without question.
He sits under the war room table while Davide and I speak in careful phrases, drawing foxes and soccer balls on paper the staff bring him.
But every so often, I find him near the east hallway, standing at the far end of it while staring. Matteo never tries to sneak past the guards.
He never asks them to open the door.
He only stands there in that too-quiet way of his, staring toward the place where Elio is kept as if the hallway itself might eventually tell him what the adults around him refuse to say.
I don’t know how I’m going to tell him the truth. How do I explain that the man down that hallway is not only an underboss for a family trying to actively hunt us down, and whose family broke our lives apart before Matteo was ever born, but he’s also his father?
The darkness in his hair, the angle of his stubborn little chin, the way his silence can fill a room before his voice ever does, all came from a man I loved long before I ever thought it could break me.
Soon, those facts will undeniably link Matteo to his father. It’s only a matter of time before someone figures it out.
I am terrified that the moment I say it out loud, something irreversible will happen.
That Elio will stop being simply a man under guard and become something much more dangerous.
It’s not just Matteo’s pull toward him that scares me, though, even if that alone unsettles me enough.
It’s mine too.
Every accidental glance reignites an old fire. Eight years of abandonment should have smothered it. His betrayal should have buried it.
The sight of Matteo trembling in that Conti safehouse should have turned every remaining ember into nothing but ash. But with only one look, one breath whispered in my direction, one brush of proximity, and suddenly, the whole world inside me is burning again.
Tonight, after Matteo is finally asleep under the watchful eye of a trusted guard, I slip outside.
The terrace sits off the second floor, half hidden behind tall glass doors and heavy curtains the color of old wine. Davide’s house is full of such places, beautiful little exits that overlook the narrow gardens in the back.
The night air is cool, carrying the distant scents of pine and damp earth. It slides over my skin and settles me in a way I haven’t felt for weeks.
Below, the fortified grounds stretch beneath the moonlight. Floodlights are positioned discreetly among the trees, men patrolling in slow, watchful routes, their dark silhouettes cutting across the silvered grass.
Beyond them, the world is nothing but forest.
I lean against the stone railing, fingers curling over the cold edge. I don’t hear him approach until he is already behind me.
“Couldn’t sleep either?”
I stiffen but don’t turn. “You shouldn’t be out here without an escort.”
“I told Bianchi’s guard I needed air. He knows better than to argue with me this late at night.” There’s a hint of dark humor in his tone, but it fades quickly. “Isabella.”
My name.
Always my damn name.
I close my eyes for one second, then I turn slowly. Elio stands a few feet away, dressed in a simple black shirt and pants provided by Davide.
Nothing about the clothes is remarkable, but on him the simplicity looks almost obscene.
The bruise along his jaw has faded to a dull shadow. Stubble darkens his cheek. His eyes look too alert, haunted as if sleep no longer comes to him.
For a moment, neither of us speaks. The terrace is too small with him on it.
The guards below are suddenly too far away, though I know one shout would bring half the house running.
The stone railing digs into my back as I unconsciously step away from him, but there is nowhere to go that does not look like I’m retreating out of fear.
He stops where he is, hands loose at his sides. “I didn’t mean to corner you.”
A bitter laugh leaves me. “That would be a first.”
“I deserve that,” he says quietly.
“You deserve a lot of things.”
“I know.”
When his face tightens, my heart clenches with a dull pain. I am tired of hurting him, which only infuriates me more. I want him to argue. I want the old, arrogant underboss who could turn anything into a command used to inflict pain.
That man is easier to hate. This one, the one standing beneath moonlight with tired eyes, is dangerous in an entirely different way than I’m used to.
I fold my arms across my chest protectively. “Why are you really out here?”
His gaze shifts briefly past me, toward the dark grounds below. “I… wanted to ask you something.”
The hesitation is what sets my nerves on fire. Elio Conti is not one to hesitate. Or at least, he never has, from what I’ve seen.
He has always commanded, demanded, decided even when he was wrong.
He has always worn certainty like a weapon polished to a shine. Now his voice catches on the edge of whatever he has come out here to say, and some traitorous part of me braces for the blow to come.
“What?”
His eyes close briefly. Pain flashes across his face as if he already knows the question will hurt both of us but still cannot stop himself from asking, anyway. “Is he mine?”
For one suspended second, there is no terrace or guards patrolling the grounds below us. No Davide or Alessio poised on opposite sides of the battlefield. There is only that one, singular question.
My throat tightens. “Don’t.”
Of course he finally asks when the house is quiet and there is no strategy left between us to hide behind. When Elio’s eyes open, they lock on mine with a devastation so naked, I almost look away.
“Tell me,” he murmurs, stepping closer to me. “I need to hear it from your mouth.”
The stone railing is cold against my back, my whole body going rigid when it digs into my spine. I hadn’t realized I retreated until there was nowhere left to go.
He stops when he notices, but the space between us has already narrowed until we’re barely a few inches apart.
“You need?” I echo. The bitterness in my voice surprises even me. “That is an interesting choice of words.”
His jaw flexes. “Please, Isabella.”
“If he is, what then?” I say, voice shaking despite how hard I fight it to remain steady.
Elio’s dark eyes lock on mine, fierce and unyielding. For one heartbeat, I see the possessive flash I’ve come to know so well. The old Conti instinct that claims whatever it touches.
It is there and gone so quickly, I almost convince myself I imagined it. But I know men like him. I know the way possession crawls through their bones before morality can put a hand over its mouth.
I know what his world does to children, especially sons.
“If you think I will let you use him as your family’s heir, you are mistaken. I will cut both our throats and let us bleed out on the floor before I ever let your family touch him,” I say.
A complicated expression crosses his face.
He steps closer, slowly enough that I can stop him.
When I don’t, his voice lowers to just above a whisper.
“Every instinct I was raised with tells me that if he is mine, then he belongs with me. Under my protection. Under my name and behind walls no one can breach.”
I glare at him.
Elio’s expression flinches with disgust, but he does not look away from me. “That is the first thought that crosses through my mind. The one my father put in me before I was old enough to know better. But it isn’t the only one I have. It isn’t the one I am choosing.”
My fingers dig into my arms as I continue to stare at him.
His fingers lift, hovering near my cheek but not quite touching it. The hesitation tears through me more violently than if he simply reached for me. Once, long ago, Elio Conti would have touched me because he wanted to.
Because desire, like power, was something men in his world learned to take before anyone thought to deny them.
Now he waits, stops himself with barely an inch between his skin and mine, and that restraint is its own kind of brutality.
It gives me the choice to pull away if I want to.
“I am not asking you to forgive me, Isabella. I’m not even asking you to love me. I’m… I’m asking you to use me to protect our boy. Let me prove to you that I am not the man you think I am. Not anymore,” he says, his voice low, rough around the edges.
My eyes begin to burn. “You don’t know what you’re asking me to give you.”
I want to sound cold, have that Russo steel reflect on my tongue. I want to stand here as my father’s daughter and make him bleed because he deserves to feel the hurt more than I do, not have this ragged grief pouring out of me like a wound reopening without warning.
Except, right now, I am not only my father’s daughter. I am only the girl Elio left behind, the woman who carried his child with no hand at her back.
The mother who learned to protect at all cost because love had made me vulnerable in ways violence never could.