Chapter Twenty-Four #3
The words exposed more fear than anything he'd said during the argument.
Her chest tightened. “I'm not.”
“It feels like you are.”
“No.” She closed the overnight bag and rested both hands on top of it. “That's why this hurts.”
Taddeo said nothing.
“The things I gave you were real,” she said. “Wanting you was real. Sleeping here because I wanted to wake up beside you was real. The nights together were real, Taddeo. None of that becomes false because you broke my trust.”
Something in his face gave way for a second.
“Then why leave?”
The question was so naked that Isolde almost crossed the room to him on instinct.
She did not.
“Because I don't want you touching me tonight.”
His expression tightened.
“And sleeping beside you while making sure you don't touch me would mean spending the whole night monitoring another boundary.” Her voice softened. “I don't want to do that.”
Taddeo absorbed the words slowly.
“All right.”
Isolde lifted the bag.
His hand moved toward it automatically.
Then stopped.
They both looked at the unfinished gesture.
Once, Taddeo would have taken the bag because carrying it was practical and he was stronger and helping was something he could do without asking.
Tonight he let her hold it.
That mattered too.
She hated that it mattered.
Taddeo crossed to the bedroom door and opened it.
He stepped aside.
Isolde walked past him into the corridor.
The distance to her original bedroom was ridiculous.
She had crossed it barefoot in towels, carrying coffee, wearing his shirts, bringing work she wanted him to look at, or simply because at some point during the evening she'd realized she wanted to be wherever he was.
Now each step felt deliberate enough that she was conscious of the carpet beneath her feet and the weight of the bag in her hand.
Taddeo followed several feet behind.
He did not attempt to close the distance.
At her door, Isolde stopped with one hand around the knob.
When she looked back, he stood beneath the low corridor light in a white shirt with the collar loosened, hands empty at his sides. He still looked like the man capable of making armed men respond to a quiet sentence and moving millions of dollars through Crownport with a phone call.
None of that power could improve what had happened between them.
“Are you going to read anything else?” she asked.
His jaw tightened. “No.”
“Because you already have what you needed?”
“No.”
“Then why?”
Taddeo looked directly at her. “Because you asked me not to.”
The answer hurt.
Isolde gave a small nod. “Good.”
“If Corwin contacts you again, the privacy rules remain in place.”
A bitter laugh almost escaped her, but exhaustion smothered it before it formed. “You understand why I can't believe that right now.”
“Yes.”
He did not ask her to.
That was probably the first right thing he had done since entering the room.
Isolde opened her door.
“Good night, Taddeo.”
His eyes remained on hers. “Good night, Isolde.”
She went inside and closed the door.
There was no lock.
She noticed that immediately, though she had known it since the first night Northglass became her prison. The room had never needed one because privacy here existed at the pleasure of people who controlled every meaningful barrier beyond it.
Tonight, Taddeo stayed outside anyway.
His footsteps remained in the corridor for several seconds before gradually moving away.
Isolde set the overnight bag beside the bed and looked around the room that had once felt unmistakably like a cell.
Her books occupied the shelves now. Her mother's green scarf hung over the chair.
Clothes from her apartment filled the wardrobe, and photographs, toiletries, notebooks, chargers, museum files, and other pieces of her old life had accumulated until the room resembled a version of home assembled from fragments.
Taddeo had brought most of them here.
He had tried, in his own practical way, to return what he could without surrendering the one thing that mattered most.
Choice.
Isolde sat on the edge of the bed.
She still wanted him.
That was the humiliating part.
Her body had apparently failed to receive the emotional update.
She could close her eyes and remember exactly how his hands felt, how easily she slept when his arm settled around her waist, the particular warmth of waking before him and realizing he had unconsciously pulled her closer sometime during the night.
None of that disappeared simply because trust had.
Desire and trust were not the same account.
She understood that now.
Isolde lay down and turned toward the dark windows, pulling the blanket higher even though the room wasn't cold.
Several doors away, Taddeo would eventually lie in the bed she had left behind, surrounded by the small traces of her presence she had not bothered gathering because the thought of returning for every object felt unbearable.
For the first time since they became lovers, neither of them had chosen distance because they wanted it.
Isolde had chosen it because wanting him was no longer enough.