Chapter Eighteen
Matteo
Iended the last call and stood in the quiet of the hallway for three full seconds before I walked back toward the bedroom.
The teams had nothing new. The expanded radius had produced the same emptiness.
Dario Rizzo and Camilla had erased themselves with a thoroughness that spoke of preparation, not panic.
Someone had helped them. Someone with resources. The knowledge sat under my ribs like a second pulse I could not quiet. Fucking traitors.
Morena was standing in the center of the room holding Camilla’s photograph against her chest with both hands. The soft white top I had dressed her in clung to the shape of her. Her bare feet were planted on the marble as if she had decided the floor itself might disappear if she moved.
She did not look up when I entered. She did not need to.
The air in the room had changed. I had seen that stillness before on men who had decided the cost of living was higher than the cost of dying. On her it looked different. It looked like something that had finally run out of places to hide.
“You eavesdropped,” I said.
It was not a question. Her fingers tightened on the photograph until the edges bent. When she finally lifted her face the blue of her eyes was raw and wet and completely unbroken by fear. What lived there instead was worse. “You aren’t trying hard enough.”
The words came out low and cracked. Then louder.
“I need you to try harder!”
I closed the door behind me and stayed where I was.
“The trail went cold. I’ll fix it.”
“Fix it?” The sound that left her was almost a laugh, sharp and ugly. “She’s four years old. She’s been with him for months.”
She came at me with her fists.
Open hands first, striking my chest and shoulders with more force than I expected from the slight frame I had held under the stage lights.
Then closed fists, the blows landing against my ribs and the hard plane of my sternum.
She was crying now, the sobs tearing out of her between every strike, years of swallowed terror and the public claiming and the cream and the collar and the murder she had watched all pouring out at once. I let her hit me.
I kept my arms at my sides and took every blow. The physical impact was nothing. The sound of her breaking was the thing that opened the floodgates.
She had endured the auction. She had endured the public consummation. She had asked for the cream and licked my release from the floor and come on my cock while the image of a dead politician was fresh behind her eyes. She had never fully broken in front of me until this moment.
“You promised,” she sobbed, fists moving. “You said you would bring her home. You said it.”
Her voice cracked completely. The next swing was weaker. I caught her wrists before the following blow could land and held them against my chest. She fought the restraint, twisting, trying to pull free, the collar shifting against her throat with every desperate movement. “Let go of me.”
“No.”
“I heard you,” she said, the words raw. “I heard every word. Empty airstrip. No flight plan. Vanished. We’re never going to find them. Only I can do that now.”
I kept her wrists locked in my hands and forced her to meet my gaze.
“The trail is cold. That is the truth. Dario had help. Camilla is alive,” I pleaded.
“I talked to her myself, remember? She’ll be waiting for you somewhere.
I am burning every resource I have to find them.
I will not stop until she is breathing in this penthouse or I am dead. That is also the truth.”
Morena stared at me for a long second. Then something in her expression shifted, the grief hardening into something sharper and more final.
She wrenched one hand free with a strength born of pure desperation and reached behind her. When her arm came back there was a knife in it.
The edge caught the light as she raised it between us.
Her hand shook violently. The point of the blade was aimed at the center of my chest.
“Let me go.”
I looked at the knife, then at her face. “Let you go where? Also, fuck no.”
“You have to let me leave. I will only come back when you have Camilla. Not before. Only when she is safe,” she insisted.
“You are not walking out that door.”
She made a broken sound and used her free hand to yank the heavy gold ring from her finger.
The pale, expensive stone flashed once before she threw it.
The ring struck the center of my chest and fell to the marble with a small, final sound.
She stared at the place it had landed as if the act of removing it had cost her something she could not name.
“I am not your wife,” she said. “I am not the thing you bought for thirty-five million dollars so you could breed me on a schedule. I am Camilla’s sister. And if you cannot bring her home then you do not get to keep me.”
I took one slow step forward. The knife trembled harder in her grip but she did not lower it.
“You can put that blade through my heart and I will not let you walk out of this building alone,” I said. “The knife does not frighten me. Your leaving… does.”
She saw it then. The truth that the threat against my body meant nothing. I had taken worse than a hand with a knife. I had built an empire on the understanding that pain was temporary and control was not.
Something desperate and final moved across her face. She turned the knife.
The blade left the space between us and pressed against the soft skin of her own throat. A thin line of red appeared almost immediately where the edge kissed her. Not deep. Not yet. But real enough.
“If you do not let me walk out that door right now,” she said, voice so rough and hard the words nearly broke apart, “I will finish what this blade started. I mean it, Matteo. I will hurt myself. I will do it in front of you. And then you will have nothing. No one left to fill for your precious seat. Only the knowledge that you kept me here while my sister disappeared and I chose the knife over another day of your lies.”
I had watched men beg. I had watched them bargain with everything they had left. I had never watched a woman put a blade to her own throat because the alternative was staying inside the walls I had built around her.
I calculated the distance. The speed. The angle. I could take the knife from her before she completed the motion. I could have her disarmed and on the bed and chained again in under four seconds. The part of me that had always chosen control screamed to do exactly that.
The larger part, the part that had started to crack , looked at the absolute certainty in her eyes and understood the cost.
If I took the knife by force she would never trust another word I said. The body I had paid for would remain available. And the woman inside it would be gone in every way that mattered. I lowered my hands. “Put the knife down.”
“Let me leave first.”
“Morena.”
“Let me leave or I finish this,” she threatened.
The blood welled a fraction deeper. I stepped back. The space I gave her felt like the largest surrender of my life. “Don’t. Please.”
The word left me before I could stop it. It sounded foreign in my own mouth. I had not begged for anything since I was a boy watching my father’s empire turn into a cage. I had built every wall around myself so that I would never have to make that sound again.
She stared at me as if she had not expected it either.
“Stay,” I said. The second word cost more than the first. “Stay and let me fix this. I will find her. I will bring her home. But if you walk out that door I cannot protect you. Dario is out there. The men who helped him move Camilla are out there. You are safer inside these walls.”
“Safer?” Her voice cracked on the word. “With you?”
“Yes. I am asking you to stay. Morena, please. I… I need you.”
The admission hung between us like something that should never have been spoken. I took another step closer. She did not raise the knife higher. She also did not lower it.
“I will not chain you again,” I said. “I will not force the ring back onto your hand. I will tell you every update the moment it comes in. But you do not leave this building while Dario is breathing free. I will not allow it.”
Tears spilled over her lashes and ran down her cheeks. Her entire body shook with the force of what she was containing.
“You do not get to allow it,” she whispered. “Not anymore.”
I closed the last of the distance between us slowly, hands lowered, every movement deliberate.
She tracked me with those wrecked blue eyes and did not retreat.
When I was close enough that I could have taken the knife, I did not.
I lifted one hand instead and rested it against the side of her face, thumb brushing the wet path of a tear.
“Stay,” I said again, quieter. “Please, baby.”
The words felt like they had been dragged out of a place I had sealed years ago. For a moment her body leaned into my palm as if the contact was the only solid thing left in the room. Then she shook her head once, sharply, and the moment broke. “I can’t.”
She lowered the knife. The blade was streaked with a thin smear of her blood. She set it on the dresser beside Camilla’s photograph with a care that was almost gentle, as if the violence had suddenly left her body and only the exhaustion remained.
I did not move when she stepped past me. I should have.
Every instinct that had kept me alive screamed to lock the door, to put the chain back on, to keep what was mine inside the walls I had built. Instead I turned and watched my wife cross the living room toward the private elevator.
She stopped in front of the steel doors and stood there with her back to me. The soft white fabric of the top moved with every uneven breath. The ring lay on the marble behind me where she had thrown it.
I walked to her. She did not turn until I was close enough to touch. When she did, the full force of her grief hit me like a physical blow. Her face was wrecked. Tears ran freely. The thin cut above the collar had begun to dry into a narrow red line.
“Morena.”
She shook her head again, but the movement was weaker.
I lifted both hands and framed her face.
She did not pull away. For the first time since the night I bought her, I felt the full weight of how much I had lost without realizing it.
The wife purchased for a seat at a table of men who would never understand what it cost to stand in this quiet hallway and watch the only person who had ever meant something prepare to walk out the door.
I kissed her.
It was not the hard claiming kiss from the stage. It was not the possessive press of mouth I had used when I filled her while the politician’s blood was drying in a side corridor. It was slower. Deeper. The kind of kiss that asked instead of took.
She kissed me back for three full heartbeats while fresh tears slipped between our faces. I tasted salt. I tasted the last of the fight leaving her body. I tasted the goodbye she had decided on.
“I will come back,” she whispered. “When you have her. Not before.”
I rested my forehead against hers for one more second and closed my eyes.
“I will find her,” I said. The words came out rough. “I will bring her home. And then I am coming for you.”
She nodded once. The movement was small and final. I unlocked the elevator from my phone with a single command and watched the doors open. She stepped inside. The white clothes I had dressed her in were soft against the body I had marked and claimed and filled… And owned.
I stood in the silent hallway and listened to the distant mechanical sound of the car descending. It felt like something that had been torn open completely and left raw to the air. In the apartment, I picked up the ring. My hands were shaking.
The heavy gold was warm from her hand. The pale diamond stone caught the light the same way it had the night I forced it onto her finger in front of the entire underworld. I closed my fist around it until the metal bit into my palm.
Then I took out my phone and made the first of the new calls.
“Double the price on Dario Rizzo,” I hissed.
“I want him alive. I want Camilla unharmed. Expand the search to every private airstrip, every shipping container, every safe house within three hundred miles. Call Santino. Call Leo. Call in every favor the Ventura name holds. And if anyone in this organization has been feeding information to the people who moved them, I want their names on my desk before midnight.”
I ended the call and stood in the center of the room that smelled faintly of the cream I had worked into Rena’s skin.
She was gone.
I was alone again.