Chapter Twenty-Three
Morena
“Still hate me?” he asked, voice hoarse.
I looked at him. At the blood drying on his shirt. At the open, terrified look in his eyes that he was trying very hard to hide. At the man who had bought me, collared me, killed for me, and then cooked for me like any of it could make up for the rest.
The truth came out before I could stop it.
“No,” I whispered. “I love you.”
He went completely still. For a second he just stared at me like the words were a foreign language.
“Don’t,” he said, low and dangerous. “Don’t say that. Take it back. You don’t get to say that. Not after everything. Not after I bought you. You don’t get to look at me with my cum dripping out of you and say you love me like it’s simple.”
“It’s not simple,” I said. “It’s the most complicated, stupid, painful thing I’ve ever felt. But it’s true.”
“Stop.”
“I love you.”
“Rena.”
“I loved you when I put the knife to my throat,” I whispered. “I’m sorry… I shouldn’t have done that. I love you even though you’re a controlling, possessive, emotionally constipated bastard who has no idea what to do with it.”
He made a rough sound and turned away. Both hands braced on the opposite counter. His shoulders were rigid. I could see the muscle jumping in his jaw.
“You can’t love me,” he said, voice cracking. “Do you understand that? I am not a man people love. I am the man who ends things. I am the man who puts bullets in heads and buys women and keeps them on schedules so I never have to feel a thing.”
He turned back to me. His eyes were wet and furious and completely unmoored.
“My father used to say love was the thing that got men killed in this life. He made sure I learned the lesson young. I watched him put a gun in my mother’s mouth when I was twelve because she wasn’t obedient enough.
He made me stay in the room. He told me that was what love looked like when it went wrong. And then he made me help clean it up.”
The confession hung in the air like smoke.
I felt the blood leave my face.“So you don’t get to stand there with my cum inside you and tell me you love me.
Because if you love me, I will destroy you the same way.
I will lock you down. I will watch every door.
I will kill anyone who touches you. I will become the exact beast he trained me to be, and I will do it with your name in my mouth the whole time. ”
His voice dropped to a whisper that was somehow louder than the shouting. “I am halfway there, Morena. Do not push me the rest of the way.”
I put both hands on his face.
He flinched hard.
“I love you,” I said again, clear and steady. “And I’m not taking it back. So if you’re going to become an animal, you’re going to do it while I’m here. You’re going to do it knowing I see exactly what you are and I’m staying anyway.”
His hands came up and gripped my wrists hard enough to bruise. For a second I thought he might shove me away. Instead he dragged me against him and buried his face in my bare neck.
“You’re going to regret this,” he whispered against my skin, voice completely wrecked. “You’re going to wake up one day and realize you told a killer you loved him and he decided to keep you forever.”
I wrapped my arms around his head and held on. I was holding him when the small voice came from the doorway.
“Rena?”
We both froze.
Camilla stood there in the pink jacket she had fallen asleep in, barefoot, hair a tangled mess, eyes huge and shiny with tears. Her little face was blotchy from crying.
I pulled away from him instantly and dropped to my knees.
“Cami. Come here.”
She ran straight into me. I wrapped her up as carefully as I could, mindful of how little she was. She buried her face in my neck and started crying harder, the quiet, exhausted kind of crying that comes after too many bad nights.
“I had the bad dream again,” she whispered. “The one where the door won’t open and you’re not there.”
“I’m here,” I said, rocking her gently. “I’m right here. You’re safe.”
Matteo hadn’t moved. He was standing where I left him, chest bare, blood on his shirt, looking like a man who had just been ripped out of one world and dropped into another. His eyes were fixed on Camilla like she was something fragile and impossible.
She peeked at him over my shoulder. For a second I thought she might hide again. Instead she sniffled and said, in the smallest voice: “I’m hungry…”
Matteo’s throat worked. He crouched down slowly, the same way he had beside her bed earlier, like he was afraid of scaring her.
I didn’t look at him when I stood. I just shifted Camilla higher against my chest and carried her toward the kitchen like the last five minutes hadn’t happened, like there wasn’t blood drying on his shirt and a confession still hanging in the air like gunpowder.
“Okay,” I said, voice as even as I could make it. “Hungry we can do. What do you want? Toast? Eggs? The cereal with the little marshmallows that I pretend I don’t buy for you?”
She hiccuped against my neck. “The marshmallow one.”
“Of course.”
Matteo moved then. He went to the cabinet like his hands weren’t still shaking, pulled down the box, the bowl, the spoon.
He poured too carefully, like the cereal might shatter if he rushed it.
Milk last. He set the bowl on the table and pulled the chair out for her without a word. It was a small miracle he had it.
I set Camilla down. She climbed up, small and solemn, and started eating like it was the most important job in the world. Every few bites she glanced at him. Then at me. Then at the doorway, as if checking that it was still open.
Matteo stood a few feet back, arms crossed over his bare chest, jaw locked. The blood on his shirt looked worse under the kitchen light. I caught his eye and tipped my chin toward the hallway.
He didn’t move. I went to him instead.
“Go change,” I said under my breath. “You’re scaring her.”
I put my hand on his forearm. The muscle jumped. “She’s four. She had a nightmare that the door wouldn’t open and I wasn’t there. You standing here looking like you just walked out of a slaughterhouse is not helping. Change. Wash your face. Then come back.”
His eyes flicked to Camilla. She was watching us over the rim of the bowl, milk on her lip. He exhaled once, sharp, and left the kitchen. I sat beside her. She leaned into my side immediately, still eating, like proximity was part of the meal.
“Are you going to leave?” The question landed so small and so heavy I had to swallow before I answered.
“No, of course not,” I said. “I’m not leaving.”
She nodded like she’d been waiting for the official ruling. Then, after another bite: “Is he going to leave?”
“Um… No. I don’t think so.”
She considered this too. “He looks like a man from TV.”
I looked toward the hallway. The shower had started in the distance.
“Which one?” I asked.
“The handsome one that sells houses.”
I giggled.
“Yeah,” I said. “He does exactly that.”
She ate the rest of her food in silence. When the bowl was empty she pushed it away and crawled into my lap without asking. I wrapped the pink jacket tighter around her and rocked her the way I had in the doorway.
Matteo came back in a black T-shirt, hair damp, the blood gone. He stopped in the entrance like he needed permission to re-enter his own kitchen. Camilla watched him over my shoulder.
“Hi,” she said.
He blinked. “Hey, little lady.”
“You look less tired now.”
Something almost like a laugh punched out of him, short and startled. “Thank you, Miss.”
She studied him a second longer. Then she held out one small hand, palm up, the way kids do when they’re offering something they don’t have a name for.
Matteo stared at it. I felt him hesitate, the full-body flinch of a man who had been taught that hands reaching for him meant a request or a weapon.
Then he stepped forward and crouched again, the same careful drop he’d used beside her bed.
He didn’t take her hand. He just put his much larger one on the table next to it, close enough that she could choose.
She patted the back of his knuckles twice, solemn as a judge, then withdrew.
Then her eyes dropped. Matteo’s forearm was still resting on the table, close enough that the black ink caught the kitchen light.
Vines. A skull face half-hidden under the sleeve of the new T-shirt.
A date in Roman numerals. Something that looked, to a four-year-old, exactly like a very angry bird.
Camilla leaned forward until her nose was almost on his wrist.
“You have drawings,” she whispered, awed.
Matteo went still. “Kind of.”
She frowned, considering the word like it might be a trick. “Did you color on yourself?”
“Someone else did,” he said.
“Did it tickle?”
“No,” he grinned.
“Did it hurt?”
A pause. “A little.”
She gasped the way children gasp when they discover a new injustice. Then she poked the bird with one careful finger, as if it might peck her back.
“This one is mad.”
Matteo looked at me like I might translate. I only raised my eyebrows. He was on his own.
“That’s because… he had a bad day,” he said finally.
Camilla accepted this immediately. Bad days made sense. She traced the line of a vine next, tongue poking out in concentration.
“This one is a plant. Plants are nice. You should give the bird a plant. Then he won’t be mad.”
I bit the inside of my cheek. Matteo’s mouth twitched. “I’ll take it under advisement.”
She wasn’t done. She pushed his sleeve up another inch with both hands, small and bossy. She found the numbers.
“Is that your birthday?”
“No.”
“Is it my birthday?”
“No, little lady.”
She looked personally offended. “Then whose?”
“No one’s you know.” He smiled. “His name was Angelo.”
She sat back in my lap, thinking hard, then announced her verdict to the room. “You have a lot of secrets on your skin.”
Matteo’s throat worked. “Yeah.”
“I have a secret too,” she said, suddenly generous. She pulled her pink jacket sleeve up and showed him the inside of her own wrist, completely blank. “I am going to draw a star there. With a marker. So we match. But mine won’t hurt at all. I can teach you.”
I felt the laugh leave me before I could stop it.
Matteo stared at her bare little wrist like she’d offered him something holy and ridiculous at the same time. Then, very slowly, he turned his own arm so the angriest bird faced her again.
“He says okay,” he muttered. “About the plant.”
Camilla beamed. She leaned in and, with the solemn ceremony of a child bestowing a knighthood, planted a sticky marshmallow-cereal kiss on the back of his hand, right over the ink.
“There,” she said. “Now he’s less mad.”