5. The Other Heir #3
Matteo sits beside me in the back seat. His knuckles are white on his thigh — not gripping anything, just clenched, the tension running through his hands like a current he can't discharge.
His jaw is set. His eyes are fixed on some point beyond the windshield.
He's somewhere I can't reach, locked inside whatever Sebastian said in that study, whatever war is being fought on a frequency I can only feel but not hear.
"What did he say to you?" I ask.
He doesn't answer immediately. The city slides past the windows — glass towers giving way to brownstones, the Seaport dissolving into the narrower, older streets that lead back toward the estate. I watch his reflection in the window and wait.
"Nothing that matters," he says.
His voice is flat. Controlled. The voice of a man pressing a lid onto something that wants to explode.
I know that voice. I've used it myself — in doctors' offices, on the phone with insurance companies, sitting at my kitchen table staring at numbers that won't add up.
The voice that says I am holding this together and if you push, I will crack.
I don't push.
His hand moves. Slowly, like he's making a decision he hasn't fully committed to. It leaves his thigh, crosses the six inches of leather seat between us, and comes to rest on my knee.
Warm. Steady. His fingers curve around the bend of my knee like they were made to fit there, like this is a gesture he's done a thousand times rather than never. He doesn't look at me. He doesn't ask.
I should say something. I should remind him of the rule — ask first, always. I should move his hand, or shift my leg, or do anything to keep this arrangement confined to the box where it belongs.
I don't.
His hand stays. My knee stays still. The car moves through the city, and neither of us speaks, and the silence between us isn't empty — it's full, heavy, vibrating with something that has no name and no place in a forty-two-page contract.
I look down at his hand resting on my knee. At the sapphire on my finger, catching the streetlights in flashes of blue. At the white knuckles of his other hand, still clenched on his thigh.
He's angry. Not at me. At his brother, at the situation, at the invisible war being waged over a throne he didn't ask for and can't walk away from. And in the middle of all of it, his hand found my knee. Not because the contract told him to. Not because anyone is watching.
Because he needed to hold onto something.
And he chose me.
I stare out the window and let him.
The estate is dark when we pull through the gates. Matteo opens my door, walks me to the entrance, and disappears into his study without a word. The door closes. I hear the lock turn.
I stand in the hallway for a moment, heels in my hand, the marble cold under my bare feet. The house settles around me — old bones creaking, the distant tick of a clock, the silence of a place that holds too many secrets to ever truly be quiet.
I should go to bed. I should take off this dress, wash my face, lie down in the guest suite that still doesn't feel like mine, close my eyes, and pretend that today didn't rearrange something inside me that I don't know how to put back.
Instead, I walk toward the back of the house. I'm not sure why. My feet carry me down a hallway I haven't explored, past rooms I haven't entered, toward the far wing where the house narrows, the ceilings drop, and the old architecture gives way to something more private.
I hear a voice. Low. Muffled by a door that is almost closed, but not quite.
It's not Matteo. The cadence is different — clipped, efficient, the voice of a man delivering a report.
Enzo. He must be on a call or speaking with someone on the estate's internal line.
I shouldn't be here. I shouldn't be listening.
Every clause in the contract I signed says I don't ask questions about his business.
But the next words freeze me where I stand.
"...Sebastian's already moving. Dante's been making calls since we left the penthouse. He's pulling everything — the mother's medical records, her financials, the apartment, the diner. He told his people she's the way in. Said she'll cost Matteo everything, and he's going to make sure of it."
Silence. Then Enzo again, quieter.
"She's not just a pawn to him anymore, boss. She's a target."
I stand in the dark hallway, barefoot, clutching my heels against my chest like a shield. The marble floor is cold. The house is quiet. And the words echo within the space between my ribs like a bell that won't stop ringing.
She'll cost him everything.
She's a target.
I walk to the guest suite. I close the door.
I sit on the edge of the bed and stare at the sapphire ring on my finger — his mother's ring, the one he slid onto my hand before the cameras started clicking, the ring that caught the light on the balcony while his brother told me I was a good person caught in a bad situation.
Sebastian wasn't warning me.
He was measuring me for a coffin.
And I'm beginning to realize that the most dangerous thing about this arrangement isn't the contract, or the family, or the war between two brothers fighting over a throne.
It's the fact that when Matteo put his hand on my knee tonight, I didn't want him to take it away.
And that — that — is the crack Sebastian is looking for.