14. Take It All Back #3
Blood on his face — from a cut above his eye, from his lip, from somewhere in his hair that's matting the dark strands to his forehead.
His knuckles are raw and swollen, the skin split across every ridge.
His shirt is torn at the collar, soaked with rain and sweat.
He's breathing hard — the ragged, uneven breathing of a man who just fought his way through a building and his own brother and is still standing through nothing but will.
Rain in his hair. Blood on his jaw. Chest heaving.
And in his hand — a key.
He sees me. His eyes look at the chain. Something crosses his face that I've never seen — not rage, not grief, but something beyond both. The look of a man who sees the full cost of his choices in iron links around the ankle of the woman he loves.
He crosses the room in three steps. He drops to his knees in front of my chair.
Not kneeling — collapsing to his knees, the way a man goes down when his legs refuse to carry the weight anymore.
His hands find the shackle. The key fits.
He turns it, and the chain falls to the concrete with a sound like something ending.
His hands stay on my ankle. Gently — so gently it makes my chest crack — he traces the raw, red ring the metal left on my skin.
His thumb moves over the bruised flesh with a tenderness that doesn't belong to a man who just fought his way through a warehouse.
Like he's trying to undo the damage with his touch.
He looks up at me from his knees. His face is wrecked — cut, swollen, streaked with everything this night has cost him. Eyes that hold everything — regret, love, and the devastating admission of a man who knows he caused this.
"I'm sorry."
His voice breaks on the second word. Not cracks — breaks. The way a dam breaks beneath the weight of floodwater, the way ice gives way in spring, the way a man who has spent his entire life holding everything together finally, irrevocably lets it fall apart.
"I'm sorry," he says again. Like once wasn't enough. Like he needs to say it until the words weigh as much as what he did.
“I didn’t exile you,” he says, the words rough, like they scrape their way out of him. “Sofia, I need you to know that. I need you to hear me, even if it doesn’t change what I did.”
His hands tighten around my ankle for one second, then loosen like he’s afraid even that is too much.
“The east wing was never meant to be a punishment. I told myself it was protection. I told myself if I kept you close, if I made them believe I had turned against you, the person behind the leaks would get careless. I thought I could build a trap around the lie and catch whoever was moving inside my house.”
His breath shudders.
“But Sebastian knew me too well. He knew I would investigate. He knew I would hesitate. He let me think I still had control, and while I was watching the trap, he took you.”
Matteo looks at the chain on the floor, then back at me. His eyes are ruined.
“I was trying to find the spy,” he says. “I was trying to protect you. But I used your pain to do it, and that makes it my fault anyway.”
The words hit harder than the apology because they are not excuses. They are confessions.
“I should have chosen you first,” he whispers. “Not the plan. Not the evidence. Not the trap. You.”
I look at him. This man. On his knees in front of me.
Not because I asked him to kneel. Not because anyone is watching.
Because something inside him put him there — something stronger than pride, stronger than his name, stronger than every lesson his father ever taught him about power and never bending.
I reach down. My hands find his face — bruised knuckles against his jaw, torn nails in his hair, my palms cradling the bones of a man who is shaking so hard I can feel it in my wrists.
I press my forehead to his.
For a second, I can’t answer him.
Because part of me wants to be angry. Part of me wants to pull away and make him feel the distance he put between us, to let him sit in the cold with the truth the way I had to sit with the lie.
But another part of me sees him too clearly now — not the heir, not the man who locked his feelings behind power and control, but Matteo. Bleeding. Shaking. On his knees with my broken chain at his feet and the truth finally tearing him open.
It doesn’t erase what he did.
It doesn’t erase what he did to me in the library.
But it changes something. Not forgiveness. Not yet. Something smaller. Something fragile. The first breath after being underwater too long.
"I know," I say.
Two words. That's all. Not that I forgive you — it's too soon for that, and we both know it. Not it's okay — because it's not okay, and pretending otherwise would be a lie, and we've had enough lies to last a lifetime.
Just I know. I know you're sorry. I know you were wrong. I know the man in the library wasn't the real you, and the man kneeling in front of me now — broken and bleeding and saying sorry like it's the first honest word he's spoken in weeks — is.
His hands move from my ankle to my waist. Not gripping, not pulling. Just holding. The way you hold something you dropped and found again and can't believe is still intact.
His forehead presses harder against mine. His eyes close. A sound comes out of him that I've never heard — not a word, not a cry, something from the bottom of the well, something that's been trapped in his chest since the day he chose wrong.
I hold his face. He holds my waist. We stay in the wreckage — the warehouse, the rain, the broken chain on the floor — and for the first time since the library, the distance between us is zero.
Not performed. Not negotiated. Not measured in contract clauses or hallway arguments or the careful inches we've been managing since the day I signed my name next to his.
Just zero. Just us. Just the sound of two people breathing in the same rhythm in a cold room at the end of the longest night of our lives.
Not fixed. Not healed. Not even close to okay.
But I can feel his heartbeat through his chest where it presses against my knees.
And he can feel my hands on his face, steady now, holding him the way no one has held him since his mother died.
And somewhere between his heartbeat and my hands, something new is forming — fragile, unnamed, built from the ruins of everything we broke.
Together. Imperfect and damaged and real.
And right now, that is enough — that is everything.