I check it again.
Only when I’m certain he cannot walk back in do I finally step away.
I stand there in the dark, breathing like I’ve outrun a hurricane, one hand pressed over my throbbing wrist. It pulses with every beat of my heart, swollen and angry with the shape of his fingers. The ache crawls up my arm and settles in my chest.
I turn toward the bathroom, my heels clicking against the marble floors, the sound echoing through the penthouse like a metronome counting down to something I’m not ready to face. The moment I flick on the light, the reflection hits me like a slap.
I grip the counter, leaning in, forcing myself to look.
Red-rimmed eyes.
Pale skin.
Dark circlesI spent too long covering this morning. A woman stretched thin, trying to hold together a life that keeps cracking beneath her feet.
“Oh, Beatrice…” I whisper, the words trembling out of me before I can stop them.
Because for the first time, I truly see myself. And I barely recognize the woman staring back.
My heart cracks open when I meet the eyes staring back at me in the mirror. They look hollow, bruised with exhaustion, stripped of the girl I used to be. There was a time I carried light in them—hope, softness, something warm enough to believe in. But the woman standing here now looks like someone who’s been surviving on fumes and borrowed courage.
Slowly, almost afraid to confirm what I already know, I lower my gaze to my wrist.
The breath rips out of me.
Under the harsh fluorescent light, the damage reveals itself in all its ugly truth. A perfect imprint of his fingers blooms across my skin, deep red bleeding into violet, the shape of his hand branded over the bone.
It’s never been this bad. Never this blatant. Never this undeniable.
My wrist throbs beneath my touch, a pulsing reminder of what happens when he thinks I’m slipping from his grasp. And if this is what he does when he believes I’mstaying, I can’t even imagine what he’ll do when he realizes I’m planning to leave him.
I’ve spent the last two weeks building an escape—quiet, careful, hopeful. I let myself believe I might actually make it out alive. But looking at this bruise, this mark of ownership, doubt settles into my bones like cold water.
Call him.
“No.” The word slips out sharp and small. “I can’t go to him.”
My reflection doesn’t argue. But the voice inside me does.
Calling Matteo would ignite a war I cannot survive. Not me, not my parents, not anyone caught between these two men. And after what we did in that utility closet—after the way he touched me, the way I let him claim parts of me I shouldn’t have offered—it would only complicate everything I’m trying to untangle.
Matteo and Giacomo aren’t two jealous men circling the same woman. They’re two wolves with blood in their teeth and history between them that could raze a city. A war between them wouldn’t be chaos. It would be annihilation. And I am the most fragile piece on the board.
I can’t risk it. Not now. Not while my family is still within reach of his shadow.
My gaze drifts back to the bruise on my wrist, darkening by the second.
The bruise is new in its severity—but the feeling isn’t. The sensation of being gripped too tightly, silenced too quickly, claimed in ways I never agreed to… I’ve felt versions of this for months. I just refused to name it.
Now I can’t avoid it anymore.
My palm flattens against the counter. I steady myself, drawing air into lungs that feel both too full and unbearably hollow. Matteo’s voice threads through my mind, soft and relentless.
You deserve more.
For so long, I believed “more” was a fantasy reserved for women braver than me.
But something shifts now.Something sharp. Something necessary.
