Matteo finds me in the library the next morning.
I'm sitting in the window seat with a book I've been staring at for twenty minutes without reading a single word, watching the grounds through the glass and thinking about the dressing room and the air vent and the unpleasant feeling when Vittorio touched my hair.
Tomorrow I'm supposed to marry him and every cell in my body is screaming that it is wrong, that I can't do it, that there has to be another way.
But there isn't.
Is there?
"Isabella."
I look up and Matteo is standing in the doorway with his hands in his pockets and an expression on his face that I've learned to recognize as him working up to saying something I'm not going to like.
"Can we talk?" he asks.
"Of course." I close the book and set it aside. "What's wrong?"
He comes in and sits in the chair across from me, and for a moment he just looks at me the way he used to when we were kids, and he was trying to figure out how to tell me something difficult.
"I want to offer you the option of switching guards," he says finally.
The words don't make sense immediately.
"What?"
"Enzo. I can assign someone else to you if you'd prefer. I know things between you two have been—" He pauses, choosing his words. "Tense. You're always at each other's throats. The hostility is obvious. And I should have asked sooner if you wanted someone else, someone who doesn't make you visibly uncomfortable."
My heart is doing something complicated in my chest.
He thinks we hate each other.
He's seen the tension and the careful distance and the way we avoid looking at each other in rooms full of people and he's interpreted it as animosity instead of what it actually is.
"No," I say immediately.
He blinks. "No?"
"I don't want a different guard. Enzo is fine. He's—" I scramble for words. "We've gotten better. After spending so much time together at the cabin and everything. We're not as hostile as we used to be."
"Isabella—"
"I mean it, Matteo. He's good at his job. He keeps me safe. I trust him." Every word is true even if the reasons aren't what my brother thinks they are. "I don't want anyone else."
He looks at me for a long moment, searching my face for something.
"You're sure?"
"I'm sure."
"Because if he's making you uncomfortable in any way, if he's said something or done something that's crossing a line?—"
"He hasn't." I hold his gaze. "I promise. Enzo has been nothing but professional. I don't want a different guard."
He nods slowly, accepting this even though I can see he's not entirely convinced. "Okay. If you're sure."
"I'm sure."
He stands and I think he's going to leave but he pauses at the door and turns back.
