I keep going.
Isabella's free hand flattens on the table. Her knuckles are white. I watch her breathe through it, this woman who survived things that would have broken most people, who sits in rooms full of dangerous men without flinching, who smiles at the man she's being handed off to like it costs her nothing, I watch her use every bit of that control to stay perfectly composed while I take her apart quietly under the table and something ugly and possessive moves through my chest because she is extraordinary and she is choosing to waste it on him.
My teeth grind against each other at the thought of Vittorio near her.
Her leg shifts again.
She's close. I can feel it in the tension running through her whole body, in the death grip she has on my wrist, in the way she's stopped pretending to follow the conversation and is simply staring at a fixed point on the wall with polite blankness painted over something that is very much not polite.
I slow down.
She inhales sharply through her nose.
I slow down more.
"Would you excuse me?" Her voice is perfect. Not a crack in it. How she manages it I will never know. She pushes her chair back and sets her napkin on the table and doesn't look at me. "Just a moment."
"Of course," Matteo says.
Luca watches her go with a slight frown and then returns his attention to the planner.
She walks out.
I watch her go. Then I look down at the table and count to sixty in my head because if I follow her immediately every person in this room will know exactly what I'm doing and Salvatore already knows too much.
Sixty seconds.
"Excuse me," I say. "Call I need to take."
Matteo's eyes find mine. The look he gives me could strip the paint off walls. I hold it without blinking, stand, and walk out.
She's not in the hallway.
I follow the corridor left and push open the door to the bathroom at the end and she's there, back against the vanity, arms crossed, her chest still rising and falling too fast, her composure back.
The lock clicks behind me.
The room is small. Marble floors, dim lighting, the distant muffled sound of the meeting continuing without us. Isabella watches me cross toward her and doesn't move, chin level, jaw set, doing that thing she does where she makes herself look untouchable right up until the moment she isn't.
"You have lost your mind," she says.
"Maybe." I stop in front of her, close enough that she has to look up to hold my eyes. "You didn't move my hand."
"I—"
"Not once. For twenty minutes. You sat there and let Vittorio touch your shoulder and you held my hand and you didn't move it once." I lean in, bracing one hand on the vanity beside her hip, and drop my voice. "So don't stand there and act like you didn't want this."
"What I want," she says carefully, "and what I can have are two different?—"
I kiss her.
My mouth comes down on hers with everything I've been sitting on for the last twenty minutes and she makes a sound against my lips that is the single most gratifying thing I've heard in recent memory, her hands come up and grab the front of my shirt andshe kisses me back like she's furious about it, like she resents how much she wants this, like she's been counting down the seconds since she walked out of that room.
I pull back just far enough to look at her face.
Her lipstick is ruined. Her eyes are dark. She's still gripping my shirt.
"In five days," I say quietly, "you're going to stand at an altar and make promises to him. You've decided that. You've chosen it." My hand finds her hip, her waist, the hem of her dress. "So I need you to remember this. Every time he touches you. Every time you have to smile at him. Every time you lie in his bed and think about what you gave up." My mouth finds the line of her jaw, her throat, the place beneath her ear that makes her breathing go ragged. "I need you to remember exactly what that choice cost you."
