Page 61 of Accidental Alliance

Other times, I swear the camera moves to focus solely on me and not the entirety of the room, like he is on the other side of that feed watching me, those dark eyes tracing every inch of my body the same way they did when he was standing right in front of me.

Maybe I am giving him too much credit.

Maybe it’s not even Elio Conti watching me at all.

I tell myself I hate him. I repeat it like a prayer, holding it between my teeth like a blade that will cut the sides of my mouth the minute I relax around the edges of it.

I hate him for finding me, for dragging Matteo into this nightmare.

I hate him for touching me like the years between us were nothing, kissing me and making my body remember a version of him my heart has spent years trying to bury.

Most of all, I hate him for proving that the pull between us is not gone.

I thought it was.

God, I needed it to be. For years, I fed that old ache every ugly truth I had until I believed I had finally starved it dead. I reminded myself over and over of the way Elio chose his own blood and duty over me when I needed him most.

I poisoned the memory with abandonment. With childbirth alone under a false name, and every night I rocked Matteo through fevers and fears and had no one else there to comfort me too.

I ignored that small voice inside my head that wondered what kind of man could walk away from something before even knowing what he had left behind and if he ever felt there was some piece of him out there he had yet to discover.

Yet no matter what poison I fed that small flame inside me, it still lives.

The chemistry between us has always been a part of me that refuses to die no matter how many times I try to cut it out of me. It rises when I least expect it, dragging itself out of ash with blackened hands and hungry eyes.

That is the cruelty of whatever Elio and I once were and continue to be. We are stuck in this sick cycle neither of us wants to name.

I hate myself for still feeling the ghost of our old fire flare to life while my son is somewhere beyond my reach because of him.

But hatred has not made me immune to Elio the way I want, and that is the most dangerous truth I carry within me besides Matteo’s parentage.

Elio does not know, at least not yet, from what I’ve seen.

Or maybe he suspects it. Maybe that sharp mind has already done the math and that is why he asked about Matteo’s father with fury burning bright in his eyes.

I press my palm to my stomach as the acid in it rises.

I have only heard bits and pieces about where my son is now and how he is doing.

The enforcers are careful around me now, more than they were the first day, which tells me Elio has given them orders not to speak about it when they’re around me.

I have squeezed what I can from them, but no one lingers long enough to answer my questions completely.

Matteo has never gone to bed without knowing where I am, not once in seven years.

Even when he was a baby and I worked two jobs to keep food on our table, after I would come home exhausted enough to feel hollow, I would always be there to take him from his babysitter and sing him to sleep.

I told myself that as long as he was breathing safely in the room next to mine, I could survive anything.

Now he is somewhere in this safehouse surrounded by strangers where I cannot reach him. I cannot answer the questions he must be carrying in that bright, perceptive mind of his.

Why do they call you Isabella?

Why did they take us?

Why won’t they let me see you?

Who is that man?