Page 64 of Accidental Alliance

They looked at the expensively tailored black suits, the calm voice, the violence that never seemed to show itself until the precise moment it needed to strike, and decided he was nothing more than his father’s son.

I knew better, but maybe that was my first mistake. Maybe girls like me should never look for softness inside wolves.

My eyes flick up to the camera then. “You turned it off.”

“I did.”

“Why?” The question comes too quickly for my liking.

He glances at the camera then too, then back at me. “Because what happens in this room does not need witnesses.”

The room seems to shrink around us, drawing the cot, the concrete walls, the locked door, and us two ruined people into the same cruel little orbit that we can never seem to abstain from falling into.

My pulse stumbles once, then corrects itself with a hard beat. “That sounds like a threat.”

“It isn’t, Isabella.”

I hate when he does that. When he refuses to play the game and just lets the truth sit between us without dressing up any of it with that cruelty he’s shown me before.

I need this anger in me to stay strong enough to keep my body from remembering what it was like being with him when I still believed some parts of him felt human. If I don’t, I’ll do something reckless I know I will regret.

For a second, the room disappears. I am nineteen again standing in his apartment with the city bleeding gold light through the windows, thinking I am old enough to understand danger because I grew up among it.

Believing I could love a man like Elio and not be consumed by him because I would know better than to allow that to happen. Thinking the way he looked at me had meant I had found a place inside him no one else could reach.

Then morning comes and he is gone.

He left.

He chose them.

He let me wake up alone in that apartment.

Those are the familiar mantras I have told myself over and over for years. They have become a kind of private scripture, verses I repeat in the dark whenever memory grows teeth and sinks in deep into my heart.

I remember whispering them through sleepless nights with Matteo fever-hot against my chest, murmuring them to myself while washing bottles alone and every time my son laughed in a way that pulled Elio’s ghost from its grave.

I fold my arms across my chest, needing the barrier even if it’s useless. “I want to see Matteo.”

“I know.”

“So bring me to him.”

“I can’t do that.”

Of course he can’t, and I already know exactly why. His father will find out and question his judgment, his brother will see and interrogate him.

The entire Conti empire is built on those who pretend their hearts have been cut cleanly out of their chests at birth, and Elio, despite all his darkness and blood-soaked discipline, has always had the fatal flaw of feeling too much.

It’s a shame he’s never had the courage to do anything about it.

“You’re a coward,” I spit at him.

His eyes flash with a brief spark of anger. “You think I wanted this?”

“I think what you want has no bearing on what happens to me or my child. So what does it matter?”

His gaze holds mine. For a moment I think I see something flicker through him—pain, maybe.