“May I?” he asked, stretching his hand out, just over the small, rounded swell of her stomach.
“Of course.”
He swallowed hard and placed his palm flat on her belly. It was the smallest little bump, but it was different than it had been. Evidence of the life that was growing inside her. A life they’d created.
She was going to be the mother of his child. She deserved to know. To really understand him. Not to simply look at him and see an illusion. He’d given her a taste of it earlier, but his need for that look, that one she reserved just for him, that look he only got from her, had prevented him from being honest. Had made him hold back the most essential piece of just why he was not the man to be her husband.
The depth to which he was capable of stooping.
Because no matter how bright the future had become, the past was still filled with shadows. And until they were brought into the sunlight, their power would remain.
“There is something else,” he said, taking his hand from her stomach, curling it into a fist. His skin burned.
“About the meeting?”
“No,” he said. “Not about the meeting.”
“What about?”
“About me. About why … about why it might not be the best idea for you to try to make a marriage with me. About the limit of what I can give.”
“Matteo, I already told you how I feel about what happened with your father.”
“By that you mean when he took me on errands?”
“Well … yes.”
“So, you don’t mean what happened the night of the warehouse fire that killed him and Carlo.”
“No. No one knows what happened that night.”
“That isn’t true,” he said, the words scraping his throat raw. “Someone knows.”
“Who?” she asked, but he could tell she already knew.
“I know.”
“How?”
“Because, cara mia. I was there.”
“You were there?”
He nodded slowly. Visions of fire filled his mind. Fire and brimstone, such an appropriate vision. “Yes. I was there to try to convince my father to turn over the holdings of Corretti to me entirely. I wanted to change things. To end the extortion and scams. All of it. But he wouldn’t hear it. You see, at the time, he was still running criminal schemes, using the hotels, which I was managing, to help launder money. To help get counterfeit bills into circulation, into the right hands. Or wrong hands as the case may have been. I didn’t want any part of it, but as long as my father was involved in the running of the corporation, that was never going to end. I wanted out.”
“Oh,” Alessia said, the word a whisper, as if she knew what was coming next. He didn’t want her to guess at it, because he wanted, perversely, for her to believe it impossible. For her to cling to the white-knight image and turn away from the truth he was about to show her.
“I don’t know how the fire started. But the warehouse was filled with counterfeiting plates, and their printing presses. That’s one way to make money, right? Print your own.”
He looked down at his hands, his heart pounding hard, his stomach so tight he could hardly breathe. “The fire spread quickly. I don’t know where Carlo was when it broke out. But I was outside arguing with my father. And he turned and … and he looked at the blaze and he started to walk toward it.”
Matteo closed his eyes, the impression of flames burning bright behind his eyelids. “I told him if he went back into that damned warehouse to rescue those plates, I would leave him to it. I told him to let it burn. To let us start over. I told him that if he went back, I would be happy to let him burn with it all, and then let him continue to burn in hell.”
“Matteo … no.” She shook her head, those dark eyes glistening with tears. She looked horrified. Utterly. Completely. The light was gone. His light.
“Yes,” he said, his voice rough. “Can you guess what he did?”
“What?” The word was scarcely a whisper.
“He laughed. And he said, ‘Just as I thought, you are my son.’ He told me that no matter how I dressed it up, no matter how I pretended I had morals, I was just as bloodthirsty as he was. Just as hungry for vengeance and to have what I thought should be mine, in the fashion I saw fit. And then he walked back into the warehouse.”
“What did you do?”
Matteo remembered the moment vividly. Remembered waiting for a minute, watching, letting his father’s words sink in. Recognizing the truth of them. And embracing them fully. He was his father’s son. And if he, or anyone else, stood a chance of ever breaking free, it had to end.
The front end of the warehouse had collapsed and Matteo had stood back, looking on, his hand curled around his phone. He could have called emergency services. He could have tried to save Benito.
But he hadn’t. Instead, he’d turned his back, the heat blistering behind him, a spark falling onto his neck, singeing his flesh. And then he’d walked away. And he hadn’t looked back, not once. And in that moment he was the full embodiment of everything his father had trained him to be.
He’d found out about Carlo’s and Benito’s deaths over the phone the next day. And there had been no more denial, no more hiding. No more believing that somewhere deep down he was good. That he had a hope of redemption.
He had let it burn in the warehouse.
“I let him die,” he said. “I watched him go in, watched as the front end of the building collapsed. I could have called someone, and I didn’t. I made the choice to be the man he always wanted me to be. The man I always was. I turned and I walked away. I did just as I promised I would do. I let him burn, with all of his damned money. And I can’t regret the choice. He made his, I made mine. And everyone is free of him now. Of both of them.”
Alessia was waxen, her skin pale, her lips tinged blue. “I don’t know what to say.”
“Do you see, Alessia? This is what I was trying to tell you. What you need to understand.” He leaned forward, extending his hand to her, and she jerked back. Her withdrawal felt like a stab to the chest, but it was no less than he deserved. “I’m not the hero of the story. I am nothing less than the villain.”
She understood now, he could see it, along with a dawning horror in her eyes that he wanted to turn away from. She was afraid. Afraid of him. He wasn’t her knight anymore.
“I think maybe I should wait a few days to have my things moved into your room,” she said after a long moment of silence.
He nodded. “That might be wise.” Pain assaulted him and he tried to ignore it, tried to grit his teeth and sit with a neutral expression.
“I’ll talk to you later?”
“Of course.” He sat back on the couch and watched her leave. Then he closed his eyes and tried to picture her smile again. Tried to recapture the way she’d looked at him just a few moments before. But instead of her light, all he could see was a haunted expression, one he had put there.
Alessia was gasping for breath by the time she got to her bedroom. She closed the door behind her and put her hand on her chest, felt her heart hammering beneath her palm.
Matteo had let Benito and Carlo die.
She sucked in a shuddering breath and started pacing back and forth, fighting the tears that were threatening to spill down her cheeks.
She replayed what he had said again in her mind. He hadn’t forced Benito or Carlo back into the burning building. Hadn’t caused them harm with his own hands.
He had walked away. He had washed his hands and walked away, accepting in that moment whatever the consequences might be.
Alessia walked over to her bed and sat on the edge of it. And she tried to reconcile the man downstairs with the man she’d always believed him to be.
The man beneath the armor wasn’t perfect. He was wounded, damaged beyond reason. Hurting. And for the first time she really understood what that meant. Understood how shut down he was. How much it would take to reach him.
And she wasn’t sure if she could do it. Wasn’t sure she had the strength to do it.
It had been so much easier when he was simply the fantasy. When he was the man she’d made him be in her mind. When he was an ideal, a man sent to ride to her rescue.
She’d put him in that position. From the moment she’d first seen him. Then after he had rescued her, she’d assigned him that place even more so.
The night of her bachelorette party …
“Damn you, Alessia,” she said to herself.
Because she’d done it then, too. She’d used Matteo as part of her fantasy, as part of the little world she’d built up in her mind to keep herself from crumbling. She had taken him on her own terms, used him to fill a void, and never once had she truly looked into his. Never once had she truly tried to fill it.
Being there for Matteo, knowing him, meant knowing this. Meant knowing that he had faced down a terrible decision, and that he had made a terrible choice.
The wrong choice, at least in traditional terms of right and wrong.
Very few people would hold it against him that he hadn’t raced into the burning building after his father, but to know that he had also not called for help. That he had meant what he’d said to his father. That he would let him, and all of it, burn. In flame. In greed. And he had.
Her lover, her Matteo, had a core of ice and steel. Getting through it, finding his heart, might be impossible. She faced that, truly faced it, for the first time.