HIS BELLISSIMA

FINISH THE SENTENCE

She'd been pacing for what felt like an hour, the marble cold under her bare feet, her mind moving faster than her body could keep up with.

How powerful was he? She'd read about men like this, seen the headlines, the documentaries, the true crime specials Audrey used to fall asleep to on the couch, always insisting she wasn't actually scared, just interested. Killers. Men who disappeared people, who hurt people, who treated women like currency instead of human beings. She didn't know exactly what category Matteo Santoro fell into, and the not knowing was its own particular kind of terror, worse in some ways than a clear answer would have been.

The room felt smaller every hour she spent in it, the walls pressing closer even though nothing about their actual distance had changed. She could feel herself starting to suffocate under the weight of all of it, the silence, the locked door, the maids who spoke in careful half-sentences, the days blurring together with nothing to mark them apart except meals she barely touched and a bed she barely slept in.

It was strange, she thought, how differently the two men in this house wore the same last name, or close enough to it. Dante had walked into her room like the whole situation was a mildly amusing inconvenience, sarcasm dripping off every sentence, and somehow, infuriatingly, it had worked. He teased, he needled, he made her laugh even when she didn't want to give him the satisfaction, and underneath it there'd been something that almost passed for warmth. Matteo was nothing like that. Matteo moved through rooms like the temperature dropped wherever he stood, controlled and unreadable, every word measured before it left his mouth.

She thought of her friends.They had no idea where she was. They probably thought she'd gone home with someone that night, embarrassed, hungover, avoiding their calls out of guilt. It had been days now. Surely they'd started to worry by now, surely someone had gone looking, and the thought of them frightened and searching, blaming themselves for letting her walk out that side door alone, made something twist violently in her chest.

She needed to hear their voices. She needed to know they were okay, that whatever was happening to her hadn't somehow reached back and touched them too.

She looked around for her phone out of pure reflex before she remembered, all over again, that it was gone. They'd taken it that first day and never given it back, and the absence of it felt like a missing limb, phantom and aching, a small cruelty stacked on top of every larger one.

A knock sounded at the door.

Clarise stepped in a moment later, her expression carefully neutral in the way it always was. "Signorina. Is there anything you need this evening? I could draw you a bath, if you'd like."

"I don't need anything." The words came out sharper than she meant them to, though she found she didn't particularly care. "I just want to be left alone."

Clarise hesitated at the door, hands folding in front of her. "Of course. The boss wanted to let you know. We leave for Sicily in two days."

The words landed like a slap.

"Two days?" Alondra was across the room before she'd fully decided to move. "What do you mean, two days? Nobody told me that. Nobody asked me anything."

"I only know what I've been told, signorina." Clarise's eyes flicked toward the door, uneasy, as though she could already sense where this was headed.

"I need to see him." The decision arrived fully formed, immovable, the fear and fury of the last several days finally finding somewhere to go. "Right now."

Clarise's face went pale. "Signorina, he's asked not to be disturbed tonight, he's—"

"I don't care what he asked." She was already moving past her, past Clarise's outstretched hand, past every polite objection the woman tried to put in her way. "I need to talk to him right now."

"Signorina, please, wait—" Clarise's voice trailed after her down the hall, thin with panic, but Alondra didn't slow down, didn't look back, her bare feet slapping against marble as she followed the only path she knew led toward his office, some small, reckless part of her almost daring one of the men posted along the corridor to try and stop her.

She shoved the door open without knocking.

He looked up from his desk, and for one unguarded second, something flickered across his face that she hadn't seen there before. Surprise, real and unpracticed, gone almost as fast as it appeared, replaced by the same careful stillness he wore for everything.

Clarise arrived half a step behind her, breathless. "Sir, I'm so sorry, I tried to stop her, I told her you didn't want to be—"

"It's fine, Clarise." His voice was even, though his eyes hadn't left Alondra's face. "You can go."

***********************************

She came into his office like a storm that had finally found a door to walk through instead of a wall to break. He was rapidly losing patience at this point .Fascination and tolerance were not the same thing, and barging into his office uninvited to demand answers as though she were owed any was exactly the kind of thing that would have earned another man real consequences.

"Why didn't you tell me we're leaving in two days?" Her voice shook, though not, he thought, from fear. "What about my friends? I need to talk to them before we leave."

"You don't need anything of the sort." His tone was flatter than he'd intended, an edge creeping into it that he didn't bother smoothing away this time.

"I do." She stepped closer to the desk, close enough that he had to look up at her rather than through her. "If I just disappear on them without a word, they'll panic. They'll report me missing. They'll go to the police, and then the police start asking questions, and none of that is good for you either, so this isn't just about me."

"Your friends," he said, unmoved, "can report whatever they like. It changes nothing."

"You don't know that."

"I know precisely that." He set his pen down, giving her his full attention now, which she seemed to want and immediately regret once she had it. "There is no report they can file that reaches me. No officer they can call that matters. Your friends are, to put it plainly, irrelevant to me".

"They're not irrelevant to me." Her voice cracked slightly on the word, and she hated it, he could see her hating it. "They're all I have left. I can't just vanish on them. I owe them a goodbye, at least. Something. Anything".

"You don't owe anyone anything anymore." He said it flatly, without cruelty, which somehow made it worse. "You belong to a different life now, bellissima. The sooner you accept that, the easier this becomes for both of us."

Something in her seemed to crumble slightly at that, though she fought it, chin still lifted, refusing to give him the satisfaction of watching her fully break.

"Please." The word cost her something, he could tell. "Just a phone call. Ten minutes. I won't tell them anything about this place, about you, any of it. I just need them to hear my voice and know I'm alive."

He studied her for a long moment, weighing something she couldn't see the shape of, aware even as he did it that some part of him wanted to grant the request purely to make the desperation in her voice disappear, and equally aware that giving in to that instinct on command was not a habit he intended to start.

"Behave," he said finally, "between now and Sicily, and I'll consider it."

"Consider it." She let out a short, humorless laugh. "You say that like it's a favor."

"It is one."

"No. A favor doesn't come with conditions stapled to it. This is a leash with extra steps." She crossed her arms and looked at him like she was finally done deciding what to call him. "You know what you actually are? Cruel. A control freak with a title, deciding what people are allowed to want and calling it power because kidnapper doesn't fit as well on a business card."

"Watch yourself."

"Or what. You'll have someone shoot me? At least that would be honest. At least it would look like what you actually are underneath all of this." Her voice climbed, unstoppable now. "You're a killer, Matteo. Men like you don't have a soul, you collect things you like the look of and call it fascination so it hurts less to admit what it is. I don't know what disgusts me more. The fact that you are pre……”

She didn't finish it. Something in his face closed the distance before his feet did.

He was around the desk before he'd consciously decided to move, the distance between them closing in two strides, and then her back met the wall beside the bookshelves and his hand landed flat against it beside her head, close enough now that he could feel the unsteady rhythm of her breathing against his own chest. He was standing close, close enough to see the flecks of gold scattered through the brown of her eyes, close enough to smell whatever soap Clarise had left for her, something warm and floral that had no business undoing him the way it did. She'd called him a killer, and she wasn't wrong, and it hadn't stung nearly as much as the sentence she'd swallowed before she could finish it.

He wanted her. Not the careful, manageable want he'd catalogued and set aside a dozen times since the alley, telling himself it was nothing more than the ordinary pull any man would feel toward a beautiful woman. This was something else, something that had been building under his skin for days and had finally found a crack wide enough to climb through. He wanted to know what she tasted like when she wasn't armored in fury. He wanted to feel the exact moment her breath caught, the way it was catching now, shallow and quick against his collarbone. He wanted her hands in his hair instead of flat against the wall behind her, fighting the urge to touch him.

His gaze dropped to her mouth and stayed there a beat too long. Her breath hitched, audible in the quiet of the room, and something low and possessive uncoiled in his chest at the sound of it, some feral, unreasonable satisfaction that she felt this too, whatever this was, even as she stood there hating him for making her feel it.

"Finish the sentence," he said, low, his voice rougher than he meant it to sound. "I dare you."

Her lips parted to say something, but—

A knock cracked against the door, hard and urgent, three times.

"Sir." One of the guards from the corridor, his voice clipped, none of the usual deference in it. "Forgive the interruption. You need to see this."

Neither of them moved for one more second, caught in the wreckage of whatever had almost happened, and then Matteo stepped back, jaw tight, control sliding back over his face like a door closing.

"Go to your room," he told her, quiet and unreadable again, though his eyes lingered a moment too long before he turned away. "We'll finish this later."

She was still standing there, hand pressed to her own chest as though she could slow her heartbeat by force, when he crossed the room and pulled the door open to whatever the guard had come to tell him.

The man's face, when she caught a glimpse of it past Matteo's shoulder had gone the color of old ash.