CHAPTER THREE

Chapter Three

Alessia POV

"Isabella," I croaked.

"My name is Isabella."

His grip tightened.

He was not pleased with my answer. Any more and I would actually choke to death.

"Try again," he hissed.

There was no heat in his voice, and that was the worst part.

I had braced for his anger – raised voices, the fury of a man who had been made to look foolish – but I had forgotten one thing.

Matteo was not my father.

There was none of that display of emotion, just the flat certainty that he would get what he wanted eventually.

His hand around my throat was not squeezing tightly, exactly, but it was present in a way that made breathing a negotiation all on his terms.

I made myself look at him, blinking rapidly as tears filled the corners of my eyes.

He was not handsome the way men in magazines are handsome.

Polished within an inch of their lives.

I would go as far as saying Matteo was not a handsome man. His nose had been broken at least once, and the scar over his brow and along his cheek didn't do him any favors either.

His dark eyes caught the glow of candlelight and gave nothing back.

Twin dead pools.

His jaw was clenched, and his lips formed a thin line across his face. And his hands – the one not currently wrapped around my throat – hung loosely at his side.

This particular stillness he had was unnerving.

He was not a man who lost control, and that frightened me.

A man who lost control had a ceiling – you could wait him out, or outlast the heat of him.

But this man had no ceiling.

I didn't want to think about what it would be like if a man like him ever lost his control.

But I didn't have the luxury of thinking about that because his hand tightened again.

He had decided on an outcome and was now waiting, with absolute patience, for me to comply.

"I don't know what you want me to say," I whispered.

He laughed, turning my face this way and then that.

He leaned in, the tip of his nose brushing along my jaw.

"You look alike," he said. "Definitely."

"But not the same. I've known since the church."

If I weren't already frozen, it might have happened now.

The church.

Which meant he had stood across from me and taken my hands and said the words and slid the ring onto my finger already knowing – or at least suspecting – and had said nothing.

He had smiled for the cameras and shaken hands and moved through three hours of his own wedding reception carrying this question like a stone in his pocket.

That, somehow, frightened me more than the hand at my throat.

It also made one thing very clear.

There was no hiding from Matteo.

I reached up and wrapped my fingers around his wrist.

He glared at me, and I huffed – or tried to.

I was under no illusions that I could pry his hand away, but I needed him to hear me, and I couldn't speak properly with his grip compressing my airway.

And the memories were starting again, and I knew that if I didn't speak soon they would drown out everything else.

"Let go," I said. "Or I can't talk."

A long moment passed.

Those dark eyes moved across my face like he was reading something there.

Then, slowly, his hand dropped.

I gulped in a deep breath.

The memories flooded me almost immediately, with no permission.

I was back in Isabella's room.

The smell reached me first.

Wine – deep and red – splashed across the floor beneath her.

But that was wrong. There shouldn't have been wine in that room because Isabella didn't drink before noon, and it had barely been past eight in the morning.

She lay on the floor between the vanity and the bed, still in her bridal underwear, the ones our mother had sent from Paris.

One arm stretched out, the wine glass lying near her outstretched hand, its contents bleeding into the ivory of her dressing gown.

"Don't waste my time," Matteo hissed.

I looked up at him.

"Isabella is dead," I mumbled.

He huffed, laughter rushing out of him.

But when he noticed I wasn't laughing, he stopped.

"Where?" he asked.

"The bridal room," I mumbled.

He hissed.

"Impossible."

"You're free to go see for yourself," I muttered under my breath.

I couldn't go back there again. See her like that again after what I had done.

"Did you see something else?" he asked.

I shook my head, playing with my fingers.

"The door had been locked from the inside. I pushed twice before it opened."

I didn't mention that her keys and coat were gone. I didn't really trust Matteo Ricci. I was not ready to hand those details to a man I had known for approximately four hours, regardless of what the marriage certificate said.

Plus, I didn't need him cleaning up evidence.

"Why didn't you report it?" he asked.

I scoffed.

"We both know that wasn't really an option," I hissed, still staring at my palms.

"I don't remember deciding to hide it. I just knew, in some logical part of my brain, that if the bride remained dead and we didn't go through with the wedding, it wouldn't work," I mumbled.

"I did what I had to."

I shrugged.

What I told him was enough.

The room went quiet once I had finished explaining.

The candles had burned low, and below us the mansion had settled into peaceful nighttime silence.

Matteo stood at the window with his back to me.

He had not moved for the last two minutes of my account.

I watched the set of his shoulders and tried to read them the way he had read my face, and found I couldn't.

He was closed in a way I didn't yet have the ability to decipher.

Finally, I asked the only question that mattered.

"So."

My voice came out steadier than I expected.

"You know what I did and why I did it. Now I need to know what you're going to do."

I held his gaze when he turned.

"Will you end this tonight and take your chances with the war? Or let it stand, so we figure out the rest together?"

Matteo studied me for a long moment.

Then he smiled.