A Hunger for the Forbidden(53)

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.

Matteo might never love. The ending might not really be happy. The truth was, she lived her life in denial. The pursuit of contentment at least, at all costs, and if that required denial, then she employed it, and she’d always done it quite effectively.

Walking down the aisle toward Alessandro had been the first time she’d truly realized that if she didn’t do something, if she didn’t stop it, it wouldn’t stop itself.

She wrapped her arms around herself, cold driving through her. She had another choice to make. A choice about Matteo. And she wouldn’t make it lightly.

There was no sugarcoating this. No putting on blinders. It was what the wives of these Corretti men, of the Battaglia men, had always done. Looked the other way while their husbands sank into destruction and depravity, but she wouldn’t do that.

If she was going to be Matteo’s wife, in every sense, then she would face it all head-on.

It was empty to make a commitment to someone if you were pretending they were someone they weren’t. It was empty to say you loved someone if you only loved a mirage.

Love. She had been afraid of that word in connection to Matteo for so long, and yet, she knew that was what it was. What it had always been. At least, she’d loved what she’d known about him.

Now she knew more. Now she was going to have to figure out whether she loved the idea, or the man.

Matteo lay in bed. It was past midnight. Hours since he’d last seen Alessia. Hours since they’d spoken.

His body ached, a bleeding wound in his chest where his heart should be. The absence of the heart was nothing new, but the pain was. He had lived in numbness for so long, and Alessia had come back into his life.

Then things had started to change. He’d started to want again. Started to feel again. And now he felt like he was torn open, like the healed, scarred-over, nerveless pieces of himself had been scrubbed raw again. Like he was starting over, starting back at the boy he’d been. The one who had been taken into his father’s hands and molded, hard and cruel, into the image the older man had wanted to see.

He felt weak. Vulnerable in a way he could never recall feeling at any point in his life.

Alessia had walked away from him, and he couldn’t blame her. In a way, it comforted him. Because at least she hadn’t simply blithely walked on in her illusion of who she wanted him to be. She had heard his words. And she’d believed them.

He should be completely grateful for that. Should be happy that she knew. That she wasn’t committed to a man who didn’t truly exist.

But he couldn’t be happy. Selfishly, he wanted her back. Wanted the light and heat and smiles. Wanted one person to look at him and see hope.

“Matteo?”

He looked up and saw Alessia standing in the doorway, her dark hair loose around her shoulders.

“Yes?” He pushed into a sitting position.

“I felt like I owed it to you to really think about what you said.”

“And you owed it to you.”

She nodded. “I suppose I did.”

“And what conclusion have you come to?”

“You aren’t the man I thought you were.”

The words hit him with the force of a moving truck. “No. I’m sure in all of your fantasies about me you never once dreamed that I was a killer.”