“I don’t believe you,” she said.
“You don’t believe me? Did you not listen to what I told you? Did you not understand? All of that, breaking that man’s legs, leaving my father, that was what I am capable of when I have the most rigid control of myself. What I did to those men who attacked you? That blind rage? I didn’t know what I was doing. I had no control, and if you hadn’t stopped me … I would have killed them. I would have killed them and never felt an ounce of guilt for it.”
“So you would have killed rapists, am I supposed to believe that makes you a bad, horrible, irredeemable person? That you would have done what you had to do to save a young girl?”
“That isn’t the point,” he said. “As long as I control it … as long as I don’t feel, I won’t do something I regret. I won’t do something beyond myself. Even with control, do you see what I can do? What I have done? I can never afford to let it go. I can’t afford—”
“I don’t believe it. That isn’t it. You’re running scared, Matteo. You aren’t afraid of losing control, you’re afraid that if you feel you’re going to have to face the guilt. The grief. You’re hiding from the consequences of your actions. Hiding behind this blessed wall of cold and ice, but you can’t live there forever.”
“Yes, I can.”
“No, you can’t. Because at least for the sake of our child, our baby, Matteo, you have to break out of it.”
“Has it ever once occurred to you that I don’t want to?” he roared. “I don’t want to feel, Alessia, I damn well don’t. I don’t want to face what I’ve done. To feel the full impact of my life. Of what was done to me. I don’t want it. I don’t need it. And I don’t want you.”
She stepped back, her body going numb suddenly. Shock. It must be that. Her body’s defense because if it allowed her to feel the pain, she would collapse at his feet.
“You don’t want me?” she asked.
“No. I never did. Not outside the bedroom. I told you that if you didn’t expect love we would be fine. It was the one thing I told you could never be. I said no love. I promised faithfulness, a place in my home, my bed, what more did you want? I offered everything!”
“You offered me nothing,” she said, her voice quivering, a slow ache starting to break through the numbness, shards of pain pushing through. “None of that means anything if you’re withholding the only thing I really want.”
“My love is so important? When has love ever given you anything but pain, Alessia?”
“I don’t know because I’ve never had it for long enough to see.”
“Then why make it so important?”
“Because I deserve it!” She broke then, tears spilling down her cheeks. “Don’t I deserve it, Matteo?”
Matteo’s face paled, and he took a step back. “Yes.”
She didn’t take it as a sign that she had gotten what she wanted. No, Matteo looked like someone had died.
She didn’t say anything. She just waited.
“You deserve that,” he said finally. “And you won’t get it from me.”
“Can’t you just try?”
He shook his head. “I can’t.”
“Stop being so bloody noble. Stop being so repressed. Fight for us. Fight for this.”
“No. I won’t hold you to me. I won’t hold you to this. That is one thing I will do for you, one thing I’ll do right.”
“You really think removing yourself is the only way to fix something? Keeping yourself distant?” It broke her heart. More than his rejection, it was his view of himself that left her crippled with pain.
“It’s a kindness, Alessia. The best thing I’ve ever done. Trust me.”
He turned and walked out of the room, left her standing there in the massive sitting area by herself. She couldn’t cry. Couldn’t bring herself to make the sound of pain that was building inside her. Endless. Bereft.
She wanted to collapse. But she couldn’t. Because she had to stand strong for her child. Matteo might have walked away, but it didn’t change the fact that they were having a baby. Didn’t change the fact that she would be a mother in under six months.
It didn’t change the fact that, no matter what, she loved Matteo Corretti with everything she had in her.
But she would never go back and demand less. Would never undo what she’d said to him. Because she had a right to ask for more. Had a right to expect more. She was willing to give to Matteo. To love him no matter who he was. No matter what he had done.
But she needed his love in return. Because she wasn’t playing at love, it was real. And she refused to play at happiness, to feign joy.
She sank into one of the plush love seats, the pain from her chest spreading to the rest of her body.
She had a feeling there would be no happiness, fake or genuine, for a very long time.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
MATTEO DIDN’T BOTHER with alcohol this time. He didn’t deserve to have any of the reality of the past few hours blunted for his own comfort. He deserved for it to cut him open.
He shifted into Fifth and pushed harder on the gas pedal. Driving always helped him sort through things. And it helped him get farther away from his problems while he did it. But Alessia didn’t feel any farther away.
She was with him. In him. Beneath his skin and, he feared, past his defenses.
Those defenses he had just given all to protect.
You aren’t afraid of losing control, you’re afraid that if you feel you’re going to have to face the guilt.
That was just what he was. Afraid. To his very core.
He was scared that if he reached a hand out and asked for redemption it would truly be beyond his reach. He was afraid that if he let the door open on his emotions there would be nothing but pain, and grief, and the unending lash of guilt for all he had done, both under his father’s influence, and the night of the fire.
He was afraid that he would expose himself, let himself feel it all, and he would still fall short for Alessia. That he wouldn’t know how to be a real husband, or a real father.
He was afraid to want it. Afraid to try it.
She wanted him to fight for them. Nothing good came from him fighting.
Except the time you saved her.
Yes, there was that. He had always held that moment up as a banner displaying what happened when he lost control. A reminder that, as dangerous as he was in general, it was when he felt passion that he truly became a monster.
He pulled his car over to the side of the road, heart pounding, and he closed his eyes, let himself picture that day fully.
The fear in Alessia’s eyes. The way those men had touched her. The rage that had poured through him.
And he knew one thing for certain in that moment. That no matter how blinded he was by anger, he would never hurt Alessia. He would never hurt his child. No, his emotions, not his mind, told him emphatically that he would die before he let any harm come to them.
That he would give everything to keep them safe.
He had been so certain, all this time, that his mind would protect him, but it had been his heart that had demanded he do whatever it took to save Alessia Battaglia from harm. It had been his heart that had demanded he spend that night in New York with her.
And it was his heart that was crumbling into pieces now. There was no protecting his defenses, because Alessia had slipped in beneath them years ago, before they had fully formed, and she was destroying them now from the inside out.
Matteo put his head on the steering wheel, his body shaking as pain worked its way through him, spreading through his veins like poison.
Something in him cracked open, every feeling, every desire, every deep need, suddenly acute and sharp. It was too much. Because it was everything all at once. Grief for the boy he’d been, for the man his father had become and what the end had done to both of them. Justification because he’d done what he had for his whole family. To free everyone. To free himself. Guilt, anguish, because in some ways he would always regret it.
And a desperate longing for redemption. A desperate wish he could go back to the beginning, to the start of it all, and take the path that would form him into Alessia’s white knight. So that he could truly be the man she’d seen.
Alessia. He thought of her face. Her bright smile. Her tears.
Of meeting her eyes in the mirror at a bar, and feeling a sense of certainty, so deep, so true, he hadn’t even tried to fight it.
And he felt something else. A light, flooding through his soul, touching everything. Only this time, it wasn’t brief. Wasn’t temporary. It stayed. It shone on everything, the ugly, the unfinished and the good. It showed him for what he was, what he could be.
Love. He loved Alessia. He had loved her all of his life.
And he wasn’t the man that she should have. He wasn’t the man he could have been if things had gone differently.
But with love came hope. A hope that he could try. A hope for redemption. A hope for the future.
For every dirty, broken feeling that he’d unleashed inside of him, he had let loose the good to combat it.
He had never imagined that. Had never believed that there was so much lightness in him.
It was Alessia. His love for her. His hope for their future.
He might not be the man she’d once imagined. He might not be the man he might have been in different circumstances. But that man was the one that Alessia deserved and no less.