A Hunger for the Forbidden - By Maisey Yates Page 0,53

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.

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