Page 63 of Accidental Alliance

The camera does not follow. Instead, it stays fixed in the same position, dead or disabled or pretending to be to catch me off guard. My hands curl into fists at my sides as I slowly turn to the door, then back to the lens again.

Surely, they wouldn’t leave me here to rot… right?

My heart starts to beat harder as the room grows smaller around me by the second. I take one step toward the door, then stop myself. If I’m being ignored for whatever reason, there will be no point in trying to bang my fist against the door to grab someone’s attention. Clearly, no one is coming to rescue me.

The lock disengaging on the door startles me. I turn quickly as the reinforced door swings inward.

For a second, everything in me goes still when Elio steps inside alone. His dark eyes lock on me with an intensity that steals the breath from my lungs.

He looks nothing like the polished underboss who invaded my house or the controlled monster who stood in this room three days ago with a question he knew I couldn’t answer.

He is disheveled in a way I have rarely seen. His jacket is gone, his shirt sleeves are rolled up to his elbows, revealing scarred forearms dusted with dark hair.

A fresh bruise blooms along his jaw, deep purple beneath the stubble shadowing his face.

There is a split near his lower lip, not fully open anymore, but angry looking enough to make my eyes catch on it before I can stop them.

His hair, usually pushed back from his forehead, is slightly mussed like his hands have been dragged through it too many times.

He looks… tired.

Elio closes the door behind him. The lock engages with a heavy finality that sounds like surrender and damnation all at once. He doesn’t speak to me and simply stares, his chest rising and falling slowly.

The silence stretches between us.

My mouth opens to ask him what happened, then slowly shuts again. It is not exactly my place to dig into the goings-on of life outside this containment room. I am not his lover, nor his confidante. I don’t get the privilege of being the girl who watches him come back bruised from some ugly family errand and tend to the blood scabbing his knuckles.

That person is long gone.

But… then again, I have never been able to help myself when it comes to him. That has always been the first crack in my own armor.

“What happened?”

The corners of his eyes tighten. He gives me nothing for several long moments. Only that dark stare and the faint flex of his jaw tell me he has not solidified into a statue right in front of me.

The bruise along it moves with the tension, his face tensing from the pain just enough to be noticeable before he locks it down again.

It is a small thing—a blink-and-miss-it type. Unfortunately for him, I have spent most of my life surviving by noticing the things men try to hide.

“Nothing you need to worry about,” he finally says.

A humorless laugh slips out of me. “An argument with your family, then?”

His gaze narrows faintly. Not surprise, exactly. Elio Conti does not allow himself anything as vulnerable as that kind of emotion to slip through unless he is alone or dying. But something close to it flickers through his eyes before the shutters come down again.

A part of me, small and buried deep under my anger, is amused by it. He hates that I can still read him.

We hadn’t known each other intimately for long before everything between us shattered into oblivion, but I had been watching Elio Conti for a long while before we ever found ourselves tangled up at that gala.

Long before his mouth ruined me and those hands of his taught my body a language I spent years pretending to forget.

I had watched him across crowded rooms while the old men around us traded threats wrapped in polite smiles.

I’d admired the way soldiers stepped aside before he ever reached them and how his father’s lieutenants never failed to lower their voices whenever he came near.

Most people saw the Conti underboss whenever they looked at him.

That was the mistake people made with him. They mistook discipline for lack of feeling.