The Boy I Chose Became My Ruin

"No," I said. "He was going to claim you."

For the first time that night, Matteo did not answer.

His hand was still locked around my arm, but I felt the briefest change in his grip. Not mercy. Not regret. Just a crack, small enough that no one else would have noticed.

Then Elena's voice cut through the room.

"Matteo, don't listen to her."

She came in through the side door with two of his men around her, one hand pressed to the bandage at her waist. She had changed out of the bloodied dress from the Red Hook house, but she still looked pale enough to be useful.

The moment Matteo saw her, the crack in him closed.

I looked at my grandfather's body on the floor and felt something inside me go very quiet.

The captains were being dragged from the dining room. Marco was pinned against the wall with a gun under his jaw. My grandfather's blood was spreading over the wood, reaching the hem of my dress.

I had spent my whole life learning how to survive in rooms like this.

For the first time, I did not want to.

I bit down hard enough for blood to fill my mouth.

Matteo saw it immediately.

He caught my jaw and forced my face up. His fingers dug into my cheeks, and the look in his eyes was almost human for one second.

"If you die," he said, his voice low, "every Caruso left in this house dies slowly."

I tasted blood and laughed against his hand.

Then I lunged forward and sank my teeth into the side of his throat.

Matteo cursed and shoved me back, but not before I felt his skin break. Blood touched my mouth again, his this time.

"Matteo," I said, smiling through the taste of it, "I should have left you in that pit."

The words hit him harder than the bite.

His face went white with anger.

"You still think you get to hate me?" He grabbed my arm and threw me to the floor beside the table. "Your family burned mine alive. Your grandfather sat at the head of this house for fifteen years while Bellandi children were buried without names."

"He didn't do it."

"You don't know that."

"I know him."

Matteo's eyes turned colder.

"You knew me too."

For a moment, I had no answer.

Elena stepped closer before I could get up. Her heel came down on my right hand.

Pain shot up my arm so sharply that my vision blurred. She pressed harder, grinding the thin heel into the bandage over my old scar.

"You really do think everyone belongs to you," she said.

I looked up at her.

The soft nurse was gone. There was nothing helpless in her face now.

"You walk into a room, and men kneel. You give orders, and whole families bleed." She crouched, grabbing my hair hard enough to pull tears from my eyes. "Look around, Vivian. No one is coming to save you now."

She forced my face toward the dining room.

My grandfather lay near the head of the table. One of Matteo's men had already pulled the Caruso crest from the wall and thrown it onto the floor. Captains who had served my family for decades were being dragged out one by one, their hands tied, their faces bloodied. The house that had raised me was full of men who answered to Matteo Bellandi.

Elena leaned close to my ear.

"You should have let me leave with him."

Then I felt the knife.

Small, thin, easy to hide.

She drew it from inside her sleeve and drove it toward my stomach.

I caught her wrist with my left hand.

The blade stopped inches from me.

Elena's face twisted as she pushed harder.

"She tried to kill me," she shouted. "Matteo, she shot you, she locked me in that room, and she would have killed the baby if Marco hadn't checked the report first."

"You never had a baby," I hissed.

Her eyes flashed.

"No," she whispered, low enough that only I heard. "But you do."

My blood turned cold.

For the first time that night, real fear moved through me.

Elena smiled.

She had seen it.

Maybe in the clinic file. Maybe in the way I protected myself when I fell. Maybe because women like her survived by noticing the one wound you could not afford to show.

The knife pressed closer.

I heard my own voice before I knew I meant to speak.

"Matteo," I said. "Don't let her touch my child."

The room seemed to stop.

Matteo's eyes snapped to my stomach.

Elena's hand trembled.

I had not planned to tell him. I had not even known what I would do with the truth after everything that happened with Elena. It was early, fragile, something I had kept locked away because the first child I lost had nearly broken me in a quiet room above the Park Avenue clinic.

Now the secret lay between us on a blood-covered floor.

Matteo crossed the room and caught Elena's wrist.

For one breath, I thought he was going to pull the knife away.

He did.

Then he looked at me.

His eyes were red, wet at the edges, but what lived inside them was not tenderness. It was grief twisted into hatred, the kind of hatred that needed something innocent to punish because the guilty were too far away.

"You thought I would let a Caruso heir live?" he asked.

I stared at him.

"Matteo."

He drove the knife into me.

The pain was white and immediate.

I stopped fighting.

Elena screamed, but not for me.

A gunshot cracked from the hallway.

She fell back, clutching her arm, blood spreading between her fingers.

Marco was bleeding from his temple and one shoulder, but he was still standing. Behind him, several Caruso men pushed into the room, firing just enough to break the line around us.

"Vivian!" Marco shouted.

I could not move.

The room tilted.

Matteo turned, gun raised, but one of Marco's men tackled him from the side. The shot went into the ceiling. Plaster rained over the table.

Marco reached me first.

He looked at the blood on my dress, and for the first time in my life, I saw fear on his face.

"No," he said under his breath. "No, no, no."

"You'll regret this," Marco said.

Matteo's face tightened.

"One day, you'll learn what really happened to the Bellandis. And when that day comes, this will be the moment you come back to."

Marco did not wait for Matteo to answer. He lifted me into his arms and backed toward the service passage while his men kept their guns trained on the room.