Chapter 60 Sixty
Elena's POV
The door clicked shut behind him. The silence he left was louder than his words.
I stood in the center of the room, the scattered papers like fallen leaves around my feet. My body felt hollow. Empty of screams, empty of tears.
His words played on a loop. The monster and the man are one. You belong to both.
My mind began to move, slow and sick, retracing every step.
The club. L’Ombra. My defiant stand in the green dress. I’d thought I was reclaiming myself. He’d been watching from the shadows, already holding the strings. Had he smiled when I took his hand?
The penthouse. The sanctuary. Every sigh, every touch I’d given to the beautiful stranger… it had all been a performance for him. A script he’d written. When I’d fallen apart in his arms that first night, had he been proud of his craftsmanship?
Falling for him. The stolen moments. The whispered plans against the “monster.” The sheer, terrifying hope of choosing him, of risking everything for a future. He’d listened to it all. He’d held me while I plotted my escape from him. The bitterness of that thought was a poison coating my throat.
I saw his face in my memory not the cold Don from minutes ago, but my Matteo. The one who looked at my mural with awe. The one who burned a wedding dress. The one whose voice broke when he asked me to run. Had that all been an act, too? Or was that the man inside the monster, laughing at me from behind a mask of love?
The thought was a physical nausea. I wrapped my arms around my stomach.
He’d given me two options. A cage as his “equal,” or a concrete box as his prisoner. Both were prisons. Both meant him. Both meant surrendering to the architect of my ruin.
My defiance felt foolish now. My stubbornness felt like a child’s tantrum against a mountain. He’d outplayed me at every turn. He’d seen my fire and used it to warm his own hands.
A crushing fatigue washed over me. The weight of the truth, of the betrayal, of the impossible choice, pressed down until my bones ached.
I couldn’t decide. Not tonight. The decision was a cliff edge, and I was too tired to look over it.
All I wanted was the dark. To close my eyes and make the world stop. To pretend, for a few hours, that this was a bad dream. That I would wake up in my old life, or even in the cage next to the man I thought he was.
The need for escape was primal. My body swayed.
I turned my back on the portrait, on the files, on the heart of his terrible kingdom. I walked slowly to the hidden door, stepped through into my sunroom. The ruined mural was a wound in the wall. I didn’t look at it.
I went to my bedroom. I didn’t undress. I just fell onto the bed, still in the clothes stained with my tears and his truth.
I closed my eyes. I forced my breath to slow. I willed the numbness to spread, to freeze the turmoil, the hatred, the devastating, unwanted love.
Just sleep. For now, just sleep.
Matteo
I walked away. Each step down the hall felt like a mile. The cold mask I wore was cracking, and behind it, I was raw.
I went to my other office, the true one. I sat in the dark. I didn’t turn on the lights.
Her face haunted me. Not the furious, screaming woman. The woman after. The one who had gone silent, her eyes clear and cold, weighing the ruins of her life. That silence was worse than any curse.
I had laid out the options with brutal clarity. A partnership in hell, or a solitary confinement. I’d offered her a crown of thorns and called it a choice.
I thought of her in the club. The defiant set of her jaw. I hadn’t been laughing. I’d been captivated. The plan had existed, but the moment I saw her, the plan had started to change. She had changed it.
I thought of her in the penthouse. The way she gave herself, not with submission, but with a fierce, claiming passion. That wasn’t in the plan. That was her. That was real. And it had undone me.
I thought of her choosing me, believing she was choosing a savior. The trust in her eyes. I had cherished it and poisoned it in the same breath.
Now she knew. She was in her room, replaying every moment, seeing my lie in all of them. The thought of her pain was a vise around my heart. I had caused it. To have her, I had broken her.
The helplessness was a tidal wave. I had all the power in the world, and I could not give her the one thing she needed: a past untainted by my deception. I could not undo what I had done.
I could only go forward. With the wedding. With the terrible, fragile hope that somehow, in the gilded cage I’d offered, she might find a way to build something real with the monster who loved her. That her stubborn fire might not just burn for vengeance, but for something more.
But tonight, there was no hope. Only the aftermath.
I sat in the dark, listening to the silent compound, seeing her eyes. The chemistry that still pulsed between us was my punishment. A constant, aching reminder of what I had, and what I had destroyed.
Seventy-two hours. Then she would be my wife. And I would spend every day of forever trying to become the man worthy of the woman who had seen the monster, and had, for tonight at least, chosen to close her eyes rather than look at him.