Page 410 of Rosetti Family New York

The word detonates in my chest, steals every breath from my lungs. Hostage. After everything we've shared, every time I've made her come screaming my name, every morning I've watched her sleep in my arms, that's still what this is to her.

"That's not..." I can't finish. Can't explain the difference between keeping her safe and keeping her caged when the result is identical.

"I trusted you," she whispers, and her voice breaks something fundamental inside me. "When you gave me that phone back, I thought we were building something real. Something different."

"We are. I am different."

"Are you?" She shakes her head, hair catching lamplight like spun gold. "Because you're still treating me like something to be managed instead of someone to be trusted."

I step toward her, hand reaching out on instinct. She flinches away, and the movement freezes my blood.

"Isabella—"

"No." Her palm creates a wall between us. "I can't do this anymore."

She turns to leave, and something primal claws up my throat. The thought of losing her, of watching her walk away thinking I'm just another man who wants to own her, rips through my chest like shrapnel.

"I love you."

The words explode out of me, raw and desperate and completely fucking true. They hang in the air between us like lightning, illuminating everything.

Isabella freezes in the doorway. I can see tension singing through her shoulders, the way her hands clench into fists at her sides.

"Fuck." The confession pours out now that the dam has burst, fifteen years of emotional walls crumbling. "I love you, Isabella. That's the problem. That's why I can't think straight around you, why I make these choices without asking."

She turns slowly, and there are tears streaming down her face. Those green eyes are wide, stunned, like I've just spoken in a foreign language.

"Matteo..." Her voice barely exists.

"I love the way you look at art like it holds secrets only you can unlock." The words spill out uncontrolled, my heart bleeding all over the kitchen floor. "I love how you take your coffee black because you think adding anything is cheating the bean. I love that you cry during thunderstorms and pretend you don't, like showing vulnerability might crack that perfect surface you wear."

She's staring at me like I'm something dangerous and beautiful and completely alien. Like she's never seen me before.

"I love how you survived fourteen years with that bastard and still managed to stay soft inside. How you touch paintings like you're afraid they'll disappear. How you make that little sound in your throat when I hit that spot inside you that makes you—"

"Stop." The word is barely a breath.

"I can't stop." My voice cracks, breaks, rebuilds itself around the truth. "I love you so much it's killing me, tesoro. It's eating me alive from the inside out. And I know I'm fucking this up, I know I'm hurting you by trying to protect you, but I don't know how to love you without being terrified of losing you."

The silence that follows is deafening. Rain lashes the windows like tears while Isabella stands there with my heart in her hands, watching it bleed.

My legs feel unsteady. I've never said those words to anyone. Never felt this desperate, consuming need to give someoneeverything while simultaneously destroying them with good intentions.

"Matteo." She says my name like a prayer, like a benediction, like a funeral dirge. "That's not love. That's fear."

The truth lands like a physical blow, doubling me over. My hands grip the counter behind me, knuckles white against marble.

"When you love someone," she continues, each word carefully chosen, precisely aimed, "you trust them to make their own choices. Even when those choices scare you. Even when they might lead them away from you."

I want to argue, want to explain that the world is full of Vincent Torres and Chase Callahans who see her brilliance as something to exploit. But the pain in her eyes stops me cold.

"I've spent my whole life with people who claimed to love me while making decisions for me," she says quietly. "Chase said he loved me too. Said everything he did was to protect me."

The comparison is a knife between my ribs, twisting. "I'm nothing like him."

"Aren't you?" Fresh tears spill down her cheeks, and I want to catch them with my tongue, want to taste her pain and make it mine. "You're both powerful men who think you know what's best for me. Who think loving me gives you the right to control my choices."

"That's not..." But the words die because she's right. Every instinct screams at me to argue, to make her understand that what I feel is pure and desperate and nothing like Chase's calculated manipulation. But the result is the same.