Matteo POV The drive back to my apartment took twenty minutes.
I know because I counted every one of them, my hands tight on the steering wheel, the city moving past the windows in a blur I did not bother to look at.
Twenty minutes to get from Eleanor Hart’s front gate to my underground parking space, and in every single one of those minutes I replayed the same moment, Isabella’s face when she said “I am done”, and felt something twist tighter in my chest each time.
Not heartbreak.
Something colder than that.
I had never loved Isabella even before I asked her to date me.
What I had was an arrangement that suited me.
A woman who was beautiful enough to be useful in rooms where appearances mattered, connected enough through her grandmother to open doors that would otherwise stay closed, and trusting enough, genuinely, completely trusting enough that she had never once looked at me the way Eleanor always did.
Like she wanted to unwrap my cover.
Isabella was an asset.
A carefully maintained, quietly managed asset, and assets were not supposed to walk away.
I shut my car door harder than I needed to and took the elevator up.
Vanessa was already inside when I entered, sitting on my kitchen counter with a glass of wine she had poured from the bottle we had opened yesterday before Isabella’s accident.
She looked up when I walked in, read whatever was on my face, and had the rare good sense to say nothing immediately.
I dropped my keys on the counter and stood there for a moment, throwing my jacket on the floor that I had already removed when I was on the elevator.
“She ended it,” Vanessa said finally.
Not a question.
“She threw the ring away,” I said.
“In a nightclub.
She actually threw it on the floor of a nightclub.” Vanessa’s mouth curved to a smile.
I watched her catch it and pull it back, but not quickly enough.
“Don’t,” I said quietly.
She set the wine glass down and stood up with one of her thighs exposed, “I’m not doing anything.” “You were smiling.” “I was not” “Vanessa,” I turned to look at her properly for the first time since I walked in, and whatever she saw in my face made her sit down.
“This is not good news for either of us.
Do you understand that?” She crossed her arms.
“She left you.
Which means…” “Which means Eleanor Hart is now sitting in that house with nothing but time and a very alert mind and a granddaughter who just came home from a nightclub having spent the night with someone she hasn’t told me about yet.” I moved to the window and stood there, looking down at the street.
“Eleanor was already suspicious of me.
Isabella walking out gives her a reason to act on it.” Vanessa was quiet for a moment, then, carefully asked, “What about the will?” I looked at her in the glass reflection.
“What about it?” “If Isabella is out of the picture with you, if Eleanor thinks you were the problem,” She crossed her arms, “I can’t be removed from it, Matteo.
You said, our relationship cannot be exposed no matter what.
My position in Eleanor’s company should not be affected” “Your position,” I said, “is only as safe as my influence over this situation.
Which, right now, is not as safe as it was yesterday.” She opened her mouth to argue with me.
My phone rang.
I held up one finger and she closed it again.
The number on the screen was one of my informants that I specifically picked from me to watch every movement of Isabella even when I was with her.
So I picked up without complaining of the disturbance.
“Talk,” I said.
What I heard over the next ninety seconds changed my four years of hard work and tolerance.
Isabella had not gone to a hotel alone after leaving my apartment.
She had gone to the Midnight Club.
She had sat at the bar and drunk herself past the point of good decisions, and then she had walked into the private section.
“The private section, of all the sections in that building,” and spent time at the table of a man my informant had not been able to identify immediately from a distance, but had not been able to get their hands on the CCTV camera of the club.
My eyes that had been moving around the living room stopped.
I stood very still while my informant continued, the details arriving one after another in a terrible sequence.
Isabella at the bar.
Isabella walked toward the private table.
Isabella left the private section to the restroom and never exited the club.
She had arrived at Eleanor’s house in yesterday’s clothes.
“Any problem?” I asked.
My voice came out completely normal, as if I’m not boiling with a lot of anger and I was proud of that.
A pause from my informant.
Then, “Mrs Hart has had a private investigator running inquiries on you for approximately three years, sir.
Financial records, business associates, property holdings.
The PI filed an updated report four days ago.” I ended the call.
The apartment was very quiet.
Vanessa said something behind me.
I did not hear the words.
I was standing at the window with the phone still in my hand, looking at the street below, and something was happening beneath my skin that I had not felt in a very long time, something hot and dark and completely uninterested in being managed.
Three years.
Eleanor Hart had been investigating me for three years, from the very first meeting, from the afternoon Isabella had brought me to that house for tea and Eleanor had looked at me over her cup with those careful old eyes and said almost nothing.
Three years.
While Isabella brought me to family dinners, she defended me to her grandmother and Vanessa, while she planned a future around a man she trusted completely, her grandmother had been quietly building a file.
And now Isabella had spent a night with a mysterious man.
I slowly set the phone down on the center table.
Went to my TV stand and picked up Isabella’s picture frame that she kept there, saying, she wanted everybody that came to the house to know she is the madam of the house and I had assured her even though it annoyed me.
She was laughing in it, turned slightly to the side, an unaware picture that I took when we visited the park and she loved it.
For two years now, I have left it there, not because I loved it or it’s my lucky charm but because it was useful to have.
It was a tool that made her stay long.
Vanessa was still talking.
Something about the will, about Eleanor, and the recovery plan.
But, I was not tracking the words.
I was thinking about three years of investigation.
About the official PI report filed four days ago.
About Eleanor sitting at that kitchen table this morning with her quiet eyes and her granddaughter’s hand in hers, knowing things, storing things, building toward a moment I had not seen coming because I had been watching the wrong person this entire time.
I had managed Isabella but I should have managed Eleanor too.
“Matteo.” Vanessa’s voice, sharper now.
“Are you listening to me?” “Shut up” I shouted.
I picked up my phone again, made a call that I had been keeping in reserve for exactly the kind of moment that required a man who did not ask questions, did not keep records, who understood that the work he did for me had a very specific price and a very specific kind of silence attached to it.
He answered on the second ring.
“Prepare everything,” I said quietly.
“I’ll confirm the details within twenty-four hours.” I ended the call.
Vanessa had gone very quiet behind me.
I could feel it without turning around, the quality of her silence had changed, the way a room changes when someone in it has just understood something they cannot ununderstand.
I looked at the picture frame in my hand one more time.
Isabella, laughing, completely unaware of the storm, she had set free.
Isabella, who had boldly looked me in the eye this morning and said “I am done” like it was the simplest sentence in the world.
“You should have listened to me,” I said softly, to the picture frame, to myself, hoping she heard me.
“I told you, nobody ends things with me without my consent” I set the picture frame face-down on the centre table.
Then I smiled, not the smile I wore for boardrooms or dinner tables or the moments when Isabella needed reassurance.
The one underneath all of those.
The one that had always been there, waiting for exactly this kind of problem to make itself necessary.
I turned to face Vanessa.
She was watching me with an expression I had never seen on her before, and Vanessa, who had spent years being the boldest person in every room she entered, took one full step backward without appearing to realize she had done it.
“One of them has to disappear,” I said simply.
“Eleanor or Isabella.” I turned towards the staircase.
“I haven’t decided which one is more efficient yet.
But I will.” Vanessa said nothing.
For once in her life, she had nothing to say.