She swallows, her throat working overtime. “Because I still care about you, and that feeling is insufferable when I can’t trust you.”
What I’d thought was insurmountable guilt finds a way of slicing deeper.
She stares at the table, nose scrunched. “You tried to leverage my feelings for you to save your brother.”
I let her statement sink in. Spend pained heartbeats imagining what that misconception must feel like.
“I tried to buy you time, Isla. I knew what you were up against would change lives, and I didn’t want you to have to deal with it right away on top of everything else. You weren’t aware getting the cops involved could potentially put Quinn behind bars for the stunt she pulled. And if they dug deep enough, your father, too, for insider trading, along with securities and honest-services fraud. Can you seriously tell me you were ready to hear that and make those decisions?”
She folds in on herself, her head bowing further.
“Talk to me,” I fucking beg.
“I know you, Raffael. I’ve watched how you work a boardroom. I’ve seen the micro-manipulations. The finesse and exploitation without your victims even knowing, and I…”
And she can’t tell if I was, or still am, doing that to her.
I breathe deep of her suffering, hold it in my chest until the pressure feels like the start of cardiac arrest. “Isla, I’m in love with?—”
“Don’t.” Her gaze snaps to mine, lips parted, expression aghast.
It takes everything in me not to argue.
She takes me in with glassy eyes, bare blinks away from tears. “I can’t be around you.” Her words are more plea than statement. “That’s my last stipulation. I’m not in a place where I can trust my judgment with you. I don’t know if I ever will be.”
No. I shake my head.
I’ll give her a few more days. Hell, I’ll give her a fucking week. But a long-term dismissal of what we have isn’t an option. “I’ve separated myself from my feelings for you for years?—”
“Then you’re already well versed on how to move forward.” She pushes to her feet.
“No,la mia rovina. I’m well versed in suffering. I’m a fucking pro at watching the woman I’m meant to be with live her life without me, and I refuse to do it any longer.”
She hesitates, a shadow of hurt crossing her features before she gathers herself. “You can. You will.”
“What makes you so sure?”
Her lips curve in a small, heartbreaking smile of farewell that guts me clean before she heads for the door. “Because I’ve gone public before, and you know I’ll do it again.”
Chapter
Thirty-Five
ISLA
I returnto the office after my lunch date with Quinn.
She’s still glowing with the energy of her new incarceration fixation, her entire personality rebuilt around the psychology of captivity and prison architecture. And although I initially didn’t want to know the details, my curiosity drove me to ask for highlights. Bullet points. The kind of summaries she works hard to tactfully deliver with the blandness someone else might describe a weather report.
The town house basement cell wasn’t fitting for long-term imprisonment, so I’ve barely caught sight of her over the last three weeks as she micromanaged the renovation of Eliseo’s penthouse into a mini penitentiary.
The hardest hit was when she packed her belongings and moved into a vacant apartment in his building, convinced that sleeping off-site when a felon was meant to be under her watch “compromised operational integrity.”
But not having her live under the same roof and check in on me every spare second of the day has its perks.
Life has settled into a strange, shaky kind of normal. Work. Coffee. Pretending I sleep through the night.
For the most part, I act as if I don’t notice the gaping chasm Raffael’s absence leaves—except when he infiltrates my fabricated peace with a new delivery.