Chapter 79

Isabella

I hadn’t slept much since I got back. Everything about the house felt different, colder, even though the temperature hadn’t changed. The air was still perfumed faintly with jasmine and woodsmoke, the kind of scent that usually wrapped itself around you like a shawl, a bit soft, a lot quiet, comforting—but not now, not today.

My body lay still beneath the sheets, but my mind hadn’t stopped running, not since the dinner.

I hadn’t spoken to Alessandro since then. Since that slip, that cursed folded paper. The damn paper I hadn’t even known I carried. It hadn’t been mine. I didn’t know how it got there. And yet, it had come from me. From my pocket. God, what was written on it?

I had replayed that moment over and over again in my head—the clink of silverware, the intense moment of passion, the weight of Alessandro’s gaze, and then the slow drop in his face when he saw it on the floor.

I couldn’t ask him. I couldn’t even look him in the eye af