Chapter 343: I Don’t Want To Marry Dimitri

POV: ISABELLA

The estate looked exactly the same as she remembered.

That was the strange part. Isabella had been taken, used as leverage, dragged through a war that wasn’t hers, and the Russo estate still stood exactly as it always had, the same cream stucco walls, the same manicured hedges lining the driveway, the same fountain in the courtyard that hadn’t worked properly since she was twelve.

Her father’s men escorted her through the front gates in silence. No one spoke to her during the drive from the airport. No one asked if she was okay.

She wasn’t.

The car stopped in the circular drive, and Isabella sat there for a moment, staring at the front door, dreading what waited behind it more than she’d dreaded anything in the warehouse.

One of the men opened her door. "Signorina Russo. Your mother is waiting."

Isabella stepped out on legs that felt unsteady, though the physical danger had passed days ago. It was the estate itself that made her feel unsteady now. This place that should have felt like home felt like a cage she was walking back into voluntarily.

The front door opened before she reached it.

"Isabella!" Her mother’s voice cracked with the force of her relief.

Camilla Russo rushed down the steps, her silk robe fluttering behind her, and threw her arms around her daughter before Isabella could brace for it. Her mother’s grip was fierce, almost painful, her whole body shaking.

"My God, my God, you’re here, you’re actually here...." Camilla pulled back just enough to grab Isabella’s face in both hands, studying her like she was checking for cracks. "Are you hurt? Did they hurt you? Tell me the truth, Isabella."

"I’m fine, Mama," Isabella said, though the words felt hollow in her mouth.

"You don’t look fine." Camilla’s eyes swept over her, the weight she’d lost, the shadows under her eyes, the way she flinched slightly at sudden movements. "What did that man do to you?"

Isabella didn’t answer. There was no answer that wouldn’t require explaining things her mother would never understand.

"Come inside," Camilla said, wrapping an arm around her shoulders. "Come inside, we’ll get you fed, we’ll get you rested, we’ll..."

"Camilla."

Lorenzo’s voice cut through the courtyard like a blade.

Isabella’s mother stiffened beside her. They both turned to see him standing in the doorway, still in his suit despite the late hour, his face a mask of controlled fury that Isabella recognized from a thousand childhood memories.

"Lorenzo, she just got back, let her rest first...."

"She’ll rest after we talk," Lorenzo said. "Inside. Now."

Isabella’s stomach dropped. This was the moment she’d been dreading since the plane touched down.

Her father’s study hadn’t changed either. The same dark wood shelves lined with books he’d never read, the same oil portrait of his own father glowering down from above the fireplace, the same oppressive weight that had always filled this room whenever Isabella was summoned to it.

Lorenzo closed the door behind them and turned to face her, and for a moment, he just looked at her. Really looked at her, the way he used to look at business associates who’d failed to deliver.

"Do you have any idea," he said quietly, "what the last two weeks have done to this family’s name?"

"Lorenzo..." Camilla started.

"No," he said, silencing her with a single raised hand. "She needs to hear this. Do you know what people are saying, Isabella? That Lorenzo Russo’s daughter was taken by a rival family because she was sleeping with him. That the Russo name is now tied to Romano scandal and Valentino war in the same breath. Do you understand what that does to our position? To every alliance I’ve spent thirty years building?"

"I was a victim," Isabella said, her voice small. "I didn’t ask to be taken to New York."

"You put yourself in that position," Lorenzo snapped. "You chose to continue an affair with a man i told you to stay away from. You chose to ignore every warning, every instruction, every chance I gave you to fix this. And now the entire underworld knows the Russo heiress can’t control herself."

Isabella felt something crack open in her chest, but she said nothing.

"Effective immediately," Lorenzo continued, "you are not permitted to leave this estate. Not for shopping, not for the gallery, not for anything, until I decide you’ve reflected enough on what you’ve done to deserve any freedom at all."

"Papa...."

"You will use this time," he said, cutting her off, "to become the woman this family needs you to be. An heiress. Someone who understands duty. Someone who doesn’t throw away everything we’ve built for a man who was using her from the start."

Isabella’s throat tightened.

"And once you’ve gotten yourself back together," Lorenzo said, his voice shifting into something colder, more calculated, "you’re going to fix the damage you’ve done to this family’s alliance with the Valentinos."

Isabella’s head snapped up. "What?"

"Dimitri," Lorenzo said. "You will find a way to repair what you’ve broken. The alliance between our families depends on it."

Isabella felt the floor tilt beneath her.

"I don’t want to marry Dimitri," she said.

The words came out before she could stop them, and once they were out, she realized how much she meant them. Not because she didn’t still feel something for him, some old ache that never fully left, no matter how she tried to bury it, but because she knew, with a certainty that hurt more than anything Dante had ever done to her, that Dimitri would never want her back.

Lorenzo’s face darkened.

"How long," he said, his voice rising, "how long are you going to keep disappointing me? This alliance has been set in stone for years. There is nothing, nothing....you can do about it."

"He has a woman!" Isabella shouted, the words tearing out of her like they’d been building for months. "Don’t you see that? He doesn’t want me, Papa! Do you understand why I became like this? It was because of him! He looked at me like I was nothing, and then I watched him love someone else the way he never loved me, and I just wanted....I just wanted someone to look at me the way he looks at her!"