Chapter 344: Isabella Open The Door, We Need To Talk

The room went silent.

Camilla’s hand flew to her mouth.

"Isabella..." she started.

"That’s why Dante," Isabella continued, unable to stop now that the truth was spilling out of her. "Because he was the only one who ever made me feel like I mattered to somebody, even if it was twisted, even if it started as something ugly. At least it was something. At least someone wanted me."

"Enough!" Camilla’s voice cracked through the room like a whip. "Enough, Isabella. Go to your room. Now."

Isabella stood there for a moment, breathing hard, tears finally spilling over onto her cheeks.

Lorenzo said nothing. He just stared at her with an expression she couldn’t read, disgust, maybe, or something worse. Pity.

She turned and fled the study, taking the stairs two at a time, her vision blurred with tears until she reached her old bedroom door and slammed it shut behind her.

***

Her room was exactly as she’d left it years ago. A shrine to the person she used to be before everything fell apart.

Isabella sank onto the edge of her old bed, her whole body shaking with the aftermath of everything she’d just said. She hadn’t meant to say all of it. Hadn’t meant to hand her mother and father the truth of her own humiliation like that.

But it had been true. Every word.

Her eyes drifted to the small vanity in the corner, to the drawer she hadn’t opened in years. She crossed the room and pulled it open, and there, beneath old letters and forgotten jewelry, was a photograph.

Her and Dimitri, years ago, She’d been sixteen, glowing, certain that her whole future was mapped out in the curve of his arm around her waist.

He wasn’t smiling in the photo. He never really smiled back then either. But she remembered thinking, foolishly, that she could be the one to change that. That given enough time, he’d love her the way she loved him.

He never had.

And now she’d watched him love someone else completely, watched it in every report that came back to her, every detail Dante had gathered about Eve, every small proof that Dimitri was capable of exactly the kind of love Isabella had always wanted and never received.

She set the photograph down and caught her own reflection in the vanity mirror.

She almost didn’t recognize the woman looking back. Hollow-eyed. Too thin. Marked, in ways that had nothing to do with bruises, by everything that had happened since the last time she’d sat in this room as someone whole.

A knock sounded at her door, sharp and insistent.

"Isabella." Her mother’s voice, quiet but firm. "Open the door. We need to talk."

Isabella stared at the door, her heart pounding, the photograph still clutched in her hand.

She didn’t move.

"Isabella," Camilla said again, softer this time. "I know what you said down there wasn’t just about Dante. I saw your face when you talked about him. I’m your mother. I know when you’re lying to yourself."

Isabella’s breath caught.

"Open the door," Camilla said. "Please."

***

Isabella opened the door.

She didn’t have any fight left to keep it closed. The photograph was still in her hand, the edges soft from years of being handled, and she stepped back to let her mother in without a word.

Camilla entered quietly and closed the door behind her. She didn’t say anything about the tears still drying on Isabella’s face, or the mess of old letters spilling out of the vanity drawer. She just crossed the room and sat down on the edge of the bed, patting the space beside her.

Isabella hesitated, then sat.

For a long moment, neither of them spoke. The house was quiet below them, Lorenzo’s fury had apparently burned itself out, or at least retreated somewhere Isabella couldn’t hear it.

"You still have that," Camilla finally said, nodding at the photograph in Isabella’s hands.

Isabella looked down at it. Her and Dimitri, sixteen and twenty-three, standing stiffly beside each other at the formal dinner that had marked their official engagement, the moment the childhood betrothal turned into something real, something with a date attached to it.

"I found it in the drawer," Isabella said. "I don’t know why I kept it."

"I do," Camilla said quietly.

Isabella looked up at her.

"Do you remember," Camilla said, "when your father and Antonio arranged the two of you? You were seven. Dimitri was fourteen. Two children who had no say in what their fathers decided their futures would be."

"I remember," Isabella said. "I used to think it was romantic. Like a fairy tale."

"Most girls do, at seven." Camilla’s voice was gentle. "I did too, once."

Isabella frowned. "What do you mean?"

Camilla was quiet for a moment, her eyes distant. "Your father and I were arranged as well. Did you know that?"

Isabella shook her head slowly. She’d never thought to ask.

"I was nineteen," Camilla said. "Lorenzo was twenty-six. Our fathers decided it over a business dinner, the same way yours was decided. I didn’t love him. I barely knew him. And for the first two years of our marriage, I used to lie awake wondering if I’d ever feel anything for him beyond obligation."

"What happened?" Isabella asked.

"Nothing happened," Camilla said. "That’s the truth nobody tells young girls about arranged love. There’s no single moment where everything changes. You just... choose it, every day, in small ways, until one day you realize the choosing has become real. I learned to love your father by deciding to. By finding the parts of him worth loving and holding onto those, instead of grieving the romance I thought I was owed."

Isabella turned the photograph over in her hands. "Is that what you want me to do? With Dimitri?"

"I don’t know what I want anymore," Camilla admitted. "I used to think it was simple. You’d grow up, you’d marry him, you’d learn to love him the way I learned to love your father. But that’s not what happened, is it?"

Isabella’s throat tightened. "No."

"Tell me what happened," Camilla said. "Really happened. Not what you told your father downstairs. Tell me."