Chapter 359: The Withdrawal Symptoms

The tremor started in her hands.

Isabella noticed it first while she was doing her makeup, the eyeliner wobbling off course, smudging into a jagged line at the corner of her eye. She wiped it off with a tissue and tried again. Her hand shook worse the second time.

Great. Perfect timing.

She set the eyeliner down and pressed her palms flat against the vanity, breathing through it the way she always did when the anxiety climbed too fast. In, hold, out. In, hold, out.

It didn’t help. Nothing helped until the medication kicked in, and the medication was three days late.

She checked her phone. No messages from the pharmacy. No confirmation, no tracking update, nothing.

Isabella grabbed the phone and dialed the number she’d had memorized since she was sixteen years old.

It rang twice before a woman picked up. "Studio Medico Armani, buongiorno."

"It’s Isabella Russo. I need to know where my delivery is. It was supposed to arrive three days ago."

A pause. The clatter of a keyboard. "One moment, Signorina."

Isabella’s knee bounced under the vanity table. She caught her reflection in the mirror, pale, hollow around the eyes, and looked away from it.

"Signorina Russo, I see here the package was delivered to your apartment in Rome on the fourteenth."

"I’m currently not there. I’ve been at my father’s estate for two weeks."

"I..." The woman sounded flustered now, papers shuffling. "The delivery address on file was your apartment. No one signed for it. It’s showing as undelivered, returned to our facility."

Isabella closed her eyes. Of course it was. She hadn’t thought to update the address, hadn’t thought about anything except getting through each day since she’d walked back through her father’s gates.

"Send it to the estate," she said. "Today, if you can. I need it today."

"I’ll have Dr. Armani expedite a new package. It should arrive within forty-eight hours."

Forty-eight hours. She could survive forty-eight hours. She’d survived worse.

"Thank you," Isabella said, and hung up before the woman could say anything else.

She sat there for a long moment, staring at her own hands. Still shaking. Worse than a minute ago, if anything, a fine tremor that ran from her fingertips up into her wrists.

It’s just the anxiety, she told herself. It’s always worse when I skip a dose. That’s normal.

She’d been telling herself that same sentence for eight years. It had never once occurred to her to ask why missing a single dose felt less like anxiety and more like her body trying to climb out of her skin.

By the time she made it downstairs for lunch, the tremor had spread. Her jaw ached from clenching it. Her skin felt too tight, too aware of every seam in her clothes, every draft in the hallway.

***

Her mother was already at the table on the terrace, a plate of untouched fruit in front of her, watching Isabella cross the courtyard with a look only a mother has for a daughter she’s worried about.

"You look pale," Camilla said, once Isabella sat.

"I’m fine."

"You said that the night you came home too, and you weren’t fine then either." Camilla set down her fork. "Isabella. Look at me."

Isabella lifted her eyes, and whatever her mother saw there made her frown deepen.

"Your hands," Camilla said quietly.

Isabella looked down. She hadn’t realized she’d been rubbing her thumb against her palm, over and over, a habit she didn’t remember starting.

"It’s just anxiety, Mama. It gets like this sometimes."

"It’s gotten worse since you came home."

"Being dragged into a war tends to do that," Isabella said, sharper than she meant to.

Camilla didn’t flinch. She’d raised Isabella through worse tempers than this one. "I’m not trying to fight with you. I’m trying to help you."

Isabella exhaled, some of the sharpness draining out of her. "I know. I’m sorry."

"Do you want me to call the family doctor? He could come by this afternoon, adjust your prescription if the anxiety’s flaring...."

"No." The word came out too fast, too firm, and Isabella made herself soften it. "No, it’s fine. My medication’s already on its way from Dr. Armani. It should be here in a couple of days."

"You’re almost out?"

"The delivery got sent to my apartment by mistake. It’s being redirected." Isabella reached for a piece of bread she had no intention of eating, just to have something to do with her hands. "It’s not a big deal. I’ve gone a few days without it before."

That wasn’t strictly true. She’d never gone this many days without it, not since she was fifteen and Dr. Armani first started her on it. But she didn’t want her mother hovering, didn’t want the conversation to turn into something bigger than a shipping error.

Camilla studied her for a long moment, the way she had the night Isabella came home, checking for cracks.

"You’ll tell me if it gets worse," she said. It wasn’t quite a question.

"I’ll tell you."

"I mean it, Isabella. I don’t like how you look right now."

"Mama." Isabella reached across the table and squeezed her mother’s hand, partly out of love and partly to stop her own from shaking so visibly. "I promise. Two days, and I’ll be back to normal."

Camilla’s expression didn’t fully unknot, but she let it go, the way she’d let a hundred small worries go over the years because pushing harder never seemed to help.

Isabella excused herself twenty minutes later, claiming a headache, and made it as far as the hallway outside her room before her legs nearly gave out from under her.

She caught herself against the wall. Pressed her forehead to the cool plaster. Waited for the room to stop tilting.

Two days, she told herself. Just two days.

***

Pov: Dante

Dante rolled his shoulder and didn’t wince.

That was new. Two weeks ago the same motion would’ve sent a hot line of pain down through his ribs, a souvenir from the warehouse, from the bullet Dimitri’s men hadn’t quite managed to put anywhere fatal. Now it was just stiff. Tight, like a muscle that had forgotten how to be used properly, not a wound trying to remind him he was mortal.