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With a quick salute, he got into the car.

It took everything he had not to look back at her as he drove away.

* * *

Elvira unlocked the door of her apartment for the very first time.

Seven days since the truce had been declared, she finally felt ready to take this step. Or, rather, she’d told herself to stop moping around like a pathetic, moody schoolgirl and take her spoils of war.

Elio had asked if she’d consider giving it back to Mattia, just as he’d given Tommaso his villa back so he’d have a decent home to live in. She’d told her brother to get his head out of Siena’s ass. Mattia’s apartment was hers, and she was going to enjoy living in it. Let him live in his hovel.

Ignoring the constant pangs of her heart, she walked slowly through the spacious rooms all decorated and furnished to the tastes of the bastard who’d kidnapped her. The bastard who’d been her lover for a very brief but very intense period.

There was nothing she wanted to change, a realisation that didn’t improve her mood. All she wanted was to forget him, but now her stubbornness meant she was destined to live surrounded by his essence.

Stuff it. She’d rip everything out and start again. Who cared if he had exquisite taste?

His library, though, was a thing of beauty. She might keep that as it was, and before she even knew what she was doing, she was taking a picture of his massive collection of books on Roman history and writing the caption: Some light reading for me to enjoy in my fabulous new apartment!

She was literally about to press send when she came to her senses and hurriedly deleted the message and the photo.

Resting a hand against her painfully racing heart, reeling at how badly she ached to reach out to him, a different, sharper ache deep in her pelvis made her suck in a breath.

She’d woken with a heavy weight low in her abdomen. It was a weight she’d tried to ignore, as if by ignoring it she could will it away.

No ignoring it now.

She hadn’t been able to bring herself to go to a pharmacy for the morning-after pill as she’d told Mattia she would do. She’d told herself she’d been so busy that she’d forgotten, but she’d known it was a lie even as she’d told it to herself.

Staggering to the bathroom, there was zero surprise to find she’d started her period. What did catch her off guard was the flood of tears she broke out in, tears that fell like a torrent down her cheeks.

Hugging her knees to her heaving chest, she finally sobbed out the agony that had been a living thing inside her since Mattia had driven away without looking back at her, not even a flick of his head. Her ears cruelly echoed with his week-old words: Unless you’ve loved and hated someone with equal passion, you will never understand why I have to do this.

He hadn’t done it. He’d accepted the truce that had ended the war for good, and she hated him for it. Hated him for kidnapping her. Hated him for driving away without looking back at her. Hated him for making her fall in love with him.

That’s if it even was love! Was it really possible to fall in love with someone you hated with such passion?

All she knew was that she missed him desperately, and she hated herself for that too.

* * *

The message on Elvira’s phone made her feel torn. On the one hand, she very much wanted to escape the apartment for an evening. On the other, it meant an evening with her brother and his Esposito wife.

A second message pinged in.

Not taking no for an answer. If you’re not here by 8, I’m coming to get you, so stop sulking.

Elio was lucky he wasn’t right there with her, or she’d punch him in the face for that.

Sulking? Her?

Asshole.

She wasn’t sulking. She just wasn’t feeling very sociable. Also, being sociable with her family invariably meant seeing her brother and his Esposito wife all loved up. It was bad enough dealing with the pair of them under working conditions, but in her personal time it just felt like an insult being added to an injury. The brother she’d thought incapable of happiness had found it with an Esposito. Somehow, she didn’t think their parents would be turning in the graves for it, not if they could see how happy Siena made him.

Elio thought her nose had been pushed out of joint by Siena being made his Queen Bee, and she supposed there was some truth in that, but that wasn’t entirely it. Siena made a much better Queen Bee than Elvira ever could, and if she was being really truthful, she quite liked her. Okay, she liked her a lot.

But then, hadn’t she said to Mattia something about her and Siena being friends if they weren’t enemies? It had been something like that, and now she’d gone and thought of that kidnapping bastard again when she’d spent the two weeks since her meltdown of tears training her brain into not thinking about him.