Page 111 of Beautiful When He Breaks

Matteo doesn’t laugh. He looks from me to Luca, then back to Ryan. “I would expect nothing less,” Matteo says.

Ryan lets out an aggravated breath and starts dragging me toward the hallway again. “Great. Beautiful. Everybody’s terrifying. I’m so glad we established community values.”

Luca steps aside to let us out, but his gaze lingers on Matteo with a sharpness that tells me he’s filing away details too. Good. Let someone else keep a file. I’m exhausted.

The second we’re in the hall with the classroom door is shut behind us, Ryan lets go of my arm and rounds on me. “What the fuck, West?”

I deserve that, which is annoying.

I run a hand through my hair and glance toward the closed door. “I thought—”

“I know what you thought,” Ryan says, and his voice loses some of the bite before the sentence is done. “I get why you thought it. But holy shit.”

Luca leans against the opposite wall, arms crossed, expression caught somewhere between concern and barely contained entertainment. “For the record, I did suggest not bursting in.”

“You suggested it approximately half a second before I burst in,” I say.

“I worked with the time I had.”

Ryan points at him. “Not helpful.”

I rub both hands over my face, the adrenaline finally turning sour in my bloodstream. “I’m sorry.”

Ryan stops, clearly not expecting the apology that fast, and for a second, neither of us quite knows where to put it. Then he exhales and looks away, jaw working. “Yeah, okay, it was kind of a fucked-up thing to walk in on from the outside. But Matteo isn’t… It’s not like that.”

There’s more there—a lot more. I can see it now that fear isn’t blocking my view. Ryan’s usual chaos is still present, but under it there’s tension. Defiance, maybe affection, though he’d probably rather walk into traffic than admit it with us staring at him.

Whatever exists between him and Matteo Vieri, it is clearly not simple, and maybe that’s what scares me most because complicated is where men like Blakely taught me harm likes to hide.

But Ryan is not me. Matteo is not Blakely, at least not by the evidence I have. My trauma does not get to become a weapon against someone else’s choices just because my nerves think vigilance equals love.

I breathe in slowly and force my shoulders down. “Okay.” I look at him properly this time, not the classroom door, not the shadow of what happened to me, but Ryan. “Okay. I believe you.”

Something eases in his face so quickly that it hurts to see. Then he ruins it by pointing at me. “But if you ever call me a victim of your white-knight bullshit again, I’m making Mila a basketball jersey with my number before she can walk.”

I almost smile. “You were already going to do that.”

“Yeah, but now I’ll make it ugly.”

Luca makes a pained sound. “No baby deserves that.”

Ryan turns on him. “Stay out of this, quarterback.”

The normal irritation in his voice helps. It doesn’t fix everything. It doesn’t erase the image of Matteo pulling him into that room or the words I heard through the door or the complicated heat Ryan is trying to pretend wasn’t written all over him. But it helps enough that I can breathe.

We start walking toward athletics again, the three of us falling into step like we’re late for practice instead of coming off the strangest ten minutes of my week. Which is saying something considering I spent the morning formally describing the worst months of my life to Blackthorne’s ownership.

Ryan keeps his eyes forward for a while before muttering, “He’s not my Blakely. I know you’re scared because of what happened,” he says, still not looking at me. “And I’m not saying you were crazy to react. But he’s not that.”

I don’t understand any of it, but Ryan doesn’t have the dead-eyed look I had a few months ago. I want to push—fuck me, I want to push—but if someone had pushed me in the beginning, I would have made every fucking excuse under the sun.

“I hope you’re right,” I tell him.

Ryan looks at me then, expression unreadable for half a second before it shifts into his usual sharp grin. “I usually am.”

Luca snorts. “That is historically false.”

“Betrayal,” Ryan says, hand to his chest, causing Luca to roll his eyes.