I freeze. “What?”
He glances, expression intact, but something loosens at the corners of his eyes. “Message,” he says. “Tiernan’s down.”
The floor sways. “And Matteo?”
He takes just long enough that I want to break his thumbs. “He’s alive.”
My knees go. Not dramatically, thank God, just a slow, graceless fold until I’m on the edge of the bed with my head in my hands and the room doing a quick spin. A sound rips out of me, ugly and human. I swallow it down, but another comes anyway. My chest heaves, shoulders slumping.
“Thank you,” I tell the ceiling, or the floor, or the god who hadn’t returned my calls in years. “Thank you, thank you?—”
Leo stands very still. “He’s five minutes out now. We should get ready to move.”
I laugh, which isn’t what my throat wants. It scrapes my ribs raw. Tears burn, then spill, hot and furious down my cheeks. I swipe at them with the back of my hand, annoyed at their persistence.
“I hate him,” I tell the tired bedspread. “I hate him for leaving me again. For putting me behind a door like a breakable thing.”
“He doesn’t think you’re breakable,” Leo mumbles.
“Shut up.”
He does, shockingly.
I breathe. I breathe again. Somewhere between the third and fourth one, the truth storms into my chest like it owns the space:I love him. It lands quiet, like it’s been waiting for me to stop making noise. The words had spilled out earlier when he left me out of desperation. A final, frantic move to keep him here.
But they’re true. It doesn’t fix anything though. It just makes the edges sharper.
A footfall I know like a bad habit resounds just beyond the door. Then keys jingle outside. I stand and then I’m moving and then I’m running, and Leo’s arm bars me for exactly one second before he steps aside. The chain skitters, and the lock turns.
The door opens on a man who looks like he wrestled the devil and won by offering it his soul. Blood freckles his cheek, his shirt is torn, but his eyes… they’re very green and very alive.
My mouth moves before sense can catch up. “You left me. Again.”
He smiles, small and wrecked. “Only to save you, Kitty Cat. Again.”
I hit him.
It comes out as a slap though it’s meant to be a fist to his shoulder that saysdon’t you everandthank God you didin the same breath. He takes it. Then I throw myself into his chest with my face pressed to the spot over his heart and his arms come around me like a future I can’t live without.
“I hate you,” I whisper into his shirt.
“I know.” His mouth is in my hair, voice rough. “Hate me here. Always.”
I breathe him in, blood and gunpowder and underneath his unmistakable familiar manly musk, and I let the world be small for one impossible second.
Then I pull back, eyes burning, and jab a finger into his sternum. “You ever lock me in a room again, Rossi, and I will teach you new uses for a butter knife.”
He winces and grins in the same motion. “That’s fair.”
“Is it done?” I ask, quieter.
“It’s done.” He doesn’t look away. “Anything left of the Quinlan crew will be handled by the Geminis by tomorrow.”
A shiver walks down my spine that isn’t fear. I nod, once. “Good.”
“Which reminds me, we need to resurrect a ghost before my cousins go running into this war for revenge.”
Leo clears his throat as if to remind us we have an audience and also a life expectancy. “We should move.”
