I don’t try to catch her hand. I don’t pull her closer. I just stand there like an idiot, taking every hit, feeling every slap carve into the parts of me I thought were long callused over. I should be furious. I should be yelling back.
Instead, the sound that comes out of my throat is a croak. “How the hell did you become this?” I need the why as much as I need air. “Who did this to you?”
Then I know the answer. The Quinlans… the Irish mob. Fuck me.
She hits me again, then suddenly she’s shaking, her whole damned body trembling. The rage breaks and grief floods in, huge and ugly. She doesn’t want to cry. She clamps her jaw shut, but the sound that comes out is a sob she can’t swallow. It rips out of her. For a second, she’s utterly and desperately, just a little girl.
I don’t know what to do. I shouldn’t comfort her. I shouldn’t touch her. Butmerda, do I want to. She tried to kill me. She put a bullet within an inch of my cousin’s pregnant wife.
So I do the only selfish thing I can think of. I bend down, scoop the gun off the ground and press it into her palm. My fingers hover around hers as if they can anchor us both.
“Shoot me.” The words come out flat, exhausted. “You came for revenge, right? So, just do it. At least then this will be over. At least then we’ll get to be done with the lies and the ghosts.”
She looks at the weapon as if she’s never seen it before. Her hand tightens, the muscles in her forearm flex. For a wild second I think she might actually do it. Her fingers tremble, and the gun between us is suddenly heavier than the world.
“No.” She breathes it like a curse. Her thumb bangs the safety as if she could make the whole thing go away. “No, I?—”
Tears streak clearer down her face. The howling in her chest breaks into ragged, ugly sobs. She presses the side of the gun against her stomach, and her body convulses as if she’s trying to use it to steady herself, not to aim. She looks so small, suddenly, as if the weapon were never meant for her hands.
I drop to my knees before her without thinking, because standing feels like some obscene refusal of responsibility. I hold her forearm where the gun rests but keep my face low because I can’t look at those blue eyes that used to melt me and not confess everything.
“Don’t,” I whisper, and I mean it a dozen ways. Don’t shoot me. Don’t throw yourself away. Don’t let them turn you into the thing they wanted. Don’t make me the man who loses you again by letting you die.
She shudders, hiccupping a sound that’s half-sob, half-laugh. It’s a broken thing. Her fists curl in my shirt and for the first time since I ripped the mask off and the world rearranged itself, she lets herself collapse against me. She’s on her knees in front of me, and the gun falls, clinking uselessly to the pavement.
The city around us is suddenly silent, save the ragged breaths mingling between us. In my arms, she is a small, terrible confession. I hold her and feel her trembling slow and then the steadying of her breath. Part of me wants to ask a thousand awful questions: Why didn’t you tell me? Why didn’t you kill me? But the words would only peel back fresh wounds.
All I can do is try to be present in a way I never was before. “I never should have left,” I whisper finally, the admission a bone-deep thing. “I was a coward. I abandoned you when I should have stayed. I thought I was doing the right thing. I thought… I thought I was protecting you. Fromthis.”
She laughs once, but there’s no humor in it. “Protecting me,” she mutters. “By leaving me with a secret and a baby and nothing? By disappearing when I needed you the most?”
The truth of it caves in on me harder than any fist. My hands shake on her arm. “I know. I know, Cat. I’m sorry. I am—” My voice breaks. I can’t take back the years. I can’t stitch up the absence. Not with words. Not with any promise now.
She looks up at me then, blue eyes swollen, and for a flicker the old defiant spark is there. It’s still sharp and dangerous. “Do you have any idea how many times I thought about killing you?”
A beat of silence passes.
“You think that would fix anything?” she adds.
“No,” I answer. “I don’t know anything anymore.”
Another endless moment of quiet.
“But I do know I can’t let the Quinlans use you like that. You are so much more than their executioner, than their weapon for revenge.”
Her hand curls into my shirt like a talon, and the rest of her, her entire face, opens up. I see it now, not just rage, but raw, bleeding hurt. She has become an instrument tuned by other people’s violence, and tonight the string is fraying.
She pushes me away, wipes her face with the back of her hand and stands. “You don’t get to fix this, Matteo. You don’t get to show up and expect me to fall into your arms in a moment of weakness and magically forgive you.”
I would expect nothing less. Still, I reach for her because the alternative is nothingness, and I am not ready for that.
She slaps my hand away, harder than before. “Don’t touch me.” Her voice is small but fierce.
I obey. I back up, hands raised like I’m surrendering to a memory. The confusion and the ache in me swirl, an ugly cocktail that tastes like failure.
She straightens, wipes the last tear from her cheek, and for a furious, defiant second she’s all the woman I loved. Brave, furious, not yet broken.
“Go,” she snaps, voice raw. “Go back to your perfect life. Go back to your cousin and your club and your baby news.”
