“Never by mine,” I fire back.
Something complicated moves through her face, a twist of skepticism, pain, and maybe memory. “I hate you, remember? You should have drawn on me by now.” She steps one pace closer. The alley seems to shrink to match her. “You should have put me against that wall and put a bullet between my eyes. That’s what people like us do.”
“I’m not putting you against anything hard that you don’t ask me for,” I blurt before I can stop myself.
Her breath catches. Mine does too.Dio, I’m an idiot.
“Matteo...” Just my name, but it drags that summer up by the roots. Sea air, warm hands, and promises we were too young to understand. She takes another step. The distance between us is seven feet, then five. I can see the chapped place on her lower lip, the web-fine tremor at the corner of her left eye. She smells like cold air, laundromat soap and a hint of gun oil. It tangles with the cedar on my coat and goes straight to my head.
“Get out of here, Cat,” I whisper, my voice not my own. “I’ll tell Ale I lost you. I’ll make them look uptown while you go downriver.” And damn, the traitorous words alone nearly kill me. They cost me everything but still I keep talking. “Take a ferry to Jersey, rent a car under a dead name?—”
“Stop.” She shakes her head, closer again, close enough that my body goes hot just from the idea of her heat. “You can’t save me from your family any more than you can save me from my own.” She pauses a beat and the truth of her words sink in. “Andyou certainly can’t save yourself by lying to yours.” Another stab of guilt.
“I can try.” Trying is the only thing I’ve ever been good at when it comes to her.
She snorts on a laugh.
“Then we’ll come up with something else,” I snap. “Come with me to talk to Ale. We’ll make him listen. I’ll—” Even as the words dribble from my mouth, I know how stupid they are. My cousin is out for blood, and no amount of pleading will change that.
“And tell him what?” she cuts in, soft as a blade. “That I spared you? That I didn’t mean to shoot at his wife? That I belong to the man who ordered your death?”
The words land like gravel in my mouth. I don’t have an answer that isn’t war.
In seconds, we end up breathing the same cold air. Only three feet apart now. Two. Her pupils are blown, but not from fear. My pulse is a drum I can’t quiet. I should back away, but I don’t. I can’t. Every instinct that kept me alive all these years goes dim when she’s close.
“Tell me why you missed.” The words erupt from my mouth without my approval. “Why didn’t you pull the trigger when you had the chance in the alley?” Or in my office or out on the streets…
She swallows, and for a second, I think she’ll give me the truth. Then her chin lifts a fraction. “Does it matter?”
“It does to me.”
A sound escapes her, half laugh, half wounded thing. “That’s your problem,” she hisses, and the wet shine in her eyes nearly ruins me.
She’s right in front of me now, boots toeing mine. Her breath ghosts my cheek. The world narrows to the curve of her mouth and the million times I’ve dreamed of tasting it just one moretime. Her hand comes up like she’s going to touch my jaw, thumb hovering an inch from the faint scar that cuts across my left cheek when I jumped off the cliff in Sicily and landed too close to the rocks.
I lean in despite every rule I wrote for myself. Heat crackles down my spine. Her lips brush mine. Almost. The suggestion of a kiss, electricity and grief and four years of bad decisions coiled tight.
“Kitty Cat,” I murmur, and it’s a surrender.
“I’m sorry,” she whispers back. “Kitty Cat doesn’t get to be stupid twice.”
The apology hits a half-second before the blow. Something hard, metal, probably the butt of her gun, cracks the base of my skull. White pops at the edge of my vision, bright as a camera flash. My knees go soft, and the alley lurches sideways.
Her breath is suddenly at my ear, the words a rush. “Don’t follow me, and don’t let them find me first.”
I must be hallucinating because I could swear I feel her hand cupping my ass. I try to catch her coat, her wrist, anything, but my fingers don’t listen. The world tunnels.
“Cazzo,” I breathe, or think I do. Then there’s only the cold bite of wet concrete at my cheek and her scent sifting away down the alley, and then nothing.
Two hours later and I’m sitting in my apartment with an ice pack pressed against the golf ball-sized lump on the back of my head. I can’t believe my little Kitty Cat knocked me out. The hint of a smile curves the corner of my lip.
I’m proud of her.
She was trembling in that alley, dark crescents under her eyes, and still she moved like a blade. The girl who once swore she wanted no part of her father’s world has learned how to survive in it. Hell, thrive. But how did she get from there to here?
The answer lands low and mean.
You did it, coglione.
