CHAPTER 34
ALREADY DEAD
Matteo
I don’t sleep. I can’t.
The guest room is small and blue in the streetlight as quiet as a chapel after mass. She’s on her side facing the wall, blanket to her chin, the line of her shoulder rising and falling under the bandage I put there. I take the floor at the foot of the bed. I tried the chair, but it creaked and I didn’t want to wake her. So I sit with my back to the frame, knees up, and palms open.
I watch the door. I watch the window. Mostly, I watch her breathe.
Every so often the pipes knock somewhere in the house, and Leo shifts out in the hall. Saoirse’s kettle ticks as it cools. The London rain threads the gutter, and I lose count of the drops, the time, everything.
My phone is face down on the carpet. If I touch it, I’ll call Ale and confess things that aren’t mine to give away. If I close my eyes, I see a baby girl with Cat’s mouth and my temper toddling through a kitchen that doesn’t exist.
Around three, the mattress whispers. I feel her hand search the bed, the side I was sitting on before she fell asleep. Then she lifts her head.
“Rossi,” she murmurs, voice rough with sleep. “Go to bed.”
“I can’t.” I don’t meet those familiar eyes. If I look up at her now, it’s over. “My head won’t… stop.”
She pushes up on an elbow. She’s barely a shadow in the corner of my eye. The blanket slides, cotton sighing against cotton. “What are you thinking about?”
“Everything,” I mumble, and then the truth. “Her. I keep building her out of air. Livia.” The name scrapes. It’s raw in my throat like a living thing. “I give her your smile and my bad decisions, and I try to imagine what I would’ve done right for once.” My laugh is silent, ugly. “It’s stupid. I know.” I drag my hands through my hair and pull at the wild ends. “I just can’t make it stop.”
The bed shifts. Her hand appears at the edge of the mattress, tentative, then drops to rest at the crown of my head, a weight no heavier than a benediction. I have to bite my cheek to keep in the sound that tries to escape.
“I’m sorry,” she whispers. “For deciding without you. For—” The words fracture. “I was alone. And I was angry. And I was scared. I should’ve… I don’t know. I should’ve been someone else.”
I close my eyes and breathe until my ribs remember how. “You don’t owe me an apology,” I whisper into the dark. “You don’t owe me anything. It’s your body. Your choice. Even when it breaks me.” My throat tightens, and I force it open. “Especially then.”
Her fingers move once through my hair like the past is forgiving both of us for a heartbeat. “Thank you.” Her voice is barely a sound.
We sit in the soft hum of the room until the rain outside softens. Something in me settles. It’s far from healed and definitely not fixed but set down for a minute like a heavy box you’ve been carrying for too long.
“Cat,” I whisper, and my voice is steadier now. “Come with me.”
She stills. I push on before I lose my nerve.
“Let’s leave it. All of it. Belfast, New York, our last names, every bad thing that keeps finding us.” I turn and tip my head back against the mattress so I can see her face in the blue light. “I’ll walk away. From Gemini, from the corporation, from the bullshit crown I never asked for. Let’s disappear. South of somewhere. I’ll cook burned toast and build terrible furniture and—” I huff a breath. “I’ll make it safe, I swear it. I’ll protect you.”
Her mouth softens in a way that is worse than a knife. She looks like eighteen and summer and the first time I ever told a lie I thought was love. “You really mean it?”
“I do.”
She strokes once more, then withdraws her hand like she’s cauterizing a wound. “I can’t.”
The words land without drama. No thunder, no cracked plates. Just gravity.
“I can’t just walk away from everything,” she adds, gazing past me to something only she can see. “Siobhan. Donal. Tiernan. My father. And you—” She swallows. “You have family too. A life that doesn’t just let go because you ask it nicely.”
I nod because I’m on the edge of begging. And if I give myself a minute to say all the things I want to say, it’ll never stop.Dio, I would give up everything for her. In a heartbeat.
Her eyes shine in the city glow. “If there’s a world where we get to be small and boring, I want it.” Her voice breaks, then recomposes. “But not yet.”
Not yet. It’s not a no that closes a door. Instead, those two words leave it unlocked for a future that might one day exist.
“Then I’ll get you there,” I whisper into the darkness. “Even if I don’t get to go with you.”
