She flinches like that hurt. “Don’t say that.”
“Then sleep,” I try instead. “I’ll keep watch.”
She lays back, a long breath leaving her body like a truce. “You always do.”
I face the door again, the floor solid under me and dawn still far away. Outside, the rain softens to a thread. Inside, her breathing evens, and I let the ghosts sit beside me without speaking.
I don’t sleep. But for the first time since Cat dropped back into my life, I’m not drowning.
Dawn shows up gray and half-hearted over London. The house is still except for the guards shifting their weight in the sitting room and the incessant rain testing the gutters. I haven’t slept. I don’t think I remember how. When the sky starts to lighten, I push myself off the floor and touch her shoulder.
“Time to go, Kitty Cat.”
Her eyes open clean, no flinch, like she learned a century ago not to startle. She pushes up on her elbows and winces only a little where I stitched her. “What?—”
“We should go,” I repeat. “The earlier the better. Before anyone tracks us to Siobhan?—”
She reaches for her phone on the nightstand. It jitters alive with a tantrum of notifications.
Donal: Answer me, Cáit.
Donal: You think you’re clever. Tiernan’s seen the warehouse.
Donal: He’s raging. Men are dead. All of them. He blames you.
Donal: There’s a number on your head now. Every hungry idiot from Belfast to Bethnal Green will take a shot.
Donal: Come in now. I can still… talk him down.
Donal: If you don’t, this turns into a war no one survives.
Donal: Cáit, please. Don’t make me hunt you.
“Shite.” Her jaw sets. She reads the messages twice. The second time is slower, like she’s tasting the urgency. She doesn’t answer. Instead, she just drops the phone face down and rubs her sternum once, over the place she guards from me.
I should tell her to block him, but I don’t. There are some lines you don’t cut even when they’re strangling you.
“We’re out of options,” I mutter. “So we have to make a new plan.”
She looks up. “How?”
I hate how simple the answer is. I hate that it was always going to be this. “I die.”
Her eyes flare and then go flat. “No.”
“Yes.” I crouch to her height, forearms on my knees, hands empty. “The photo bought us hours. We turn hours into days. I can have Leo call it in to the Geminis and make it official.”
Her eyes widen in horror and guilt lances through my chest as I imagine the look on my mother’s face, thenPapá, and my cousins.
I continue on all the same. “We provide a death certificate and a closed casket no one can open back in Manhattan. Tiernan will take the victory lap he thinks he earned. Every Rossi and Valentino eye will turn to the Quinlans for blood. Ale will assume they were behind the shooting in Manhattan. It’s perfect really. And it’ll buy you—” I nod at the phone. “—enough time to disappear.”
“I won’t let you do that.” Her reply is quick and sharp, and I love her for making it a command.
“You don’t get a vote. I owe you more than I can pay.” That summer. Four years of ghosts. A name written under a flower I can’t stop seeing when I close my eyes. “Consider it a down payment.”
She shakes her head. “Your family?—”
“My family will live.” The words taste like glass. “Ale will rage, then he’ll aim it at the Quinlans and away from you. Alessia will threaten to resurrect me just to murder me herself. Serena and Bella will cry. And I’ll deserve all of it.” I swallow once, and it scrapes. “But Ale’s about to be a father. He’ll have to play it smart. He’ll burn down Tiernan’s empire and make him bleed from afar. It’ll keep Rory safe. It keepsyoursister safe.”
