Chapter 14 Caterina
CATERINA
The plan is supposed to be photos.
Aoife has a list as long as a gospel: bridal party, family, family-that’s-security, security-that-insists-it’s-family. We make it as far as the rectory hallway when Cayce’s palm finds the small of my back and veers us through a half-closed door.
“Two minutes,” he says, voice low. “I’ve been waiting a week.”
“So have I,” I tell him—because those late-night messages? They’ve been winding me like a clock.
It’s a cramped parish sitting room—old leather, a crucifix, a hissing radiator. He shuts the door with his heel and the look on his face knocks the air out of me. He doesn’t kiss like ceremony; he kisses like he’s finally cashing a check he wrote with every text.
“Did you do what I asked last night?” he murmurs against my mouth.
“You’ll have to find out,” I say, leaning back on the little table, palms down, pulse up.
He sinks to his knees.
The hem of my dress skims his shoulders.
Cool air kisses skin; his hands are warm, sure.
When he hums yes at what he finds, my thighs go obedient on instinct.
His mouth is reverent and unhurried, like he’s praying with a new set of beads and I’m the answer he expected to take hours, not seconds.
I didn’t know how fast my body could learn a language; now I do.
The first crest hits—bright, breathless—and I have to catch the crucifix with my eyes to keep from floating away.
“Good girl,” he says, and I forget my own name for a beat.
He rises, turns me, palms flattening at my hips.
The quiet rasp of the zipper is indecent in a holy room.
“Hands on the table,” he tells me, and I do, cheek to sleeve, breath fogging wood.
He fits close—hot, solid—and then he’s there, inside, and every warning I ever gave myself about this man evaporates like candle smoke.
The angle from behind is new, shocking; the press of his hardware catches along every inch of me like a secret I asked for and got anyway.
It’s quick because it has to be, rough around the edges because neither of us can help it, and made more impossible by the fact that somewhere, not far, a choir loft exists.
I bite my lip to keep quiet and fail; his hand covers mine like a seal, steadying the table, steadying me.
When I shatter the second time, it’s softer and deeper and I have to squeeze my eyes shut so the room will hold still.
We breathe. We remember we’re in a church. He closes me back into myself—zip, smooth, careful hands—then settles my veil like he’s unwrapping a relic in reverse. I tug his tie straight, pat his lapel as if it misbehaved, and try to find a face that won’t get us both arrested by Aoife.
“Photos,” I say, trying stern and landing somewhere south of smug.
“Right,” he says, not sorry at all, and offers me his arm like a gentleman who just sinned and plans to again.
We step back into the corridor like we’ve done nothing but pray. Aoife meets us with narrowed eyes and a smirk she keeps to herself.
“Glow suits you,” she mutters, shoving a bouquet into my hands. “You get three more minutes of latitude and then you belong to my list.”
The rest becomes a montage of orchestrated beauty.
Nan’s hand on my cheek. My father’s jaw working as he smiles in the direction of the camera and in the direction of the past at the same time.
Pru steals olives from two martinis between frames.
Tiernan hovers at the edge of every group like a shadow with etiquette.
Nico appears in exactly one shot before Roisín relocates him by glaring.
Then we’re at the reception in the church hall, which has been transformed by Aoife and a florist who deserves a papal blessing.
Green on white, low candles, linen that makes your fingers feel wealth.
The band pretends to be background and fails.
We do the first dance—slow, clean, not a performance—and I try not to cry when Nan leans forward in her chair to see us better.
After that, the greeting line. It’s theater and work.
People file past in their best outfits and the fakest smiles they can manage.
Cousins who smell like cologne and stories, aunties who test my cheekbones for truth, old men who look relieved that I don’t tremble.
I say thank you, I’m happy you’re here, yes, turquoise, no, not cold.
Someone’s toddler offers me a cracker and I accept like it’s treasure.
“Breathe,” Cayce says softly between guests, and I do.
Then my uncle steps up.
He’s on my father’s side—the one who always laughed a beat too late, who never once called me by a nickname, who hugged too hard at funerals. Today his suit fits. His eyes flick from me to Cayce and back. The smile he produces has edges sharp enough to cut.
“Congratulations,” he says to me, like a test he expects me to fail. “You’re a smart girl.”
Cayce’s hand at my back doesn’t move. Everything else in him does. The tilt of his shoulders changes by a degree only people who know him would notice. The look in his eyes goes distant—not unfocused, just away. Not the quiet he uses to steady a room. A different kind.
I sense it like a draft that’s blowing between us.
My uncle shakes Cayce’s hand and squeezes longer than anyone needs to. “Mr. Shannon,” he says. “You’ve done well.”
Cayce’s mouth doesn’t move. “Enjoy the evening,” he says, voice even, and releases. My uncle walks away, pleased with himself, no idea he just walked across a grave with the ghost standing on it.
“Hey,” I say under my breath, not turning my head so the next person in line won’t see. “What just happened.”
He doesn’t look at me. He looks at the door my uncle walked through. The greeting smile is gone. The room’s noise thins to a high whine around the edges. He’s here—his body is here—but something else is happening that I’m not in on.
“Cayce,” I say, and his name pulls at him like a rope. He blinks. The rope holds but not tight enough.
That’s enough greeting.
“Excuse us,” I say to Aoife, already moving. I take his hand—not polite, not public—and pull him out of the line, around the corner, into a storage alcove that smells like coffee urns and clean mops. I close the door with my hip and anchor him with both hands flat on his chest.
“Hey,” I say again.
He’s not shaking. He’s not sweating. He’s not doing anything you can point to and label panic, and still it’s there—the thing that happens to men who have seen what he’s seen and then catch a scent, a word, a face that puts them back on the wrong road at night.
“Tell me,” I say, not soft.
For a second he tries to give me the version that fits the suit. Then he stops. He puts his hands on the metal shelf behind me and leans in like the taste in his mouth is old.
“Your uncle laughed,” he says, voice low. “Not out loud. In his eyes. At the handshake. The way a man laughs when he thinks he recognizes the price of everything around him.”
I wait. He watches my face like he needs to be sure it can take the weight he’s about to put on it.
“Blackvine Ridge,” he says.
Two words that create a landslide of emotions inside me. Blackvine is the threat people in our world use to keep their children in line. Teenagers who need to be taught to survive when everyone and everything around them wants to chew them up and spit them out.
“Your uncle is one of the men who took pleasure in my pain. They never needed permission to take. They just did it.”
I don’t need him to clarify what happened to him at Blackvine Ridge. I see it in the set of his mouth—the invisible scars that never faded. The tallies he carries on his soul.
“I’m not standing in a church hall with your hand in mine while a man who tortured me smiles at us like we’re equals,” he says, flat. “I’m not that healed. And I didn’t know his name until today.”
“Okay,” I say. “Then we’re not going to stay in a hall with him.”
He huffs something like a pained mix of a laugh and being punched in the gut. “You could have asked me to be polite.”
“I’m not polite,” I say. “I’m married.”
That earns me a look that says I hear you. It doesn’t unwind the coil in his shoulders.
“What happened to you?” I’m not asking about the paperwork version. “Not the family story. Yours.”
He doesn’t flinch. “They held me under a frozen lake,” he says.
“Cut holes in the ice and used it to make everything worse. They did it long enough for me to learn what I’d be when I got up.
I didn’t die. Sometimes that’s not a mercy.
I watched friends die. Watched people I cared about sacrifice themselves for others.
And in the end, none of us made it out whole.
” He shrugs once, the kind of motion that would look casual if you didn’t know him. “You asked to know. That’s the answer.”
I put my thumb on the notch at his throat because that’s where breath lives and because I need him to feel the difference between now and then.
“You’re not alone,” I say. “You weren’t then. You’re not now. You carry the ones you lost with you.”
“Little saint,” he says, warning and gratitude in one word.
“Don’t saint me,” I say. “Don’t you dare.”
His mouth moves—almost a smile, almost a wound. “What do you need from me right now?”
“I need you to hear that you’re mine,” I say, crisp as a vow. “You are my family now. I won’t let anyone hurt you.”
He gives me the look he gives when people say big things and don’t know the bill. “You don’t know how to fight, Caterina,” he says, just giving me the truth.
“I’ll learn,” I say. “For you, I’ll figure it out.”
There’s the crack, the small one he doesn’t show in public. He bows his head the distance between our foreheads. I feel the breath he’s holding let out slowly when his skin touches mine.
“Okay,” he says.
“Okay,” I echo.