Chapter 18 Caterina
CATERINA
Nico calls it a romantic dinner with a straight face, which is how you know he’s dangerous—he lies to himself first and expects me to take it as the truth.
The terrace faces the sea like a stage built for sunsets.
Lanterns swing from iron hooks, all curated glow and borrowed starlight.
The table is set with bone-white plates and silver that isn’t shy.
A woman in a uniform pours wine and disappears; a man with a scar on his jaw stands ten feet away pretending to guard the view.
Nico pulls out my chair like a gentleman. My wrists are free. My choices aren’t.
“You deserve beautiful things,” he says, settling opposite me. “I always thought so.”
“I had something beautiful. You stole it from me,” I say.
He laughs as if I’ve flattered him. He’s dressed like a magazine spread—linen shirt, sleeves rolled, the expensive watch that he hopes I’ll notice.
He’s tanned, handsome in the way of men who learned vanity as a form of homework and passed the test. His eyes keep trying to soften like that’ll make me confuse him with safety.
“Be honest,” he says, pouring me wine I won’t drink. “You expected something worse.”
“I expected the truth,” I say.
“This is the truth,” he says, gesturing at the water, at the lanterns, at the three courses cooling under silver lids. “I was always supposed to be yours.”
“You weren’t,” I say. “And if you were all that knocked on my door in a different life, I would’ve changed the door codes.”
He smiles like I’m flirting. He smiles like the word no is foreplay instead of an entire sentence that I don’t need to justify or explain.
A server removes the lids. Fish, rice, something green that looks like it remembers the ground. I don’t like fish. I guess Nico forgot that part of my dossier. He picks up his fork and remembers to say grace—not to God, to me. “To us,” he says, lifting the wine.
“There is no us, Nico. What is this?” I pick at the fish with my fork, deliberately petulant. “I don’t like fish.”
“There will be.” He sips and ignores my complaint, then watches me over the rim until I either drink or shove the glass away. I push it to the center of the table and fold my hands so he can see they’re steady.
“You kidnapped me,” I remind him. “That’s not courtship.”
“It’s correction,” he says, maddeningly calm. “I tried to warn you in the church. You made a bad choice. You picked a man who will ruin you.”
“He already did,” I say pleasantly. “In that same church. Best decision I ever made.”
His jaw ticks. “He’s a butcher.”
“He’s my husband.”
“Temporary,” Nico says, as if trying on the word. “When you remember who you were supposed to be, you’ll thank me. That marriage will be annulled, and then we will get married.”
I cut a bite of fish because defiance isn’t always refusing. I take it, taste lemon, butter, the salt of a sea I wish would swallow this place, and gag a little. “No,” I say. “I’ll bury you.”
He laughs again. It sounds like disbelief dressed as charm. “You’re not a killer.”
“I wasn’t a wife last month,” I say. “People change.”
He reaches across and tries to take my hand. I pull it back like I’ve touched the wrong wire. The guard shifts his weight, unsure how much pretending is required.
“Don’t be difficult,” Nico says, voice lowering the way men think makes them magnetic.
“I’m not pretending. I truly am difficult. It’s my best quality.”
“You were always so polite.”
“No,” I say. “I was obedient.”
“To your father,” he says knowingly.
“To fear,” I correct. “I took vows you don’t understand and didn’t keep the ones that weren’t mine. Now I do.”
“Caterina,” he says, softening, leaning in. “I can give you a life where you don’t have to be afraid. No one has to bleed for you. No one has to die.”
“People always bleed for women like me,” I say, just as soft. “The question is whether they deserve it.”
“And he does?” Nico’s smirk returns. “Your Irish saint? He killed a man over a joke.”
“He killed a man who used his mouth like a weapon to try and hurt me,” I say. “And that wasn’t the only thing he used.”
“You don’t know that.”
“I know enough.”
He taps his fork on the plate—delicate, impatient. “Your uncle says your husband is lying. That he’s spreading stories about Blackvine to make the Morettis kneel.”
“My uncle is a liar,” I say, watching his face when I strip the varnish off. “And a coward. He sent boys to rooms he never walked into, and he did it with a rosary in his pocket so he could point to God later when anyone asked why.”
Nico’s expression shifts—there, a crack. “He’s family.”
“So is my husband,” I say evenly. “Choose a noun that matters.”
The rest of the meal is a tug-of-war disguised as conversation. He tells me stories about us that never happened, about dances we didn’t share and looks I didn’t give him. He paints a future like a travel brochure. He tries to correct my memory as if it’s a radio he can tune.
Gaslighting.
I don’t throw the plate. I don’t scream. I don’t give him what he came here to take by force if he can’t have it by persuasion: the idea that I can be moved.
He finally gets bored of my calm. Or drunk enough to feel unsafe around it. He stands, drags his chair back a foot, and glares down at me.
“You’re being stubborn,” he says. “It’s not attractive.”
“It’s beautiful,” I say, rising. “And it’s permanent.”
He reaches for my elbow. I step away on instinct and he doesn’t like it the way men who prefer a still target don’t like math. “Enough,” he says, and the word is less romance, more policy.
The guard moves—one step, then back when Nico flips two fingers. “Lock her in the room,” he tells the air. “She’ll think better after sleep.”
“Sleep,” I repeat lightly. “In your house.”
“In mine,” he says, pleased. “For now.”
They walk me inside. Not rough. The kind of handling you use for things you plan to display later. The room is coral stone and white curtains, a bed that tries to be kind. The window frames moonlight like a painting.
They close me in, the lock clicking loudly with confidence.
I pace and force myself to breathe. I count—one, two, three—because counting helps.
The window lifts.
I go still so fast my ribs ache. A palm wedges under the sash. Fingers—small, ringed—appear, followed by a face that looks like trouble and salvation and a thousand bad ideas I have loved since ninth grade.
“Miss me?” Pru hisses.
I fling myself across the room and haul her in by the forearms, swallow a laugh that wants to come out like a sob, and we end up in a tangle on the floor like girls at a sleepover who made all the wrong plans and survived them anyway.
“What—how—?”
“Tiernan literally tossed me,” she whispers, gleeful. “Human fastball special. Ten out of ten. I had about two seconds to consider breaking my neck and then I was inside. You good?”
“No,” I say. “Yes. Where is he?”
“Tiernan?”
“Cayce.”
“Being biblical,” she says. “In the old-fashioned way. He’s definitely about to commit murder that he told your father he wouldn’t do around you.”
My mouth goes dry. “Alive?”
“Furious,” she says. “Focused. He and Tiernan cleared the outer ring. I came for you.”
I drag her up, grip her forearms. “I need him.”
“I know,” she says, softer. “But I need you to breathe. Here.” She digs into her hoodie pocket and produces a small black device with a mean little spark.
“Taser. Thumb safety, trigger here. Aim center mass or thigh. It won’t kill him, but it will make him rethink his life choices.
Do not drop it or tase yourself. I’m saying that because you’re shaking. ”
“I’m not—” I am. Fine. “Okay.”
She squeezes my hand once and then lets go. “We go slow. We go right. Tiernan’s—”
A shout cuts down the hallway like a blade. Not panic—alarm. Pru and I look at each other and move at the same time. Pru hunches over the doorknob and pulls out a small box, then a few metal tool-things that she very efficiently uses to pick the lock while I stand behind her and gape.
A moment later, after she peeks around the door jamb and determines it safe, we slip into the corridor, pressed against cool stone and walking fast. The lights are low. Men shout in two directions, which means they can’t agree where the problem is.
I have a feeling Tiernan and my husband have something to do with that state of affairs.
I hear him.
Not words. A tone. The sound a held note makes when it gets a throat.
I move toward it because I can’t not. Pru hisses my name and I ignore her because I have become exactly the kind of woman who goes toward the danger when it sounds like him.
The doorway is open a hand’s width. I push it with two fingers and step into a room that doesn’t deserve the word office because offices don’t have shackles on the wall behind a tapestry. This one does.
There are two men in it. Only one I care about in any sense of the word.
Nico stands with his hands raised halfway like a man who thought he was built for violence and discovered he was only built for its costume. He’s bleeding from the mouth enough to make him look human.
Cayce stands behind him—shirt half-open, eyes calm, knife in his hand.
He glances up when the door moves. Not frantic. Not embarrassed. Acknowledging. He warned me once that he had a face that doesn’t apologize. He’s wearing it now.
“I told you I was a monster,” he says, almost conversational, and then he leans and makes a small, exact motion behind Nico’s ear.
It’s efficient. It’s quiet. It’s personal in a way justice should be and isn’t.
Nico drops to the ground immediately. The blood is less dramatic than I expect, which is worse. He makes a small, wet choking noise as he struggles to move or breathe.
I don’t faint. I don’t scream. The taser in my hand begins to tremble and I squeeze it tighter, and then I step to Cayce and put my hands on his face.
“Look at me,” I say. My voice shakes and I steady it.
He does. Unapologetic. Waiting for the moment he breaks me.
“You warned me,” I tell him, and then I kiss him like a woman who heard the warning and walked toward it. His mouth tastes like copper and mint and the end of something I never wanted to start. When I break for breath, my forehead rests against his. “It’s okay. You’re my monster. It’s okay.”
Something gives in him that isn’t weakness. It’s permission. He breathes, once, like the first time someone believes you and it sticks.
Tiernan appears in the doorway with Pru right in front of him like the period at the end of a sentence. He takes in the room—Nico convulsing as he bleeds out, me pressed to Cayce like a restraining order reversed—and nods once as if his list is being checked in the order he prefers.
“We’re done,” he says, calm as weather. “Outer ring’s quiet. Boat’s waiting.”
Cayce wipes his knife on a handkerchief that has never been used for anything that delicate. He doesn’t look at Nico again. He looks at me. Every line of him asks a question without asking it: Can you still stand in my house and not break where you shouldn’t?
“Yes,” I say aloud, for us both. “Now take me home.”
Tiernan grabs Nico’s body by the foot and drags him down the hall.
“Tiernan,” Pru says, breathless with adrenaline, hair sticking to her forehead, eyes incandescent, “remind me to kiss you when we’re not in a murder room.”
“Noted,” he says. He does not smile. His ears might be pink, but I’ll never tell.
Cayce takes my hand, our fingers locking. His palm is warm, steadying the tremble in my fingers. We don’t look back.
On the terrace, the ocean is still pretending to be beautiful. The lanterns swing. My uneaten plate of fish is cooling. It’s obscene in its very ordinariness.
We move through the hedge, along the limestone path, and down to a waiting boat. Men melt out of shadows to become ours. Pru sticks close, and Tiernan scans the horizon, searching for any threat they might have missed.
At the bottom of the steps, I stop. The night air tastes like salt and iron and relief that hasn’t earned its paycheck yet. I turn to Cayce and put my fingers under his jaw, tilting his face down to mine.
“I’m not afraid of you,” I say. “Not ever. I just want you to know that.”
“Good.” Cayce’s mouth twitches once—not joy, not triumph. A recognition of balance restored. He kisses my knuckles, then my mouth, quick, like a signature. “Let’s get you home.”
“Home,” I echo.
The boat lifts from the dock like it has always been ours.
The villa recedes. The horizon opens. I’m barefoot, in a dress that will need a priest and a dry-cleaner, with a taser in my pocket and a husband whose monsters know my name.
I sit. I breathe. I keep my eyes on the line where the dark meets the dark and imagine building a sky where we decide who gets to stand under it.
Now there’s only one man standing in our way.