Chapter 14 My World Fucking Ends
MY WORLD FUCKING ENDS
Matteo
The revolving doors of my Upper West Side building spit the three of us out into the cool night air.
Ale is at Rory’s side like her shadow, one hand firm against the small of her back.
Something tightens in my chest at the tender gesture.
I couldn’t handle another night alone in my empty apartment and since I still couldn’t get myself to dial one of my typical late night booty calls, I opted for a movie night out with my cousin and his wife.
Pathetic, I know.
The old Matteo would be laughing his ass off at the shadow of the man I’ve become in the last week. Funny how a ghost from the past can inflict such damage. Suddenly, I’m questioning everything, my life choices, my flirty playboy ways, my career… nothing seems good enough anymore.
Rory giggles, catching my eye. She’s glowing, Alessandro too, and I wonder how much longer they’ll wait before breaking the news to the rest of the family. They’re going to go nuts. The first grandchild in the Rossi-Valentino family. The first new member of the cousin crew.
A crack splits the night. Sharp. Echoing.
A bullet screams past my ear, clips my shoulder and buries itself in the concrete pillar behind us.
“Down!” I roar, shoving Rory before Ale can even move.
She shrieks as she stumbles, her knees hitting the pavement before she keels over to her side and hits her head on the sidewalk.
Fuck. Ale loses his goddamn mind. He’s already on the ground with her, shielding her belly with his entire body, eyes wild and murderous.
“Rory, Rory, talk to me,” he stammers. “Dio, are you hit?”
“I—I’m fine,” she gasps, but her face is ashen, her hands clutching her stomach like she can hold the life inside steady by sheer will.
Ale’s head snaps toward me, scarred face twisted in rage that has nothing to do with me and everything to do with the bullet that dared come close to his wife. He looks like he’s one heartbeat from burning Manhattan to the ground.
And it’s my fault.
Because this is about me, damn it. I should have told him my assassin was still out there. I never should have invited them out tonight. Merda, how could I have been so stupid to put Rory in danger like this?
After a quick glance at my shoulder—it’s only a flesh wound, thank Dio—I scan the suddenly silent streets. I see her before the guards do. She’s nothing but a flicker of black against the edge of the alley. Mask. Blonde hair escaping the edge like flame. Trigger.
“Matty!” Ale barks, but I’m already moving, despite the twinge in my shoulder.
The world narrows to her shadow fleeing down the street. My pulse is a war drum in my ears. My feet pound across the pavement. I chase like a man possessed, because I am.
She doesn’t get away this time. Not this time.
She ducks into a narrow alley, but I’m faster, fueled by guilt and rage and something I refuse to name.
She’s climbing the wire fence at the end of the street when I grab her by the waist and slam her back into the brick wall.
The gun clatters from her hand. She thrashes against me, completely feral, but I’ve got her pinned with my body.
My fingers tear at the mask as the rage builds with each ragged breath.
I finally rip it free.
And my world fucking ends.
Golden blonde hair spills loose. Blue eyes burn up at me, wide and wild and heartbreakingly familiar. A freckle just beneath her left eye. Lips I’ve kissed a thousand times in memory.
“Kitty Cat?” Her name is nothing more than a serrated whisper.
Caitríona. My Kitty Cat.
The impact is nuclear.
Sicily.
The jetty, her laugh bubbling as I splashed her.
The taste of salt on her neck.
Her small hands clutching my shoulders as she whispered someday against my skin.
Her face when I told her I’d never leave.
Her tears the night I did.
The montage crashes through me, every memory like a blade across my chest, until I can’t breathe. Until I’m choking on the impossible truth that the ghost, the assassin, the girl I almost shot a dozen times…
Is her.
My grip trembles but I don’t let go. I can’t. I’m staring into the eyes of the only woman I’ve ever loved and all I can think to do is hold on tighter, terrified she’ll vanish again.
Her lips part. “Matteo—” The sound of my name in her voice wrecks me.
And before I can stop myself, the wrong words tumble out, cracked and raw. “She’s pregnant.”
The world tilts. She freezes, blue eyes widening, the fight draining from her limbs as if I’ve gutted her with those two words alone.
And Dio help me, I realize too late that maybe I have.
But I can’t stop myself now, the hurt and the anger bleed together and twist into something darker. “The woman you almost killed back there, when you were aiming at me, is fucking pregnant,” I hiss. “Her name is Rory and she’s my cousin, Alessandro’s, wife.”
She doesn’t move, just stares at me, mouth curved into a capital O.
The sound of my own voice seems unreal like it belongs to someone else. Her mouth makes that little O again, and for a heartbeat she looks like the young girl on the beach, wide-eyed and wordless, before everything snaps back hard to now.
“Fuck you,” she growls. A tear slips slow down her cheek. It glows in the streetlight like a tiny, traitorous thing.
An immediate rush of shame shoots through me.
It’s so hot it makes my teeth ache. My hands are still fisted where I held the mask, knuckles white.
All the anger that sent me chasing her is already curdling into something else: regret, horror, a grief so big it has no name.
How could this be the same person I left with a promise I broke?
How did she become the knife at my throat?
“Cat—” I start, but the name dies in my mouth when she suddenly lunges.
Her hand slams into my chest, a smack that hurts harder than any punch.
She hits me again and again, each strike frantic and each one carrying the weight of words she won’t say.
She’s small but fierce, nails raking my shirt and tears splattering on my collar.
Her face is windblown, raw, and there’s so much hate there.
It’s years of hurt sharpened into a weapon.
“You left,” she spits between blows. “You left me. You left us. You walked away.”
I don’t try to catch her hand. I don’t pull her closer. I just stand there like an idiot, taking every hit, feeling every slap carve into the parts of me I thought were long callused over. I should be furious. I should be yelling back.
Instead, the sound that comes out of my throat is a croak. “How the hell did you become this?” I need the why as much as I need air. “Who did this to you?”
Then I know the answer. The Quinlans… the Irish mob. Fuck me.
She hits me again, then suddenly she’s shaking, her whole damned body trembling.
The rage breaks and grief floods in, huge and ugly.
She doesn’t want to cry. She clamps her jaw shut, but the sound that comes out is a sob she can’t swallow.
It rips out of her. For a second, she’s utterly and desperately, just a little girl.
I don’t know what to do. I shouldn’t comfort her. I shouldn’t touch her. But merda, do I want to. She tried to kill me. She put a bullet within an inch of my cousin’s pregnant wife.
So I do the only selfish thing I can think of. I bend down, scoop the gun off the ground and press it into her palm. My fingers hover around hers as if they can anchor us both.
“Shoot me.” The words come out flat, exhausted. “You came for revenge, right? So, just do it. At least then this will be over. At least then we’ll get to be done with the lies and the ghosts.”
She looks at the weapon as if she’s never seen it before. Her hand tightens, the muscles in her forearm flex. For a wild second I think she might actually do it. Her fingers tremble, and the gun between us is suddenly heavier than the world.
“No.” She breathes it like a curse. Her thumb bangs the safety as if she could make the whole thing go away. “No, I—”
Tears streak clearer down her face. The howling in her chest breaks into ragged, ugly sobs.
She presses the side of the gun against her stomach, and her body convulses as if she’s trying to use it to steady herself, not to aim.
She looks so small, suddenly, as if the weapon were never meant for her hands.
I drop to my knees before her without thinking, because standing feels like some obscene refusal of responsibility. I hold her forearm where the gun rests but keep my face low because I can’t look at those blue eyes that used to melt me and not confess everything.
“Don’t,” I whisper, and I mean it a dozen ways. Don’t shoot me. Don’t throw yourself away. Don’t let them turn you into the thing they wanted. Don’t make me the man who loses you again by letting you die.
She shudders, hiccupping a sound that’s half-sob, half-laugh.
It’s a broken thing. Her fists curl in my shirt and for the first time since I ripped the mask off and the world rearranged itself, she lets herself collapse against me.
She’s on her knees in front of me, and the gun falls, clinking uselessly to the pavement.
The city around us is suddenly silent, save the ragged breaths mingling between us.
In my arms, she is a small, terrible confession.
I hold her and feel her trembling slow and then the steadying of her breath.
Part of me wants to ask a thousand awful questions: Why didn’t you tell me?
Why didn’t you kill me? But the words would only peel back fresh wounds.
All I can do is try to be present in a way I never was before. “I never should have left,” I whisper finally, the admission a bone-deep thing. “I was a coward. I abandoned you when I should have stayed. I thought I was doing the right thing. I thought… I thought I was protecting you. From this.”
She laughs once, but there’s no humor in it. “Protecting me,” she mutters. “By leaving me with a secret and a baby and nothing? By disappearing when I needed you the most?”
The truth of it caves in on me harder than any fist. My hands shake on her arm. “I know. I know, Cat. I’m sorry. I am—” My voice breaks. I can’t take back the years. I can’t stitch up the absence. Not with words. Not with any promise now.
She looks up at me then, blue eyes swollen, and for a flicker the old defiant spark is there. It’s still sharp and dangerous. “Do you have any idea how many times I thought about killing you?”
A beat of silence passes.
“You think that would fix anything?” she adds.
“No,” I answer. “I don’t know anything anymore.”
Another endless moment of quiet.
“But I do know I can’t let the Quinlans use you like that. You are so much more than their executioner, than their weapon for revenge.”
Her hand curls into my shirt like a talon, and the rest of her, her entire face, opens up. I see it now, not just rage, but raw, bleeding hurt. She has become an instrument tuned by other people’s violence, and tonight the string is fraying.
She pushes me away, wipes her face with the back of her hand and stands. “You don’t get to fix this, Matteo. You don’t get to show up and expect me to fall into your arms in a moment of weakness and magically forgive you.”
I would expect nothing less. Still, I reach for her because the alternative is nothingness, and I am not ready for that.
She slaps my hand away, harder than before. “Don’t touch me.” Her voice is small but fierce.
I obey. I back up, hands raised like I’m surrendering to a memory. The confusion and the ache in me swirl, an ugly cocktail that tastes like failure.
She straightens, wipes the last tear from her cheek, and for a furious, defiant second she’s all the woman I loved. Brave, furious, not yet broken.
“Go,” she snaps, voice raw. “Go back to your perfect life. Go back to your cousin and your club and your baby news.”
The word baby stings worse than any punch. Rory’s name was a blade; now it’s a verdict. My chest constricts. Some stupid part of me wanted this to end with understanding. Whatever we become next, I thought maybe pain could be honest enough for that.
Instead, she shoves the mask into my hand and turns on her heel, stalking away into the night with the kind of grace that’s drunk from fury.
I stand in the street with the mask in my palm and a dozen ruined memories cascading like broken glass.
Eventually, it, too, slips from my fingers and lands beside the gun.
It lies cold on the pavement where it fell, useless now for everything but evidence.
My heart is a raw, empty thing and all I can do is call out, “Caitríona.”
She doesn’t look back. Not for me. Not for the man she once trusted. Not for the boy who left. My Kitty Cat disappears into the dark and the sound of her footsteps is the only thing I can follow.