Chapter 31
A FLOWER
Caitríona
The hangar yawns open like a mouth about to swallow a secret.
I stand at the entrance, willing my heartrate to normalize.
I focus on anything but the gnawing fear that Tiernan has Siobhan.
My gaze sweeps over the neon lights that paint everything the color of old coins, the jet’s polished wing, the wet tarmac, and Leo’s square silhouette in the corner.
The sight of the Gemini guard makes me uneasy despite Matteo’s repeated assurances.
His head tips in my direction with a look that says he’s done worse for less.
Headlights rake the fence line, drawing my attention. Donal’s sedan noses through the service gate and rolls to a stop with the engine still growling. He’s out before the door finishes opening, his head on a swivel and dark coat flaring like a warning.
“Cáit.” His voice cracks across the space. “Where the fuck have you been and where is—”
I walk toward him fast enough to force his focus. I fold every wild thing inside me into one narrow expression. “It doesn’t matter,” I bark, all business and all blade. “We don’t have time. I’ve got the body now and that’s all that’s important.”
He reaches for me, checking the line of my jaw with his thumb like he’s counting bruises. As if he actually cares. “Tiernan’s moving Siobhan. I’ve got a line on her location but—” His gaze darts past me to the jet. “Whose plane is this?”
“Mine,” I lie. “We take off in five so let’s talk inside.”
He hesitates, nostrils flaring. “You trust the crew?”
“No, but I trust myself.”
That lands. He nods once, grim, and turns his head to spit a curse into the rain. “Fine. Move.”
I pivot so he has to walk at my shoulder. Behind us, Matteo’s footfalls melt into the hum of the hangar fans. Leo shifts beneath the hangar, casual, and ghosts along the edge of the light.
At the entrance of the hangar, Donal pauses, his eyes on the door like it might bite. “After you,” he grunts.
I should feel guilt, a hint of remorse… something, anything as we walk toward the jet. But there’s nothing as I angle my body to block Donal’s view and stretch up as if to whisper in his ear. “Where does Tiernan have her?”
Matteo steps up from his blind side and the butt of his pistol kisses the base of Donal’s skull with surgical precision. My brother’s eyes flash surprise, then fury, then nothing. He crumples into Matteo’s arms the way a mountain chooses the quickest path downhill.
“Easy,” Matteo mutters, lowering him to the tarmac like he’s worth something to someone. Which, God help me, he is to me. Or at least, he used to be.
By the time I blink, Leo is already there. He uncaps the syringe, expression unreadable. “Twenty-four hours,” he mumbles to Matteo, finding a vein with the kind of care only a man who’s done this too many times affords. “He’ll dream of better places.”
I swallow hard and push the image of my brother dreaming anywhere out of my head. Leo hauls him over his shoulder, then marches up the steps like he’s carrying a ragdoll. We follow behind. Matteo and Leo cuff my brother, then strap him into a rear seat like any other passenger getting on a flight.
Matteo squeezes my shoulder when it’s done. “Go sit up front,” he says softly.
I nod and my feet are moving on autopilot. I drop into the plush leather seat and close my eyes. Matteo sinks in beside me a moment later, a quiet exhale the only sound between us. The cabin swallows us. Doors seal and engines roar. The runway lights bleed into a horizon I can’t quite reach.
Then my stomach drops and we’re hurtling faster and faster, until we finally catch flight.
I don’t speak as New Jersey falls away, as the ocean takes the windows and refuses to give them back.
I can’t stop thinking of my sister. Of those freckles, her soft laugh, and the hands that never learned the weight of our family name because I helped keep it from her.
I’d insisted on boarding school in London so she could be ordinary. And now Tiernan had her. Because of me.
Because of Matteo… and this thing between us. Guilt rolls over me, flooding every inch of my body until I can’t breathe.
The cabin hums, and I sneak a peek through slitted lids. Leo pretends to busy himself with a manifest that doesn’t exist, eyes flicking between Matteo and me like even he can taste the awkward in the air.
I wonder what Matteo told him about me, about us.
“Drink?” Matteo asks finally. The bottle appears from a drawer beneath the window I didn’t clock, the label stubbornly Irish.
I nod because I need the quiet numbness. If I open my mouth, I’ll break. He pours, and I throw back a shot. It hits like a match, warming the ice in my veins. He pours again. I don’t thank him for knowing exactly what I needed.
“You okay?” he asks.
“Keep pouring.”
Somewhere between the third shot and the thought of a fourth, the tight coil in my chest snaps. I stand because sitting still hurts too much. The cabin sways, but my balance doesn’t. I tumble forward and wait for the crack of my knees against the floor, but it never comes.
Instead, I fall face first into warm, unyielding arms. My nose is squeezed against Matteo’s familiar, musky scent and I draw in a deep breath. Fuck me, he still smells the same.
“I gotcha, Kitty Cat.” His warm breath skates across the top of my head as he tucks me into his side.
My body wants to melt into his… needs it. But I don’t want this warm comfort, it’ll only make me softer, and I can’t break right now. I need something else. A distraction.
I need to be fucked like only the wicked devil, Matteo Rossi, knows how. Pushing free of his hold, I catch his wrist and tug. “I need you to distract me.”
“Distract?” He blinks as understanding crawls across his handsome face. “Cat—”
“Don’t.” I pull harder, toward the rear where a door hides a narrow bedroom. “Just, I need—” I don’t finish the sentence. I can’t say I need to forget like it’s a luxury.
He resists long enough to make me look back. “You sure?” he asks, low and careful. “Or am I just a tourniquet you’ll hate me for later?”
“I don’t have later,” I snap. “All I have is now.”
That’s either the worst thing or the truest thing I’ve ever told him. He reads it on my face and his expression changes. It both softens and hardens at once. Then he follows behind me.
The bedroom is barely a room. It’s cream walls, a too-clean duvet, and a window that knows nothing but clouds. The door clicks shut behind us, and the world we don’t control stays on the other side.
But here… here I can just pretend for a few blessed hours.
I press him to the edge of the mattress, then climb into his lap. His hands frame my face, gaze stormy as it latches onto mine. “Cat…” I hate how much I like my name on his lips.
Then I kiss him like the ground’s gone. My mouth claims his and he devours me like he’s been waiting to be told to.
We’re a whirlwind of hands, lips, and breath.
There’s no time to strip down, not with the red-hot need coursing through me.
I slip my leggings and panties off in one smooth motion then undo the button of his jeans, lower his zipper and his cock springs free.
He’s already thick and hard, and just the sight of him has wetness pooling between my thighs.
The same hunger we pulled out of the rain ignites, only it’s sharper now that we’re dry.
He hesitates once more with his palm on my hip, eyes searching mine. “Maybe we shouldn’t…” he murmurs.
“Don’t you dare, Rossi,” I whisper and sink onto his cock. “I need you to fuck me like we’re eighteen again.”
“Merda,” he grits out as I take all of him in.
I barely restrain the groan myself as he fills me up, stretching me until he’s all I feel.
We find the same rhythm and a different one. Urgent, yes. Brutal, yes. But threaded with something that makes my throat tight if I look at it too long. It’s bursting with history, mercy, and a stubborn hope that doesn’t know when to quit.
His punishing grip on my hips steadies me as he slides me up and down his hard length.
For a few impossible moments, everything else vanishes.
The world tunnels to the feel of his cock rubbing my clit, to the torrent of unspoken emotions racing between us, to our ragged breaths as we consume each other.
“Cazzo, Cat,” he rasps before his hand climbs up my side and finds my breast beneath my shirt. “Your pussy feels just as tight and warm as I remember it.”
I arch into him as he shoves my bra aside and toys with my nipple. Fire races through my veins, amplifying the building heat at my center. Then his mouth replaces his fingers, sucking and licking the sensitive tip over the thin fabric.
He drives into me, harder, faster. Only pleasure exists, pure, fiery heat and nothing else.
“I’m going to come,” I whimper.
“Good girl,” he growls, “Come for me, Kitty Cat.”
I’m so close, toeing the edge. His hand slides up my neck and closes around my chin, forcing my eyes to his. “Fuck, I love you.”
It splits me. Heat, ache, fury, all of it. I clamp my hand over his mouth and almost laugh, ragged. “Don’t say that,” I gasp. “You aren’t allowed to say that anymore.”
His eyes blaze and that pounding pace slows. “But it’s the truth…”
“I don’t care. Just please—”
He kisses my palm then moves it aside with a frustrated sigh. “Fine, I won’t,” he murmurs, voice jagged and wrecked, “not again. Not until you say it first.”
I scoff to keep from shattering. “You’ll be waiting a long time.”
“I’m good at that,” he says, and it’s awful because it’s true.
We start to move again. Anything to skip over this moment. The bed complains softly as we pick up the punishing rhythm. I want to forget. I need to forget.
Matteo’s head drops, mouth skimming my jawline then moving lower.
Down my neck… I’m so consumed by the moment of pleasure, for an instant I forget.
His hand pushes my shirt down my shoulder and then he drags his tongue across my flesh.
The neckline falls low with the motion, lower, and the cabin light finds what the rain didn’t.
The orange blossom inked over bone, petals guarding a name in small script. Livia.
Matteo goes still as his eyes lock onto the tattoo. “What is that…” he murmurs, not a question, not quite a plea.
I freeze, instinct screaming one thing, and my heart screaming another. I fix the shirt, pulling it up like I can shove the past, like the locket, back under the cloth. “Nothing,” I lie.
He sits back, breath hitching, eyes locked on the place I’m hiding. “Cat.”
“It’s a flower,” I spit.
“And the name?” He’s impossibly still, his entire face carved out of stone.
“I—” The next word saws my throat raw. “I had an abortion.”
Silence detonates.
He rocks like the plane changed altitude, and I scramble off his lap. A small sound rips out of him. It’s ugly, human, and he drags a hand over his mouth as if he could wipe the word off the air. Heartbreak hits his face unguarded, followed by something darker that I deserve.
“When?” he asks, voice shredded. “How—why didn’t you—”
“Because there wasn’t a you,” I cut, too fast and too sharp. “Because you left.”
He flinches like I slapped him. “So you—” He can’t say it. “You ended it.”
I nod once, because this is the story that keeps him safest. “I ended it.”
He stares at me for a long, terrible moment, green eyes gone winter. Anger climbs his throat, and he swallows it like poison, burying it under something colder. He swings his legs to the opposite side of the bed and braces his elbows on his knees, back to me, head in his hands.
The hum of the engines returns as loud as a judgment. I pull the collar higher and press my palm to the blossom like it might keep me from falling apart.
We don’t speak for the rest of the flight. Leo doesn’t knock. The ocean doesn’t care. Belfast draws closer, and so does everything I can’t outrun.