Chapter 32
DON’T BE A HERO
Matteo
I don’t speak as we start the descent. I haven’t since she dropped that bomb and just walked away. I don’t touch her either.
Clouds peel away to a gray strip of coastline, cranes like rusted antlers along the water. Belfast. Cold gets under the skin here. It’s like it finds the places you didn’t cover with armor.
My thoughts zip to the past, to four long years ago when I came looking for her. A stupid kid certain that love could triumph over all. I was desperate. Desperate to fix what I’d broken between us. Now, it was shattered completely.
Across from me Cat buckles in and stares at nothing.
I keep my eyes on the window because if I look at her I’ll ask again, and I can’t afford to hear the same answer twice.
She said she ended it. Our child. The word sits in my chest like shrapnel I put there myself and still I resent her for twisting the blade.
It was my fault. I know that. I left. But knowing and forgiving are not the same.
Wheels finally slam into the tarmac, my stomach hitting my spine. Reverse thrusters howl. Leo stands as soon as the overhead light dings green, practiced calm poured over coiled muscle.
For a second, I’m envious. I wish I could find the calm right now.
“The terminal’s full of Tiernan’s men,” he mutters. Cat’s eyes track the movement of his mouth. “Two cars, maybe three. They’re lying low, don’t want to be seen but my local guy has eyes on them.”
“Fucking Tiernan,” I growl. I’m already on my feet wearing a stupid disguise and sliding Donal’s hood off his head. “Fine. Let them think they got lucky.”
We work fast. Donal’s still dead weight under the drug, breath even, and cuffed wrists neat under a blanket. Leo snaps a cervical collar around his neck, then adds a portable oxygen mask. From ten feet away, he looks like a man who shouldn’t be moved without a doctor.
Perfect.
“Decoy’s ready.” Leo nods, arms pressed tight across his chest.
“Get him out the obvious way,” I tell him. “Then once we’re out of the airport, I’ll give Tiernan his Marco Rossi.”
Cat is already zipping her jacket, jaw set. The plane door yawns open, and rain needles the stairs.
We descend to a private apron bordered by chain-link fences and sodium lamps.
Two men in cheap jackets try to look like they belong to baggage carts.
A third leans on a pillar with his phone but never scrolls.
I clock them all without turning my head.
My men, six in total, fan out on the blind side of the hangars, local hires Leo pulled from a list I don’t keep on paper.
We wheel Donal down the stairs. In scrubs and a surgical mask, I fall in beside the gurney and tilt my cap low.
From a distance, Donal could be me, same height, same build.
To the airport crew, he’s just a patient flown for specialized medical care and to Tiernan’s men, it’s my body, prettied up for the optics.
“Out the main door,” I murmur. “And make it obvious.”
The terminal air reeks of disinfectant and fried food.
Cat ghosts to my six in the same hospital scrubs, head down, and hands in her pockets.
Leo pushes the gurney at a medic’s clip, wheels squealing just enough to turn heads.
Tiernan’s men take the bait. One peels off a column, and another shadows from a magazine rack.
The third lifts his phone like he’s calling for a ride.
We burst through the sliding doors into weak daylight. A white van screeches up. It’s one of ours. Leo loads the gurney, swings the rear doors shut, and hops into the passenger seat. The van fishtails out, too fast, calling too much attention.
“Go,” I bark into the mic. Across the street, two of my men ignite a minor car-park argument. Horns blare along with lewd hand gestures, and someone knocks over a cone. Both watchers choose the van.
I turn the other way.
Cat keeps pace, hood up. “Where to?” she asks without looking at me.
“Docklands,” I reply. “Warehouse row. These guys love their theater. He’ll want cranes in the background when he breaks things.”
She swallows like glass and nods once.
Two cars idle in a shadowed bay just ahead.
Gemini men, my men. We split across them.
I take the lead with Cat, and the other car ghosts four lengths back.
We cut east, past crumbling terraces, a sorrow etched into the landscape two generations ago and never forgotten.
Before long, we roll into the port. Containers are stacked like ugly Legos, and the driving rain makes everything reflective.
For a second, I’m back in a different rain, in what feels like a lifetime ago and damn it, I wish I could go back.
Instead, I swallow it all down and kill the engine behind a low berm of rusted scrap. For a second, we just listen to the port breathe, to the chains clinking, gulls arguing, and water slapping iron. My throat is ash. “Hey, listen to me.”
She finally looks at me. The space between us is ice.
“No trying to be the hero today. We stick to the plan, and we all come out of there alive.”
She nods with her hand already on the latch.
“You go in there with Donal hooded. Sell it like you’re delivering me. Ask to see Siobhan first. When they crowd the ‘body’ and lift the hood, my team hits the doors.”
“Just like we planned.” She hesitates, finger clutching the handle.
“Cat.” The word scrapes and she looks over. The rain on the glass throws a thousand versions of her back at me, and I pick the only one that’s real. “If this goes to hell… if we don’t make it—”
“Don’t,” she whispers.
“I have to.” I swallow the blade in my throat.
“If I don’t walk out, you get your sister out and you keep running.
Go back to Jersey, to London, I don’t care, just…
live. And know that leaving you back then was the worst thing I ever did.
Everything since has been me trying to crawl back to that beach and do it right. ”
Her mouth trembles, then hardens. “You don’t get to say goodbye.”
“It’s not goodbye.” I manage a crooked smile. “It’s insurance.”
For a beat she just breathes. Then she reaches across the console and catches my wrist, pulse to pulse. “You don’t get to be a hero either,” she rasps. “Be smart.”
“I’ll be both.” I squeeze once and let go before I can take it back. “I’ll give you two minutes. If they don’t bring her out by then, I breach anyway.”
She nods. “Two minutes.” Then she whips the door open.
It takes every ounce of restraint to keep from racing after her.
From the rain-drenched window, I watch as she and one of our local guys haul the hooded weight of Donal from the trunk of the van and drape a tarp like a body bag.
Cat takes the lead, the picture of a trigger doing her job.
They keep to the bright strip of wet concrete between stacked crates and a corrugated wall until they reach the warehouse with its big doors cracked and a sliver of light bleeding onto the ground.
Cat steps through first, shoulders squared, and then she’s gone.
My fingers curl into fists as I start the countdown. Every breath is a struggle, despite reassuring myself time and again that she knows what she’s doing. She’s not my innocent little Kitty Cat anymore. She’s so much more.
When the time is finally up, I shoot out of the car toward the warehouse, gun clenched in my fist. I take my position beside a rusted out, broken window.
Cat’s steady voice echoes over the rain. “I brought you the body.”
A half-dozen heads swing toward the gurney. But not one of them is Tiernan. Guns lift, and then someone further back barks, “Hood off. Let’s see the corpse.”
“Not until I see my sister,” she fires back. “Tiernan wanted proof, but he didn’t say I had to be stupid.”
A beat. Then from the shadow in the back, a gesture.
A man drags a chair into the light. Siobhan.
She’s zip-tied, tape over her mouth, and eyes furious and wet.
Cat’s breath hitches loud enough for me to hear from the gutter.
She tips her chin like there you are and takes two steps closer.
The men surge to the tarp, greedy for a face.
“Four on the floor,” Reni whispers through the earpiece. “Two by the office. Two above.”
“Copy,” I breathe. “No one makes it out to tell Tiernan I’m still alive.”
“Understood,” four voices echo back.
Then I raise three fingers, more out of habit than anything else. “Now.”
The hood rips back. A dozen eyes settle on Donal’s face, not mine, and confusion detonates.
Chaos. Men shout. A second guard lifts his gun and Cat puts him down, clean, two to the chest. Pride twists with something darker in my gut, and I grind both down. Not now.
I crash through the window as my men hit both doors.
One of the Irish guys, Reni, drops from the catwalk and takes out the man closest to Cat on the first shot.
Then, Tadhg smashes through another window and floods the mezzanine with commands and muzzle flash.
I race toward Cat and shoot two rounds into the closest idiot still gawking at Donal’s face, then shoulder through the chaos to the chair.
“Matteo!” Cat’s voice, sharp. A man appears behind Siobhan holding a knife. He’s young, terrified, and the blade knows only one language.
I lift my hands, gun low. “Easy,” I mutter, Irish cadence I can mimic well enough to be rude. “Walk away, kid. This isn’t your hill.”
His eyes flick to the door, to the girl, then back to me. He puts the knife to her throat in pure, stupid panic. Cat moves before he finishes the thought. Two steps, a twist, and her shoulder slammed into his wrist. The knife hits concrete, and my boot pins it there.
He lunges for Cat. I catch him midair and drive him into the floor. He goes limp.
Cat is already on her sister with her knife out, ties sliced, and tape peeled back.
Siobhan sobs and clutches at her. My heart breaks at the sight.
Her sister gulps in air and then cries a little from the shock of it.
Then Cat drops to her knees and takes her face in both hands, foreheads touching and something wordless and old as blood passing between them.
“I’ve got you,” she murmurs. “You’re alright. I’ve got you.”
Siobhan’s focus ricochets to me, blue and a little wild. “Who—”
“Friend,” Cat replies, not looking away from her sister. “The only one we need.”
My throat does something unpleasant. I cut the zip on Siobhan’s ankles and wrap my jacket around her shoulders. The girl is shaking hard enough to rattle. Cat pulls her up, small and stubborn, like she thinks she could carry the whole ocean on her back if it meant getting her sister out.
Sirens cry out in the distance.
“Out!” I roar, covering them as Leo sweeps the floor right to left.
We move. Cat keeps one arm around Siobhan, the other on the gun at her hip. I lead them through a slit in the wall a forklift chewed through years ago and out into the icy rain.
Behind us, dying men groan and a warehouse bleeds. In front of us, the car waits with the engine running and the heater on like I planned it that way.
Siobhan slides into the backseat between Cat and a med blanket Leo appears with. She looks small there, not more than a child. With Cat’s eyes and… No, don’t go there. I slam the door, round the hood, and drop into the passenger’s seat beside Leo.
“Any sight of Tiernan?” Cat asks, voice low.
“Not here. He sent his lieutenants to do his dirty work. He’ll hate that he missed out on me.”
“Good.”
We pull out without lights. In the rearview Siobhan’s eyes flutter, then fix on Cat, then close like she knows she’s safe in her sister’s hands. Cat strokes her hair, gentle in a way I haven’t seen in four years.
The silence grows teeth again. I press my head back and let the ache behind my ribs remind me what we’ve won and what I’ve lost and what I still don’t know how to ask for.
We’re alive. Cat’s sister is breathing. Tiernan will come. Donal will wake in twelve hours angry as the sea.
And the woman sitting behind me, the one who branded a flower and a name over her heart and then told me she cut out our future, stares out at a city that made her. I don’t know if I want to hold her or haunt her.
For now, I close my eyes and just breathe.