Chapter 34
ALREADY DEAD
Matteo
I don’t sleep. I can’t.
The guest room is small and blue in the streetlight as quiet as a chapel after mass.
She’s on her side facing the wall, blanket to her chin, the line of her shoulder rising and falling under the bandage I put there.
I take the floor at the foot of the bed.
I tried the chair, but it creaked and I didn’t want to wake her.
So I sit with my back to the frame, knees up, and palms open.
I watch the door. I watch the window. Mostly, I watch her breathe.
Every so often the pipes knock somewhere in the house, and Leo shifts out in the hall. Saoirse’s kettle ticks as it cools. The London rain threads the gutter, and I lose count of the drops, the time, everything.
My phone is face down on the carpet. If I touch it, I’ll call Ale and confess things that aren’t mine to give away. If I close my eyes, I see a baby girl with Cat’s mouth and my temper toddling through a kitchen that doesn’t exist.
Around three, the mattress whispers. I feel her hand search the bed, the side I was sitting on before she fell asleep. Then she lifts her head.
“Rossi,” she murmurs, voice rough with sleep. “Go to bed.”
“I can’t.” I don’t meet those familiar eyes. If I look up at her now, it’s over. “My head won’t… stop.”
She pushes up on an elbow. She’s barely a shadow in the corner of my eye. The blanket slides, cotton sighing against cotton. “What are you thinking about?”
“Everything,” I mumble, and then the truth.
“Her. I keep building her out of air. Livia.” The name scrapes.
It’s raw in my throat like a living thing.
“I give her your smile and my bad decisions, and I try to imagine what I would’ve done right for once.
” My laugh is silent, ugly. “It’s stupid.
I know.” I drag my hands through my hair and pull at the wild ends. “I just can’t make it stop.”
The bed shifts. Her hand appears at the edge of the mattress, tentative, then drops to rest at the crown of my head, a weight no heavier than a benediction. I have to bite my cheek to keep in the sound that tries to escape.
“I’m sorry,” she whispers. “For deciding without you. For—” The words fracture. “I was alone. And I was angry. And I was scared. I should’ve… I don’t know. I should’ve been someone else.”
I close my eyes and breathe until my ribs remember how. “You don’t owe me an apology,” I whisper into the dark. “You don’t owe me anything. It’s your body. Your choice. Even when it breaks me.” My throat tightens, and I force it open. “Especially then.”
Her fingers move once through my hair like the past is forgiving both of us for a heartbeat. “Thank you.” Her voice is barely a sound.
We sit in the soft hum of the room until the rain outside softens. Something in me settles. It’s far from healed and definitely not fixed but set down for a minute like a heavy box you’ve been carrying for too long.
“Cat,” I whisper, and my voice is steadier now. “Come with me.”
She stills. I push on before I lose my nerve.
“Let’s leave it. All of it. Belfast, New York, our last names, every bad thing that keeps finding us.
” I turn and tip my head back against the mattress so I can see her face in the blue light.
“I’ll walk away. From Gemini, from the corporation, from the bullshit crown I never asked for.
Let’s disappear. South of somewhere. I’ll cook burned toast and build terrible furniture and—” I huff a breath.
“I’ll make it safe, I swear it. I’ll protect you. ”
Her mouth softens in a way that is worse than a knife. She looks like eighteen and summer and the first time I ever told a lie I thought was love. “You really mean it?”
“I do.”
She strokes once more, then withdraws her hand like she’s cauterizing a wound. “I can’t.”
The words land without drama. No thunder, no cracked plates. Just gravity.
“I can’t just walk away from everything,” she adds, gazing past me to something only she can see. “Siobhan. Donal. Tiernan. My father. And you—” She swallows. “You have family too. A life that doesn’t just let go because you ask it nicely.”
I nod because I’m on the edge of begging. And if I give myself a minute to say all the things I want to say, it’ll never stop. Dio, I would give up everything for her. In a heartbeat.
Her eyes shine in the city glow. “If there’s a world where we get to be small and boring, I want it.” Her voice breaks, then recomposes. “But not yet.”
Not yet. It’s not a no that closes a door. Instead, those two words leave it unlocked for a future that might one day exist.
“Then I’ll get you there,” I whisper into the darkness. “Even if I don’t get to go with you.”
She flinches like that hurt. “Don’t say that.”
“Then sleep,” I try instead. “I’ll keep watch.”
She lays back, a long breath leaving her body like a truce. “You always do.”
I face the door again, the floor solid under me and dawn still far away. Outside, the rain softens to a thread. Inside, her breathing evens, and I let the ghosts sit beside me without speaking.
I don’t sleep. But for the first time since Cat dropped back into my life, I’m not drowning.
Dawn shows up gray and half-hearted over London.
The house is still except for the guards shifting their weight in the sitting room and the incessant rain testing the gutters.
I haven’t slept. I don’t think I remember how.
When the sky starts to lighten, I push myself off the floor and touch her shoulder.
“Time to go, Kitty Cat.”
Her eyes open clean, no flinch, like she learned a century ago not to startle. She pushes up on her elbows and winces only a little where I stitched her. “What—”
“We should go,” I repeat. “The earlier the better. Before anyone tracks us to Siobhan—”
She reaches for her phone on the nightstand. It jitters alive with a tantrum of notifications.
Donal: Answer me, Cáit.
Donal: You think you’re clever. Tiernan’s seen the warehouse.
Donal: He’s raging. Men are dead. All of them. He blames you.
Donal: There’s a number on your head now. Every hungry idiot from Belfast to Bethnal Green will take a shot.
Donal: Come in now. I can still… talk him down.
Donal: If you don’t, this turns into a war no one survives.
Donal: Cáit, please. Don’t make me hunt you.
“Shite.” Her jaw sets. She reads the messages twice. The second time is slower, like she’s tasting the urgency. She doesn’t answer. Instead, she just drops the phone face down and rubs her sternum once, over the place she guards from me.
I should tell her to block him, but I don’t. There are some lines you don’t cut even when they’re strangling you.
“We’re out of options,” I mutter. “So we have to make a new plan.”
She looks up. “How?”
I hate how simple the answer is. I hate that it was always going to be this. “I die.”
Her eyes flare and then go flat. “No.”
“Yes.” I crouch to her height, forearms on my knees, hands empty. “The photo bought us hours. We turn hours into days. I can have Leo call it in to the Geminis and make it official.”
Her eyes widen in horror and guilt lances through my chest as I imagine the look on my mother’s face, then Papá, and my cousins.
I continue on all the same. “We provide a death certificate and a closed casket no one can open back in Manhattan. Tiernan will take the victory lap he thinks he earned. Every Rossi and Valentino eye will turn to the Quinlans for blood. Ale will assume they were behind the shooting in Manhattan. It’s perfect really.
And it’ll buy you—” I nod at the phone. “—enough time to disappear.”
“I won’t let you do that.” Her reply is quick and sharp, and I love her for making it a command.
“You don’t get a vote. I owe you more than I can pay.” That summer. Four years of ghosts. A name written under a flower I can’t stop seeing when I close my eyes. “Consider it a down payment.”
She shakes her head. “Your family—”
“My family will live.” The words taste like glass.
“Ale will rage, then he’ll aim it at the Quinlans and away from you.
Alessia will threaten to resurrect me just to murder me herself.
Serena and Bella will cry. And I’ll deserve all of it.
” I swallow once, and it scrapes. “But Ale’s about to be a father.
He’ll have to play it smart. He’ll burn down Tiernan’s empire and make him bleed from afar.
It’ll keep Rory safe. It keeps your sister safe. ”
Her mouth trembles, then steels. “You hate this. Your family—”
“I hate everything about it,” I admit. “But I hate the alternative more.”
She stares at me for a long beat that stretches the room. “And after?”
“After I personally put Tiernan six feet under and pull that contract from over your head?” I exhale. “I’ll tell Ale the truth, I’ll tell all of them. Then I’ll take every punch he throws and stand there and take the rest.”
Silence hums. In the hall, someone clears his throat. Life keeps going like it didn’t just hear a man choose to disappear himself.
She reaches, finally, and takes my wrist the way she did last night, pulse to pulse. “You don’t owe me your life,” she whispers.
“I already gave it to you a long time ago. All I’m doing now is filing the paperwork.”
It earns me the hint of a smile, wrecked and beautiful. “You’re an idiot.”
“World-class,” I agree. I stand and offer her a hand up. She takes it, and for two seconds we hold on like the floor is unreliable. Then I step into the hall and jerk my chin at Leo. “We have to talk.”
His face folds at once. We’ve discussed it as a contingency plan and he understands too quickly. That’s his job and his curse. “You want me to call Ale?”
I nod. My voice comes out rough. “Tell him, no, tell them all, I love them. Tell Serena to take his phone before he starts a war in the group chat. Tell Bella… just tell Bella I’m sorry.” A beat. “Make it big and showy so everyone knows it’s real.”
Leo’s jaw works. “A wake?”
“Private. Closed casket.” I look back at the room where Cat is lacing her boots like they’re armor. “And get word to the right ears in Belfast that Tiernan’s victory party starts now.”
He touches his earpiece, already moving. “Copy.”
Cat appears in the doorway, hair pulled back, and jacket zipped over the fresh bandage. She looks like she didn’t bleed last night and like she’d do it again if it gets her sister one more quiet morning like this one.
“I don’t like this,” she says again. “You don’t have to—”
“It’s the only way,” I cut in.
She flinches. “You’re sure.”
“Of course not,” I reply, and that’s the truth. “But we don’t get sure today.”
Saoirse materializes with a thermos and a healthy dose of disapproval. “You look like bad decisions in nice shoes.” She shoves the thermos into my chest. “Here’s some tea for the road. Don’t die and most importantly don’t get her killed.”
“I’m already dead.” I grin, and even I hate how easy it comes. “And I’d never let anything happen to Cat.” She softens at the edges and steps aside.
By the time we reach the sitting room, the perimeter is set and the car is idling out front. Leo stands by the window with the phone to his ear and his face blanked to professional. I know that look. He’s listening to Ale break.
I turn away before I hear the sound and change my mind.
Cat reappears, a single tear staining her cheek.
“You said goodbye to Siobhan?”
“She’s still asleep.” She flicks away the lone droplet and draws in a breath. “I didn’t want to wake her. It’s better this way.”
“You’ll see her again soon.”
She nods, but it’s half-hearted, as if she doesn’t believe that any of this will end well. But it has to.
On the front stoop, the London morning halts between a drizzle. I put a possessive hand on Cat’s lower back to steer us through a world that feels like chaos. At the curb, I pause. “Promise me that if this works, you’ll leave this life behind you.”
Her eyes drop between us.
“Unless you like being this badass assassin, of course.”
A rueful laugh tumbles out as her gaze lifts to meet mine. “I don’t know what I want anymore, Matteo.” Her hand finds the rough stubble on my cheek, and she drags her thumb across it. “What about you?”
“I’ve got a date with a shovel and an Irish bastard who thinks he can threaten what’s mine.”
“Big words, Rossi.” Still, she’s smiling. She studies my face like she’s trying to memorize it against her will. “You have Tiernan’s location?”
I nod. “One of our Irish guys has eyes on him. We’ll make our way to Belfast and give Ale a day to mobilize the Gemini crew abroad. As soon as the merda hits the fan, I’ll make my move.”
“You? Not us?”
“It’s gotta be me, Kitty Cat.”
It hurts her. It hurts me worse. But she doesn’t let me see more than a sliver.
“Matteo,” she whispers.
“What?”
“Don’t be a hero.”
“Never.” I lie and lean in. I don’t kiss her, but Dio, I want to. So, I settle for the place just above her ear, a breath that isn’t quite a touch. I force a grin that fools nobody and step back. “Time to go.”
We slide into the backseat of the car. Leo ends the call, folds his body into the driver’s seat and meets my eyes in the rearview. His voice is a flat line. “It’s done.”
“Good.” I stare out at a city that doesn’t know I no longer exist.
The engine turns and London starts moving. Somewhere in Manhattan, my family thinks the world just ended. Somewhere in this car, it might have.
I reach for Cat’s hand on the seat between us but falter at the last minute, placing it next to hers so our pinkies barely touch. Her hand moves to cover mine, and I hold my breath.