Then I said, “The fact that you think that sentence helps your argument is honestly remarkable.”
Something in his face snapped. He moved toward me fast enough that I barely had time to tense.
He never reached me.
Matteo appeared lazily from the mouth of the alley and struck him once, so hard that Adam hit the ground before my brain fully caught up.
I stared.
Matteo adjusted his gloves as if knocking men unconscious between Christmas displays and trash bins was a normal Tuesday hobby.
Then he looked down at Adam, who was groaning faintly at his feet, and sighed.
“Can I have him?” he asked, glancing up at me. “I promised Petrolino not to touch him unless you agreed. Please. I haven’t played in a while.”
I looked at Adam. Then at Matteo. Then back at Adam.
“He’s no concern of mine,” I said. “Do what you want.”
Matteo’s smile deepened, slow and genuinely delighted.
“Bloodthirsty,” he murmured. “You are definitely more fitting than I first thought.”
“That’s not what this is.”
“No?” He tilted his head, still pleased. “A shame. I was beginning to enjoy the idea.”
Adam made a weak, miserable sound in the slush. Matteo glanced down at him in boredom.
“You see?” he said mildly. “Even unconscious he’s irritating.”
I should probably have been more alarmed. Instead I looked at Adam lying there in the half-frozen filth and thought, with a clarity that felt peaceful, that whatever happened to him next did not belong to me.
Matteo seemed to read that too.
“You’ve accepted his fate.”
I shrugged, then narrowed my eyes. “I do, but…wait. Were you following me?”
He placed a hand against his chest with elegant offense. “Consider me your fairy godmother.”
I stared at him. “A fairy godmother who wants to kill a man for fun?”
“Please,” he said. “Don’t insult me. I’m not going to kill him for fun.” He looked down at Adam with renewed consideration. “I’m going to torture him for fun, then kill him.”
Once again I looked at Adam sprawled in the slush and waited for guilt to show up. Or horror. For some reflexive need to intervene, to be the better person, to insist that no one deserved whatever Matteo Genovese was casually promising.
Nothing came.
“Fine,” I said. “Merry Christmas.”
Matteo’s smile broadened, slow and almost affectionate. “I will. And for all it’s worth, I think you’ll make a magnificent mafia queen.”
I snorted, shook my head, and walked away, leaving him there to do whatever he had planned.
The strange thing was that as I kept going, snow catching in my hair and boots crunching over the frozen pavement, guilt never arrived. Adam’s choices had led him here. His cruelty, his entitlement, his certainty that I would always remain someone he could frighten, use and then shame for objecting to it, had finally brought him to a world more ruthless than he was.
And maybe that should have unsettled me, but all I felt was a slow, quiet awareness that something in me had changed too completely now to ever fit back inside the woman I used to be. I didn’t know whether that coldness had always lived deep in my nature, waiting for the right pressure to crack it open, or whether this was simply what remained after pain, love, fear, and truth had burned away everything weaker. Maybe it didn’t matter.