Page 42 of The Killer Cupcake (Poison Cherry #3)
The door closed soft as a coffin lid, leaving Carmelo drowning in the wreckage of his choices.
Janey peeled herself away from the door and hurried out of the poker room just as the argument between Carmine and Carmelo ended. She'd caught every word through the thin wood—every confession, every desperate plea, every damning detail.
The hot blood spreading through her veins now wasn't anger. Anger was too small, too simple for what moved inside her. This was older, darker—the kind of feeling that made men bleed for their sins against women. And keep bleeding until they were dead.
Matteo watched Janey rush out of the poker room and head straight for the stairs to take her upstairs, where the rooms were. He leaned against the bar, observing as Carmine emerged moments later with his cane, walking slowly in the same direction with a deadly purpose.
His brows lowered with concern when his brother was the last to appear. He pushed off from the bar. Carmelo wiped away tears, his face and neck were both red as a beet. He headed for the hotel's front door. Matteo followed.
He found Carmelo outside by a large oak tree, retching violently into the bushes. He ran over as Carmelo pressed both hands flat against the bark and wept openly, his shoulders shaking with grief.
" Che cazzo è successo? " Matteo demanded in Italian. What the fuck happened?
Carmelo was so distraught that he didn't even notice his brother's presence.
"Melo? Che cazzo? " He grabbed Carmelo's arm to bring him out of it. Carmelo swung wildly, missing Matteo's head by centimeters as he stumbled backward, lost in his anguish.
"What is it? What happened in there? Tell me!"
Carmelo shook his head and walked toward the darkness beyond the hotel's lights.
Matteo had been lost before—distraught, on the verge of complete self-destruction—and it was Carmelo and Debbie who had saved his life during those months.
He'd never seen Carmelo reach that low, except once before.
And that was during the long recovery after losing Kathy the first time—the endless months of silence, the obsessive drawing of her face, the hollow emptiness where his brother used to be.
He'd seen that darkness and vowed when he'd made his way out of it that neither his baby brother nor anyone else he loved would ever know that kind of pain again.
He went after Carmelo, but the darkness and the wooded area beyond the hotel had swallowed him completely. He had vanished into the night like a ghost.
And for the rest of those long hours, Matteo searched desperately for him, finding nothing but shadows and the echo of his own voice calling his brother's name.
Quebec, Canada - 1978
Carmelo's eyes snapped open. He shot upright in bed, his heart hammering against his ribs with the savage rhythm of a war drum.
The dream had been so vivid, so ruthless and real.
It felt as if some malevolent force had transported him back through time to witness the exact moment his soul began its descent into hell.
He felt Kathy stir beside him, her warmth a stark contrast to the ice water flowing through his veins.
He looked down at her in the darkness, and tears welled in his eyes like blood from a fresh wound.
She lay on her side, her dark hair now threaded with silver and tucked behind one of the silk scarves she'd taken to sleeping in—a small vanity that broke his heart with its fragile humanity.
Even in sleep, she carried the weight of their shared trauma in the lines around her eyes, the slight furrow between her brows that never quite disappeared anymore.
Carmelo touched her hip with a trembling hand, needing to confirm she was alive, real, still there with him despite everything he'd done.
The warmth of her skin beneath the thin nightgown was like medicine, and only then did he find the ability to breathe again.
He tossed aside the covers with careful precision, desperate not to wake her and face the questions he couldn't answer.
"Melo?" Kathy moaned softly, her hand reached back through the darkness for him like a drowning woman grasping for shore.
"Be right back, amore ," he whispered, his chest constricted with the crushing weight of his own unworthiness. Before she could fully surface from sleep, he turned and fled like the coward he'd always been when it came to causing her pain.
Did she return to his bed out of pity? When he made love to her, was she only tolerating his possessive needs to plan her escape?
He moved through the darkness like something born to it, finding his way by memory and old pain to the one room where he could stop pretending, where he'd spent these past weeks plotting fresh lies for her, then scrambling for ways to claw her heart back—that sick dance they'd been doing for decades now.
Destruction and redemption, over and over, like they were both addicted to the hurt.
Every scar, every scream, every tear that ever rolled down her face—his fault. All of it. Every goddamn drop.
The door opened to his private hell. Neither Kathy nor Nino had ever stepped foot in there.
The walls were covered in his drawings, taped up like evidence at a crime scene.
His mother's face, frozen young and disappointed forever.
Kathy at seventeen, before he'd taught her what betrayal tasted like.
His father's cruel mouth. Men he'd beaten to death—some in the ring after he'd lost her, others later when he'd become the Wolf and his hammer sang its own kind of justice.
All those faces. All those ghosts. Feeding on him.
He shut his eyes and let out a breath that had been trapped for years. Here in the dark, the armor came off. Here he could finally break—could weep like the boy he'd been, could shake with the fear he never showed, could admit what he'd become.
How much was too much? When did he cross the line he couldn't come back from?
What happened when the Battaglias told him to fuck off with his begging?
When Kathy finally wised up and ran—took their daughter and disappeared like she'd tried before?
When his lies unraveled and every enemy he'd made came to collect?
The questions circled, picking at him like buzzards. But slowly, the panic loosened its grip. He dropped onto the stool—hard, unforgiving, built for penance—and grabbed the pencil with hands that wouldn't stop shaking.
Kathy's face looked back at him from the half-finished drawing.
Not the woman sleeping down the hall, but the girl who'd walked into that barn years ago in Butts and told him to his face she had cut him off clean.
The day she'd finally seen what Ricci men really were.
The day she'd looked at him like he was nothing and said it: "I will never forgive you. "
The day he'd died inside, the Wolf was born.
His pencil scratched across paper, chasing something he'd killed—that last moment when he'd been a man she could love, before he'd become the thing she feared.