Page 49 of A Trap So Flawless

“Like hell, you do.” I take the phone back, as if she’s going to use it to book a flight right now. “You’re staying right here. You’re staying with me.”

“But… But my mamma, and-”

“Fuck your mammy,” I hiss. “And fuck your daddy, too.”

He killed my grandda.

And then he had the nerve to fucking die before I could go and kill him. There will be no closure, no vengeance. Nothing for me but this ouroboros of anger and pain, always feeding on itself.

“I’m going,” Valentina says. Her eyes are shiny. But I can see that she’s replacing sorrow with combativeness. “With or without you. I have to be with my mamma. I’ll find a way.”

I grip her wrists and drag her to me. The phone falls, and I wouldn’t give two fucks about that normally, but it lands beside something that draws my eye like metal to a magnet.

Something yellow and gold. Something sparkly.

“You kept it.”

“What?” Valentina gasps, writhing and wriggling in my hold, trying to get free.

“The ring.” I wrench my gaze from the floor to her face. “Why didn’t you tell me you still had it? Why didn’t you tell me that you brought it here?”

She kept it. All this time. She might not have been wearing it…

But she still brought it all the way across the ocean anyway.

Maybe she only kept it to pawn it.

No. I don’t think that’s the case. She’s got all kinds of expensive shit she could have sold instead. And in her haste to get out of the country, when she was packing, she chose this.

“Is this what you were looking for?” I demand, grabbing the ring with one hand and keeping her held fast with the other. “Is this what you were fucking digging for in that bag?”

She doesn’t answer, but I can see in the way that her teary eyes flash that my instinct is correct.

It wasn’t the passport. It wasn’t the cash.

It was this. This was what she wanted.

This ring, with a diamond the precise colour of the lightest parts of her irises, such a perfect match that I literally stopped breathing for a second when I first saw it. It used to be an oval. I had it specially cut like this. Shaped like the tears she’s cried.

The tears that fucking ruin me.

And that’s what we are to each other, after all. Isn’t it? Utter fucking ruin.

My grandda would still be alive if I had never seen her.

If I had never saved her.

So I kiss her, because I can’t think of what the hell else to do. Because if I don’t, I think I’m to lose my mind. I back her up against the car, my mouth working powerfully over hers until she opens to my tongue with a harried gasp. Intoxicating sweetness, my Valentina. Poison so sweet I swallow it down willingly.

Even the pain is sweet. The berry brightness of her nails on my face, scratching. Pushing me away.

“Stop, Darragh!” she shouts. It echoes, coming back to me tenfold. I’m clutching the ring so hard in my fist I think my palm is bleeding. My face definitely is.

“Just stop,” she says, more quietly this time, but just as fiercely. “My papà is dead. My mamma needs me. I can’t do this anymore.”

“Can’t do what?”

“Can’t hide away with you here, like the rest of the world doesn’t exist!”

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