The Choice

Isabella stood over Luca’s body, her chest heaving. She looked up at Mateo.

He lowered the gun. The adrenaline was fading, and the pain in his ribs was blinding. He slumped against the desk.

Isabella walked toward him slowly. She stopped a foot away, studying his face.

"You..." she whispered. "Who are you?"

She looked at the grease on his face, the cheap uniform. But then she looked at his eyes. She saw the man who had just commanded a room of killers.

"I'm Mateo," he said. His voice cracked slightly. The Mouse was creeping back in.

"You knew things," she said, reaching out to touch his arm. "Things no one could know. You stood tall."

"I... I just wanted to help."

Isabella looked at him with a mixture of confusion and dawning fascination. The pity was gone. In its place was a spark—the same spark he had seen in the eyes of his wife in Universe B.

"You saved me," she said. She took his hand. Her fingers were warm. "Thank you."

The sound of sirens rose from the street below. The police, or the cleanup crew.

Mateo looked past her, toward the hallway. Toward the elevator shaft.

He could feel it. A faint hum.

The broken key was still in the lock downstairs. But he felt a pull. A vibration in the air. The barrier between the worlds was thin tonight.

If he went back down... if he fixed the key... he could go back.

He could go back to the Penthouse where the clothes fit, where the power was real, where the woman looking at him already loved him with every fiber of her being. He could be Don Mateo, safe and strong.

But he looked at Isabella A. She was traumatized, shaking, and looking at him like he was a puzzle she desperately wanted to solve. She needed him. Not the King, but the man who had climbed a forty-story shaft to save her.

"Mateo?" she asked, squeezing his hand. "Where are you going?"

Mateo looked at the service elevator doors in the hallway. The light above them flickered once. Green. Then red. Then dark.

He looked back at Isabella.

"Nowhere," Mateo lied. Or maybe it was the truth.

He squeezed her hand back. The path to the easy life was broken. He was stuck in the cage. But as he looked at the woman who was just beginning to see him, he realized that maybe, just maybe, he could build a kingdom here, too.

"I'm right here," he said.

The elevator hummed in the distance, a ghostly invitation to a life unlived, as Mateo let the doors close on the possibility of elsewhere.