Page 33 of Last Breath

‘I’m not ...’ He didn’t have a response. Max was right. Nella was an adult and had made it quite clear for about fifteen years that she didn’t need or want his protection.

Max sighed. ‘I won’t text her. But I won’t lie to her.’

‘Scared you’ll be banished from the Circle of Challenge Survivors?’ Jett asked as he pushed the door half open.

The empty Magnum box just missed him as he ducked out into the night.

‘Can you feel that?’ Max hissed at Jett.

He was staring at the Virgin Mary, holding her hands over her bright red heart that was coated in gold and hanging out of her chest.

‘What?’ Jett said, ripping his gaze away from the sculpture.

‘The heat.’

‘Heat?’ he asked, confused, as the church choir stood in unison.

‘Mmm. From the flames I’m about to burst into.’

Thankfully the choir’s splintering octaves drowned out most of Jett’s snort. Incense, candle wax and the expensive perfume of Bindi Bindi’s most devout believers coursed up his nose as the congregation kneeled at the end of their pews before ambling down the aisle after the priest’s final blessing.

Max and Jett stayed under the protection of fibreglass Mary as they tracked the La Marca’s fixer. Raphael was talking to the priest, bowing his head and opening his hands, laden with thick silver rings, up to the sky as though trying to bring Jesus in on the conversation too. When he finally slipped back into the crowd, Jett and Max followed him back to his pew, empty except for a blonde woman with her hair pulled back in a tight knot.

‘Shit, that’s ...’

It was too late – Raphael had already seen them.

‘Atoning for your sins?’ Jett whispered as he and Max slid into the pew behind them.

Ariana La Marca whipped around; her blue eyes rimmed in red. She took the white handkerchief, embroidered with red roses, that Raphael offered and dabbed at them quickly.

Jett wasn’t sure how he felt about Matteo’s only daughter – Forrest Valentine’s future wife. By virtue of her birth, he should hate her, because he worked for the Barbaranis. Because her family had tried to hurt his. Because her fiancé was a murderer.

But Ariana had been captured in the cellar with them six months ago. She was an unexpected witness that the people who’d imprisoned the Barbarani siblings hadn’t anticipated and had been seconds away from her own death when Max and Grey saved her life. She was the only La Marca who’d cried at Giovanni’s funeral.

But how could she be so blind to the fact that her fiancé had murdered a girl in cold blood? Or worse, did she know?

Raphael half turned to face them, his onyx eyes narrowed. He looked the same as he always did – black goatee trimmed in sharp lines along his pointed jaw, every hair styled and combed into a modern fade so the nape of his neck was basically shaved. His silk shirt was the colour of dried blood and his ringed hand was lazily drawing circles on the wooden pew in front of him. ‘You know, it’s incredibly tedious to keep up this charade that I am your enemy, Mr Randall.’ His eyes pulled towards Max, whom he greeted with a wink. ‘You do recall, don’t you, Mr Randall, that I saved your life?’

‘Decidingnotto pull the trigger on the gun you had pointed at my head isn’t exactly the same thing as saving my life,’ Jett said, leaning against the pew.

‘I think you’ll find,’ Raphael drawled, ‘in the world of the La Marcas and the Barbaranis, it is exactly the same.’

Well, that’s not going to be my world for too much longer.

‘Perfected those fake tears, haven’t you?’ Jett asked, no longer sitting on the fence about whether or not he should treat La Marca’s daughter with a modicum of reverence. Raphael’s comment had pushed him right off onto the side ofburn her and her family to the fucking ground.

Max gave him a warning kick under the pew. He didn’t care.

Raphael’s hand stiffened against Ariana’s shoulder. ‘Leave. Now.’ Jett didn’t miss the small shift the woman made to move away. ‘You have no business here.’

‘Jesus loves everyone, even ussinners,’ Max said, but she was still glaring at Jett.

Who still didn’t care.

‘Raphael,’ Ariana said. ‘Go. It’s fine.’

Jett assumed he’d heard wrong, and so did Raphael, it seemed. ‘Ari—’