Page 130 of My Dark Ever After

She quirked a dark eyebrow and pulled out a pistol.

I nodded, then directed Carmine, Renzo, and my othersoldatito surround the house and close in.

As I approached the front door through the vines, I noticed a man patrolling outside, his dark clothes blending in with the shadows. I lifted my gun and popped off two quick shots, the silencer muffling the sound of each bullet. I crept forward and bent to check his pulse to ensure he was dead, then approached the front door, pausing beside it to listen for any noises inside the house. There was a low murmur of voices, but not many.

I peeked through the gap in the curtains of the front window and glimpsed three men around a dining room table, playing cards. They wore gun holsters at their sides and radios hooked over their ears.

What could they possibly be there to protect?

“Andiamo,” I whispered into my own comm, and then shot out the mechanism on the front door before kicking it in.

The men were scrambling when I went inside, cards spiraling through the air as they fumbled to pull out their weapons.

Pop. Pop.

More shots fired from the back of the house.

I squeezed off three more myself, hitting the closest man in the neck and chest, taking him down for the count. The other two dove behind the table, overturning it to hide behind the marble top.

Renzo appeared at the other end of the kitchen, moving toward me quietly.

I let my foot crack over a splinter of wood so they would be focused on my approach. One of them lifted his head to fire at me.

I ducked just as Renzo took aim at that raised head and splattered it across the back wall with a bullet.

On another day, when I did not feel emotionally flayed alive, Renzo and I might have competed for who could get the last man standing.

The man surprised me by shooting the mirror to my left, distracting me for long enough to jump over the table and hurl himself at me. We fell to the floor, my gun skittering from my hold. I used his leftover momentum to flip him onto his back, sliding a knife from its sheath at his waist as I evaded a left hook and then reared up to slash the blade across his neck. He ducked my swing, snapping a big hand up to grip my neck in a vise that had me seeing stars. But I still had the blade in my hand, so I switched grips and slid the sharp edge from the end of his forearm to his wrist on the arm grasping my throat.

Warm blood sluiced over us both as if poured from a basin.

A moment later, his hand dropped dully to the carpet, and he focused on breathing through the wet gurgle of blood filling his throat.

I climbed off him and retrieved my gun to find Carmine had joined Renzo.

“All clear up here. No sign of Leo,” he told me. “But the basement is locked tight and coded with a high-tech alarm. Ludo’s working on it now.”

“What the hell could they have been hiding here?” I questioned. “And why the hell go to so much trouble? I cannot image Leohidingbehind a locked door.”

I rounded the corner and moved through the handful of men waiting for Ludo to hack into the alarm panel.

“It’s top tier,” he grunted, two sharp tools in his mouth and another in his hands as he parted various wires behind the panel. “Digital access wasn’t cutting it.”

“Do you know which wire to cut?” Carm asked doubtfully.

“I should.”

“Wow, that instills confidence,” Carmine muttered.

I ignored their banter to go down the hallway, checking each door until I found what I was looking for in the back of a closet. A moment later, the lights flickered and went dead.

Thankfully the sun was cresting over the hills, spilling pale, honeyed light through the windows so we could see some of what we were doing.

“What did you do?” Carm asked as I returned.

“I cut the power,” I muttered, grabbing the bolt cutters from my backpack to snip the lock on the door to the basement.

When the door still would not budge, I told everyone to stand back and fired at the opposite side of the panel, aiming for the hinges. After a round of bullets, the wood creaked and split apart.