Page 136 of My Dark Ever After

Why would he and Leo decide to cut off the hand that fed them and go after the whole enterprise for themselves?

Why would Tonio go to such lengths—getting Leo to shoot him!—to make us believe he was free of guilt? What did he need before he got rid of the Romano family entirely?

“Where is Tonio?” I whispered.

Martina straightened out of her slump at my tone. “He was taken to the hospital for his injuries. Why?”

“Are there anysoldatiwith him?”

“Just his usual bodyguards, Ernesto and Michele.”

I blinked slowly as the name Michele swam up from the depths of my memories.

“Michele and Philippe were brothers, right?”

“No, just friends. They grew up in the same village, and Tonio practically fostered them. Michele’s father was a drunk, and Philippe had to take care of his single mother. She was very sickly. Aldo gave them work.”

Not Aldo, I corrected mentally, but Tonio. The grumpy but sweet older man who was known for taking in strays like Leo. Only, he had been doing it not out of the goodness of his own heart but out of greed, in order to build his own internal army to take control of the outfit from Aldo—or Raffa—one day.

Had he been working against the family for that long?

Was his problem with the Romanos about the sins of the father and not the son?

“It was Tonio,” I said. “Tonio was the one pulling all the strings. Leo might have helped him, but they did it together.”

“You’re saying Tonio shot himself and stayed in the burning olive grove by choice?” Martina asked, but she wasn’t skeptical, just working it out aloud.

“It would be clever,” Dad said darkly.

Martina was already on her phone, fingers flying as she shot off texts.

“Leo could have been the one to shoot him,” I allowed. “But it was a setup to take suspicion off him and put it firmly onto Leo, who we already suspected. This way Tonio could stay close.”

“But why not just kill Raffa and be done with it? I’m sure being so close to the family, to Raffa, he would have had the opportunity,” Dad noted.

“Not really,” Martina said. “Raffa is rarely truly alone. Either Renzo, Carm, Ludo, or me is always with him or in the vicinity. If he’d killed Raffa outright, we would have taken him down.”

“Exactly.” Adrenaline transformed my blood to battery acid. “Whereas if the Grecos or Pietras were the ones to kill Raffa, Tonio could step in like the hero to take over and then wipe out his accomplices in the name of revenge.”

“Bravo, Guinevere,” someone said from the doorway.

I looked up just in time to see Tonio, dressed impeccably in a three-piece suit, looking every inch the strong, deadly mafioso even with his recent gunshot wound, lift his gun and fire.

The scream that tore from my smoke-ravished throat tasted like blood.

Because the bullet had been meant not for me but for Martina, who didn’t even have time to fully turn toward the threat before the shot punctured through the back of her chair straight into her torso. I watched as her eyes went wide and breath punched out of her lungs. Clasping a hand over the blood bubbling up behind her shirt, she triedto stand up only for her legs to give out, falling back into the chair with a shuddering moan.

“Stay there, Pietra scum,” Tonio coolly ordered my father, who had stood to go to Martina. “Do not even blink, or I will shoot you too.”

Dad opened his palms innocently and remained where he stood.

“On the other hand,” Tonio mused, cocking his head to consider my dad. “I do not have any need of you.”

“Wait,” I demanded, stepping in front of Dad. “If you need me, you need him. I won’t do anything for you if you kill my father.”

Tonio sighed as if I were a particularly petulant child. “You are hardly in a position to make demands.”

“Raffa will eviscerate you for this,” I said, hoping that dragging him into conversation might give some of thesoldation the property the opportunity to come looking for us, especially if Martina had had time to text Raffa or any of the others about our revelations.