Page 140 of My Dark Ever After

I just had to hope the others—Gemma!—had too.

“For love, a fawn can become a huntress,” I told Tonio before I shoved the rolling desk chair back hard into his legs and dropped beneath the shelter of the desk.

A moment later, a violent crack pierced the air, followed by the shattering of glass and a heavy thwack. I spun around to witness Tonio slipping down the wall with a slack, open mouth, a bullet drilled through the center of his brow, his brain blasted across the red walls behind him.

Glass tinkled as more fell, and then the crunch of boots on the debris-strewn floor.

Raffa had climbed through the window, stalking toward us with his huge gun trained on Tonio.

Pop. Pop. Pop.

I watched as he drilled three more rounds into Tonio’s already-dead body, the corpse jumping from the impact.

Blood sprayed my front from my close proximity.

If Raffa had miscalculated the shot by even two inches, I would have been dead instead of his uncle.

But then again, we both could have died today, and the thought of that, of the life-ending anguish I’d felt believing he was dead, rocked through me like an earthquake.

“Raffa,” I said, standing tall to face him.

The predatory expression that had turned his face to marble wavered, as if the sound of his name in my mouth called him back from a berserker rage. A moment later, his gaze turned from Tonio to me, and the last of that hardness shattered into unfiltered relief.

“Vera,” he breathed like a dying man’s last wish.

And then we were crashing into each other despite his injuries, my hands fisting in his hair, his gripping my ass to leverage me up into his arms, our mouths connected like a watertight seal for our plunderingtongues. We kissed so desperately I could not breathe and didn’t care to ever again so long as I could stay safe in his embrace for the rest of my life.

“Meus Rex Infernus,” I said against his mouth. “Come to save me.”

Because he was no one’s Prince Charming, but he was my King Below. And no matter the enemy at the gates, I knew in my bones we would find a way to conquer them and live the rest of our lives in our kind of dark ever after.

“My huntress,” he whispered as he kissed my lids, my nose, the point of my chin, anointing me in his love. “You are so fucking brave. I am so sorry.”

“Don’t be sorry,” I insisted, holding him away from me by tightening my fingers in his hair. “This wasn’t your fault. It was Tonio and ...”

I hesitated.

Because it was also Leo’s fault, even if he had been the reluctant villain to Raffa’s reluctant mafioso.

Which reminded me . . .

“Gemma,” I gasped, almost choking on the hope ballooning inside me. “Is she ...?”

Raffa smoothed a hand down the back of my hair. “She is.”

He turned so that I could face the room again and notice what had taken place in the few moments we had taken to reunite and reaffirm we were alive.

Renzo knelt at Martina’s side, his hands wet with her blood as he stanched her wounds. She loosely held on to his shirt, lids fluttering as she struggled to breathe, but she was alive.

And beyond that, Leo was on his knees holding on to a figure in a dirty gray dress, with blond hair I recognized even under the grime of soot and ash.

“Gemma,” I mouthed because the air had been ripped from my lungs. I tried again after sucking in more oxygen, which burned going down. “Gemma.”

Leo’s hands spasmed on her back before reluctantly loosening so that she could pull away and twist to look at me.

“Dio mio,” Dad said from beside the left wall, his hand at his neck as if his shock and joy were strangling him. “Gemstone.”

His nickname for her all our lives.