Page 34 of My Dark Ever After

To my surprise, he grinned, and there was something genuinely warm in his expression that gave me pause. “True. I’m sorry for scaring you. I had hoped to take you quickly and quietly.”

“Where? And why?”

“The Venetian wants you,” he admitted. “That’s all I can say at the moment. But please, you must come with me.”

“No.” I had nothing to defend myself with, but I bent my knees and rolled slightly to my toes, grateful I had decided to wear practical flat sandals because of the Romano children. “I’m not going anywhere.”

“I have something,” he said as I eyed the distance to the stairs. He kept one hand in the air as the other reached for his pocket, which was coincidently next to his holstered gun. “I was told to show you this.”

My breath arrested when he pulled a shiny gold chain from his pocket, unraveling it until the pendant swung into sight. It was a gold cross, something that adorned the necks of countless men and women in this country.

Only I knew who had worn that necklace.

The cross was the size of my palm, large but thin and made of delicately twisted filaments of metal, with a diamond the size of my pinky finger pressed into the apex.

“That was my sister’s,” I breathed, stepping forward as if by magnetic force.

“It was,” he agreed.

Before he could say more, the sound of footsteps echoed through the stairwell. We shared a look, just for a split second, but it conveyed his distress that we had been found and my own that this stranger couldn’t finish telling me why the hell he had Gemma’s necklace.

The next second, he was dropping the necklace back into his pocket and gripping his gun, training it at the mouth of the stairs. A shape appeared, rounding the curve, and he shot at it.

The sound of Ludo cursing in Italian reached my ears, and I knew if I did nothing, this stranger was going to hurt him. There was no way Ludo wouldn’t find a way to get me. I might not have trusted Raffa’s goodness, but I knew he wouldn’t let me be taken and that those orders meant something to the men in his inner sanctum. Not just because they were orders from their capo, but because I truly believed I meant something to them too.

Just as they meant something to me.

Raffa wasn’t the only person I’d missed in Italy.

There was no way for Ludo to get to me except by storming up the stairs onto the small landing, exposing himself to the gunman’s bullets.

But he seemed to have forgotten about me for the moment.

My mind worked so fast it ran into the idea headlong, making me wince.

Ludo fired a round of shots that didn’t connect and then was forced to duck around the curve as the man returned fire.

I sucked in a deep breath as I tried to gather every ounce of courage I possessed and transform it into kinetic energy.

When the man ceased firing to move slowly toward the staircase with his gun raised, I took my opportunity.

The landing was small enough that it only took me a single leaping bound to ram myself into the unknown gunman with the full weight of my charging 110 pounds. The force made him stagger sideways, his head hitting the bulbous iron bell with a dull knell that vibrated faintly through the tower. I almost winced in sympathy at the contact, but he was already reaching for me, probably trying to use me as a human shield against Ludo, who was charging up the stairs.

I evaded his reaching arm, but he raised his gun with the other and fired off a shot. It was poorly aimed, but that didn’t matter with Ludo racing up to the stairs toward us, caught between the narrow walls. The sound of Ludo’s pained grunt drew my attention momentarily away from our assailant, and I watched my friend fall to one knee at the top of the stairs, hand pressed to his side.

Before I’d come to Italy for the first time, I had never known violence. It had been as abstract as a staged fight scene on the television screen or a chapter in a spy thriller, something intangible enough that I had never had to think about how it would apply to me.

Did I have the capacity to be violent?

I would have laughed and said, unequivocally, even righteously, absolutely not.

I’d never even killed a spider.

Yet there I was, standing at the top of an ancient bell tower with shots ringing out around me, a wounded friend at my back and a strange shooter before me, and the only thing I could think about was protecting Ludo, protecting myself, at all costs.

So as the gunman righted himself against the wall and took a step forward with his weapon trained on Ludo, the small American girl completely forgotten, I rushed him again.

Throwing all my weight low into the side of his exposed torso, I pushed the stranger up against the half wall in the open archway, and then, when he tried to swing the gun my way, I planted both hands on his chest and shoved with all my might.