Page 36 of My Dark Ever After

I turned just enough to let the light hit the side of my face, highlighting the vicious grin curling one side of my mouth. “Next time you think to speak about my woman, I will take out your kneecaps, understood?”

Ernesto reached over to clamp his meaty hand around his son’s forearm and answered over his squawk. “Capisco, capo. I apologize for my son. Let me know if I may be of assistance.”

I jerked my chin before the door swung shut behind me and listened to the phone as I raced to the curb and got into the town car Martina had idling out front.

“They’re in Impruneta for the wine festival,” Renzo told Martina as he got into the passenger seat, and we took off with a squeal of tires into the twilight streets.

“Go,” I barked, even as I heard the unknown man say to Guinevere, “The Venetian wants you.”

Porca Madonna, that fucking Venetian.

“It will take us fifty minutes to get there, boss,” Martina told me.

“Break every speed limit.”

“Thatiswith breaking every limit,” she countered.

Gunfire exploded on the other end of the phone line. My hand gripped the phone so tightly the metal edges cut into my flesh, spilling blood across my palm.

“Where the fuck are Ludo and Carmine?” I demanded of Renzo.

“Ludo isn’t answering his phone, but Carmine is on the way. He was watching your sisters across the piazza. He said ETA is three minutes. He left Michele and Philippe to protect your sisters.”

Three minutes with Guinevere alone somewhere with an unidentified shooter.

Fear turned my blood to battery acid, bitter enough on the back of my tongue to make me gag, burning in my veins until I thought I would catch fire from the inside out.

“Why the fuck did they even leave the estate?” I asked.

Renzo winced. “They were with Ludo, Carmine, and a handful of men who kept to the shadows. It seemed extremely unlikely they would find trouble.”

My family calls me Jinx because I’m so unlucky,Guinevere’s sweet voice came back to me as she explained her idiosyncratic ability to find trouble wherever she went.

“Cazzo, I never should have left her,” I snarled, as more gunfire sounded and a female cry exploded over the airways.

I’d never believed in God, even though I was born and raised a good Catholic Italian. It did not make any logical sense to me to appeal to an entity we had no science to back, no actual data on.

But I sat there in the car as the countryside blurred around us, and I begged whatever God might prevail that he would keep Guinevere safe from harm.

And then when that did not seem like enough, both because I doubted his existence and because I doubted even more that I deserved to be heard by him, I appealed to the devil, offering him my cold soul in eternal damnation in exchange for Guinevere escaping this alive.

My heart stopped when the gunfire ceased abruptly and silence followed.

“Guinevere!” I bellowed, hoping she would hear me—could still hear me and wasn’t dead.

If she lived through this, I would not spend a moment more battling guilt and the inane idea that being away from her was ever a good idea. I would sew myself to her side if I could, pocket her against my chest in the inside of my suit jacket so that I might always feel her against my heart. Insane, overpossessive—I no longer gave a fuck.

Even if she could not accept me as her lover once more, she would live with me as her shadow whether she liked it or not.

No harm would ever come to Guinevere Stone again.

The words rang truer in my thoughts than prayers to God or deals with the devil.

I was the only authority that mattered.

Over the line, a gasping, choking sob that was soon muffled. A minute later, a cacophony of clatter and raised voices.

“Someone answer this goddamn phone!” I shouted.