Page 70 of My Dark Ever After

She screamed, hitting her head against the table as she bent down over her ruined leg.

The room erupted into activity, Renzo throwing his huge body over the table to slam Dren against the floor, Dren’s gun flying out of his fist to clang against the wall. Martina was on the man who had stepped forward with the tablet, someone twice her size she latched on to like a spider monkey, strong thighs clamping his arms to his sides while she slid a small stiletto blade into his neck. Arterial blood splashed vibrantly across her white dress shirt and face, but she held on until he bled out. It only took seconds. Carmine grappled with the last man, a short, burly, hairy man who had mysoldatoby the throat until Carm elbowed him in the balls and then knocked him out with a sharp elbow to the temple.

Meanwhile, I stood slowly and rounded the table to Drita’s side. Through her pain, she had managed to find her own weapon, and she swung it wide to take aim at me. I sidestepped her first clumsy attempt, lunging forward before she could try again and seizing her arm, breaking the bone with a clean snap so the gun clattered to the floor.

She cried out, eyes squeezed shut in pain.

“Listen to me carefully,” I told her in my passable Albanian so there would be no misunderstandings. “I will not kill you, because you did not know, perhaps, that this woman is not just any other woman to me. She isthewoman. The one I breathe for. If I find she has been killed because of your pathetic power play, I will hunt you down and skin you alive before I hang you upside down by the ceiling to bleed to death drop by slow drop. You will beg me to end your agony, and I will not, because you will have instigated mine the second Guinevere died. If she is, by some fucking miracle, alive when I find her, I will consideryou in my debt, Drita. I think an increase to a forty percent cut might ease the sting for a while. What do you say?”

She hissed at me as I clasped her broken arm a little too tightly.

“I did not hear you,” I said pleasantly.

“Yes,” she snapped, eyes blazing like sunlight on ice. “Fuck you, Romano. Yes, fine.”

“Where are they taking her?”

She glowered at me, but Renzo had the good grace to drag Dren’s knocked-out carcass in front of us, his gun pressed to Dren’s temple.

“Well?” I asked.

Her breath shuddered out of her. “They were meant to take her from the train. Someone told them you would be on the eight o’clock.”

There were exactly ten people who knew which train we were taking back home.

My mother and my sisters Stacci and Carlotta.

Renzo, Carmine, Martina, Leo, and myself.

Guinevere.

And Philippe.

There was a chance any of them could have told someone else, but it was marginal. The most obvious answers were frequently the correct ones.

Which meant that Philippe was our turncoat.

“Where are they taking her?” I demanded, twisting Drita’s arm slightly like the valve release on some of the anger steaming up my throat.

“Fuck!” she screamed. “I do not know. It didn’t matter to me.”

“Kill them,” I said to the brothers.

Carmine locked eyes with Drita as he lifted the heavy gangster onto the table with his head hanging over the edge. Only then did he leverage his weight against the man’s head in a savage blow that resulted in a crackling crunch as his neck broke.

Less dramatic than his brother, Renzo immediately drilled a bullet into Dren’s head.

Drita shouted through her tears, but I ignored what she was saying to lean in very close, my mouth a whisper against her cheek.

“They call me the Gentleman not because I believe in mercy, Drita,” I explained, “but because I always follow through on my word. If you ever keep important information from me again, I will kill you. If you ever even so much as speak Guinevere’s name, I will cut out your tongue and asphyxiate you with it. And if you ever think to turn on me, I will hunt down and destroy everyone in your clan, just like I have with the Grecos. Is that understood?”

Her mouth trembled as she pressed it into a tight line and nodded.

“Molto bene,” I said, dropping her arm to the table so she cried out again. “Andiamo. We have to find my huntress.”

And I had to hope that was what she would be if they had her.

Notla mia cerbiatta, but thecacciatriceI had seen peeking through those doe eyes.