Page 89 of My Dark Ever After

It was ironic that this kind of man was exactly whom Dad and Raffa had warned me against, thinking themselves inherently monstrous too.

I could say with a clear heart that they were not.

And neither was I.

But that did not mean I wouldn’t do something monstrous when my loved ones were threatened. Or when I was.

So I fixed a trembling pout to my mouth, ran to Gaetano, and threw my arms around his neck to sniff into his shoulder.

“I’m so sorry,” I gasped. “I was afraid and confused, but I just want it all to go away. Please, make it all go away.”

Gaetano was stiff in my embrace for a moment before the hand holding his cane came up to thump me gently on the back.

“Hush now. Do not worry. Yournonnowill take care of it.”

I lifted my head from his suit jacket just enough to peer around his arm at thesoldatowho had come inside with him. He stood close, a personal bodyguard.

Close enough that if I shoved Gaetano just a little bit as I nuzzled closer for comfort, I could snag the gun dangling from his right hand ...

Gaetano stumbled back a step as I pushed forward, the guard reaching to steady him with his left hand. He was distracted by the movement, lulled into a false sense of security behind the locked door of the panic room with only the Pietra family inside.

So it was almost too easy to grab the gun and wrench it to the side, twisting his wrist to such an extreme angle he barked out a curse. Gaetano was between us, so it was impossible for him to get a good grip on me as I took the gun for myself.

Shuffling so that my back was to the side wall, I leveled the gun at Gaetano, then swept it across the room.

Ginevra sat with Giulia and her sons on the love seat, staring at me with more curiosity than fear.

Gaetano’s gaze was one of indignant fury.

“You will not shoot us,” he proclaimed. “This is your first time holding a gun, if I had to bet.”

It wasn’t.

I’d held one at the Beaumont Building what felt like years ago but was only weeks prior in Michigan, when those thugs had tried to take me away.

But he was right in that I had never fired one before.

I raised a brow at my grandfather and smiled, all teeth and peeled-back lips. “I know enough to hit a target four feet from me.”

Gaetano shifted quickly for a man of his age, snapping his cane up with one hand to knock it against my wrist. The impact smarted, the weapon swerving to the right.

To thesoldato, who used Gaetano’s distraction to lunge for me.

Without a second’s hesitation, I pulled the trigger.

The bullet caught him in the upper shoulder and hardly slowed him down.

So I fired again, his torso only a foot from mine. The kickback from the gun bit into my hand, but I hardly felt it through the adrenaline.

This time, the bullet blasted through his chest cavity, the force so much greater because it was at point-blank range.

When he hit me, it was in a stumble, his breath a thin thread of air whistling through his throat. I shoved him off me, and his body fell to the side against the wall, alive but not for long.

Gaetano stared at me as if he had never seen me before.

Which was funny, in a way, because I had never felt more myself.

There was a loud bang at the door, not as if someone knocked but as if a body was crushed against it. Gaetano pulled his own silver handgun out of its shoulder holster and shuffled back away from the door.