Page 90 of My Dark Ever After

“It will hold,” Ginevra reassured him. “It’s reinforced. No one will get in using force.”

All of us waited with eyes on the door, only the dying man’s gurgling breaths to punctuate the silence.

“Guinevere, get back here,” Ginevra hissed as a mechanical whirr sounded.

“I’m fine here,” I insisted, but one glance behind me showed my aunt standing before Giulia and her sons, fierce and proud like a female warrior staring down the barrel of her gun.

“They must be friendly if they know the code,” Circo whispered. “Right, Mamma?”

The whirr continued until there was a loud beep and the heavy door began to swing open.

Gaetano fired into the narrow gap, once, twice, three times.

“Non sparate,” someone called out from the other side.

Hold fire!

My grandfather froze, his mouth puckering in tart surprise, while behind me Ginevra gasped.

Then again, I did too.

Because I would have known that voice anywhere. It had read to me before bed, soothed me through multiple hospital visits, and bantered with me my entire life.

The door pushed open farther, and John Stone, born Mariano Giovanni Pietra, stepped into the room wearing a bulletproof vest over his dress shirt, a semiautomatic rifle strapped across his chest as casually as a fanny pack.

“Ciao, papà,” he said. “Are you happy to see me?”

Behind him, Raffa emerged in his own bulletproof vest, blood from a shallow cut weeping down his neck. His eyes immediately found mine, darkening as they took in my damp clothes and hair, the blood spatter from the fallensoldatoat my feet.

Without hesitation, he stepped around Dad and pistol-whipped Gaetano, who fell to his knees with a sharp cry.

“Did you do this to her?” Raffa asked, his words as clear and cold as ice carved from an Arctic glacier.

Gaetano spat a wad of blood at his feet. “She was defending the man who killed my sons.”

Raffa arrested completely before a snarl retook his features. He looked utterly feral in that moment, filled with animal fury and a base sense of right and wrong that was entirely founded on his own skewed code.

It was magnificent to behold.

Especially knowing that a crime againstmehad inspired it.

“What did he do to you?” Dad asked, staring at me in anguish. He looked simultaneously older than his years and younger. I could see the old version of himself transposed against the man he was now like a palimpsest.

“They filmed it to send to you,” I said, surprised that my voice did not waver even though it was rough from choking on water and crying out with distress. “They waterboarded me for information about Raffa. About you.”

Raffa cursed viciously in Italian, but it was my dad who shocked me.

John Stone, the same man who was a leading financial adviser and owner of the largest investment firm in the Midwest, the man who followed his routines like gospel, without deviation, who volunteered at the local homeless shelter and held me every single time I cried, stepped up to his father’s kneeling form and put a bullet straight through his head.

Chapter Twenty

Guinevere

Ginevra, the boys, and I screamed as his body hit the floor with a dull thwack, his cane clattering to the stone beside him. Gaetano’s brains painted the wall, the floor, and an old leather chair the same color as the blood dripping from its upholstery.

“Mariano!” Ginevra snapped, stepping forward only to pause when Raffa pointed his gun at her. “Che diavolo?”

What the hell?