Page 107 of My Dark Fairy Tale

I am sorry, but you are his breath, and he needs to die.

Oh my God.

Time slowed to a molasses drip while thoughts flew through my head like shooting stars.

My parents back home, aching from betrayal, not knowing they would ache so much more when I never came home at all, lost to the evil Italy they had warned me about.

Raffa, somewhere in the house, without knowledge that I loved him with every single thing inside me.

The life I could have lived if I’d only been brave enough to take a risk when I could have.

All of it gone in the single press of a finger around a trigger.

The masked man took three big steps forward and aimed the long barrel of the gun at my forehead.

I couldn’t close my eyes or look away.

I wouldn’t be a coward in this final moment before the end came.

So I was watching him as theBangscreamed through the tiny closet, deafening me momentarily, making me flinch. My face seemed to break open, sharp pinpricks of pain punching into my skin, moving hot and wet across my forehead, my cheeks and chest.

I took in a shuddering breath and realized,I am not dead.

But the masked man before me had the entire front right of his face blown clean away, only crumbled bone and wet, bleeding muscle and tissue left in its place as his body swayed and then fell forward into me.

I scuttled to the side, avoiding his collapse, pressing myself into the corner of a row of suits.

Without the man between me and the door, I could see who stood there.

The perpetrator of that vicious, life-endingBang.

Raffaele Romano, arms still raised, locked and steady, a curl of gray smoke shimmering in the moonlight over the cocked gun. As I watched, he took a step forward and drilled three more bullets into the body at my feet without flinching.

I opened my mouth, and finally, I screamed.

Chapter Twenty-Four

Guinevere

I ran.

The basic human response to a terrifying situation is fight or flight, and I knew, even in my stupefied horror, that there was no way I could ever fight Raffa.

So I leapt over the body—the body—like the fawn Raffa had accused me of being and darted past him before he could even lower the gun.

The gun!

There were people I could go to inside the house. Martina was my first thought, ex-military and badass, but logic ripped the thought into pieces.

Everyone in this house was unequivocallyhis.

So loyal to him, they could not be trusted to help me even under the best circumstances.

And these weren’t that.

Because that same level of loyalty that made them a family meant only one thing.

They knew.