Page 211 of The Enslaved Duet

I smiled at him as I pulled it, as the gun jarred back into the junction between my index finger and thumb so hard I thought my hand fractured. Giuseppe was shocked in that brief pause, his eyes wide, his elastic mouth gaping open like the wound I’d blown clean through his upper left chest.

I hoped I hit his heart, I thought finally as the echo of the shot began to falter, and Giuseppe collapsed as if in slow motion to the ground beside his chair, clutching at the blood staining his breast pocket like a blooming rose.

Mason and I locked eyes, his face greasy and crumpled like a used napkin.

“My God, Cosi,” he breathed in that tiny gap of peace before the calamity. “Run.”

I didn’t run.

Instead, I pivoted quickly and shot off at the blur of black I knew was di Carlo’s thug coming toward me. He grunted when I drilled him through the left thigh and fell to the floor, raising his gun to get one off on me.

I shot him in that shoulder, and he fell back, gun skittering across the linoleum.

He was done and groaning, so I took a moment to step back to Giuseppe, looming over his body and casting a shadow that turned his pooling red blood black.

I had never wanted to hurt anyone, but this was what my life had become.

Kill or be killed.

So, staring down at Giuseppe as he glared up at me, panting through his pain, I did what I’d been trying to do for years.

I killed one of my demons.

The gun was no longer cold, but achingly hot in my hands as I cocked it and leveled the mouth of the weapon at Giuseppe’s head.

Pop.

This innocuous sound followed by the wet smackingslapof his brain spilling out over the floor.

“Cosima,” Mason yelled at me, prompting me to turn halfway toward him before I heard anotherpop, this one muffled by the glass.

Seconds later, there was a light, almost musical tinkling as the glass shattered and rained over the floor on either side of the wall, hitting me across the legs in pinpricks of fire.

Something slammed into my side then and began to burn as if someone had shoved a flare beneath my skin. I looked down dumbly to see a spot of red on my white cashmere turtleneck dress and then reeled back again when something sliced through my shoulder, jerking me off-balance so that I went careening to the floor on one knee.

I looked up through my curtain of tousled hair to see a GMC black SUV idling at the curb, two men dressed in black aiming at me with perfectly steady handguns.

And I knew with utter, eerie calm, that I was going to die.

After everything, I was going to be shot dead in a Bronx deli by the mafia. All my life, I’d run from them, and finally, maybe poetically, they were finally going to get my ounce of flesh.

I thought of all the things, at that moment of clarity before death, that had brought me to that point. My father’s weakness, my mother’s silence, Alexander’s submission and then defiance to his malicious dad, Dante and Salvatore’s interference…

The memories surged through me, riding the pain to the surface of my thoughts so that they were hand in hand. Pain and remembrance.

I struggled to focus on the one thing glinting gold in the darkness.

Xan.

Fuck, I thought as I swayed and anotherpopwent off as Mason yelled something, and I was pushed to the right by an unbelievable force less than a second before fire ripped over the side of my head, and I couldn’t think anymore for the hurt that overtook me as I fell to the ground.

I blinked blearily at the cracked, yellow ceiling and then Mason was there, bent over me, the sound of a car backfiring tearing through the air as the assailants took off.

“Fuck, God, fuck. Cosi,” Mason babbled, his hand fluttering around me like carrion over carcass. “Fuck, there is so much blood.”

“If I die,” I whispered, surprised my voice even worked through the thick surge of blood in my throat. “Tell him I loved him.”

Mason cursed and tried to collect the ribbons of blood spilling from the gaping wound, but I didn’t watch to see if he succeeded because blackness finally overwhelmed the searing pain, and I wasout.