I woke up with a gasp because there was a hand over my mouth.
My eyes flew open, torso knifing up only to be gently pushed back down. Raffa was leaning over me, the whites of his eyes gleaming in the dark room.
“Hush,” he insisted quietly, sharp urgency in every line of his coiled body as he hunched over me like a shield. “Someone is in the house.”
Fear tied my belly into tight knots. He removed his hand to press a finger to his lips.
I nodded, heart moving to hammer in my throat so hard I thought I would vomit around it.
A light was flashing on Raffa’s bedside table like a silent alarm, throwing red light into the room every few seconds. It was a security system, I realized with relief.
The police were on their way.
The door to the room creaked open.
Raffa pushed me into the mattress, straddling my body, facing the door with a gun raised in the direction of the entrance.
But it was only Ludo, his own handgun in both hands. He jerked his head at Raffa and made a hand gesture toward the hall before disappearing again.
Raffa nimbly climbed off the bed and grabbed for my hand.
“Hide in the closet while I go sweep the house,” he ordered me softly in Italian. “Do not make a noise and do not come out unless you recognize the voice of whoever is in the room.”
When I didn’t say anything, gaze fixed to the dark metal of the gun in his other hand, he shook me slightly by the shoulder.
“Guinevere,” he snapped quietly and raised the gun to point the barrel at his eyes as if he wasn’t even aware he had a loaded gun between his fingers. “Eyes here. Do you understand me?”
I nodded, but when he tried to move away, I clutched harder at his hand.
Raffa’s features softened slightly as he looked down at my nails digging into his skin. He pulled me into his arms and pressed a long kiss to my temple.
“You will be safe, little fawn. Do you trust me?”
I was nodding before he had finished asking the question. “I’m not scared for me. I’m scared about you going out there. Please, stay in here with me. Let Ludo and Martina handle it. They were in the army!”
Raffa’s smile was a thin slice of white in the dark. “Do not worry about me, Vera. Whoever has broken into my home should be much more afraid of me than I am of him. Now, do as I say. Hide.”
I rose to my tiptoes to press a hurried kiss to the side of his mouth and then turned to run across the wood floors to Raffa’s walk-in closet, the door closest to the windows overlooking the inner courtyard. There were slats in the wood so I could see out if I pressed my face to the door.
I didn’t hear Raffa leave, but I knew when he did because fear gripped tighter at my throat. My heart raced so hard, I thought it would give out, and I felt dizzy from the strain.
Long minutes passed, and nothing.
I was almost relaxing slightly when I heard the creak of the old wood door opening again to the bedroom.
My heart stopped, slamming into an impenetrable wall of fear.
Because I knew somehow that it was not Raffa.
Or Martina, or Renzo, or Ludo, or Carm.
Somewhere deep in the palace there were a shout and the concussive bang of a gunshot indoors.
Through the slats in the door I saw a shadow detach itself from the wall and freeze in the middle of the room at the sounds from the second floor.
My hand slowly went to my mouth as if I could press my too-loud, panicked breath back into my body.
A second later, the dark form moved again, crossing to the bed. I watched as it seemed to check the sheets and then crossed to the bathroom diagonally across the room from where I hid.
Thumps echoed throughout the palace.
The shape of a man reappeared almost instantly, walking faster now.
Coming straight for me.
I swallowed my scream and threw myself backward, my bare toes silent on the carpet. My back hit the end of the closet, ten feet from the slatted door.
I pressed my spine hard to the wood as if it could absorb me and keep me safe.
But it couldn’t.
A moment later, the door swung out on quiet hinges, and a tall, lean body filled the gap.
I was trapped.
Fear clogged every pore so completely I could not even scream. Every scary movie I had ever seen where the heroine didn’t call for help suddenly made sense.
I was frozen in terror and faced with a man who stepped forward just slightly, so the moonlight fell through the slats onto a face wearing a Venetian mask.
And the dark metal of a gun raised to point at me.
“Mi dispiace, ma tu sei il suo respiro e lui deve morire,” came the muffled words from the man who clearly intended to kill me.
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 the Bang screamed 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-ending Bang.
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.
