Page 153 of Forsaking All Others

The house was surrounded by armed men.

Our men.

Dario and I locked eyes, fear passing between us as potently as our shared DNA.

If we didn’t make it out through this ambush and fast, the woman we loved was going to die.

“Booker,” I said calmly. “Where do you keep your guns?”

Chapter Thirty-Seven

Fiammetta

“Play the piano for me, darling.”

I sighed, because I was absolutely trash at playing the piano and because I hated it. Signora Conti had tried her best to teach me in Palermo, but I’d always wanted to be outside or reading a book. I liked listening to music well enough, but my hands were better suited to firing a gun or holding a knife, I’d found.

I left the domestic tasks and classic hallmark skills of a well-heeled regency bride to others.

But my mother-in-law was a contradiction.

She liked women dressed to impress, with good manners, and the docile nature to do as they were told. But underneath the surface, she collected strong, smart women who would help her manipulate society to her own ends. The only commonality between the two was her need for them to do exactly as she bade them. Carla Ferretti was queen of any room, in any situation.

I knew this because she had been trying to conform me to this image for years, and, when it proved impossible, she’d merely pressed even harder. She clearly didn’t understand that not everything turned diamond bright under pressure. Some things cracked.

Sometimes I wondered if she’d been this forceful with the twins. Ever since I learned she had allowed Lando to turn Luca into a shadow killer, I looked at her with new eyes.

Yes, she was a proper mafioso’s wife and society matron, gleaming on the arm of Lando like the pretty ornament she was meant to be.

But there had to be something sinister in her, something that was at least as broken as the pieces Luca, Dario, and I harbored inside of ourselves in order for her to hand her young boy over to a life of bloodshed and little else. She had condemned him to a living hell without friends or joy or the possibility of a family of his own.

What kind of woman knowingly allowed that?

It made me realize, with some sense of urgency, that in the wild mess of the last two weeks I had forgotten to take my birth control pills. When I’d gone looking for them in my vanity, they weren’t there, and I kept forgetting to track them down. I wasn’t overly concerned, because truthfully, I’d forgotten to take them before, and nothing had happened.

But with the amount Luca had been inside me, the way he delighted in pushing his leaking seed back into my swollen pussy when he was done with me, had alarm bells trilling.

As if I didn’t have enough to deal with.

I resolved to find them in the bags Bonnie had helped me to pack when I turned in for the night, hopefully after playing a few poor tunes for Carla.

“What would you like me to play?” I asked my mother-in-law as I reluctantly moved to the piano.

I was even more unsettled than usual because Lando had refused to let me bring Cerberus to the house. Carla claimed she was allergic to dogs, and she always made me sequester my baby when they came over for a visit, but for obvious reasons, I was especially reluctant to be parted from him now. I felt naked without him by my side, paranoid and slightly helpless in a way I hadn’t felt since I’d been kidnapped by the Russians.

Lando was seated in his customary high-backed leather chair by the roaring fire, and Carla was on the sage-green couch, frowning down at her phone. She liked to play word games, she’d told me when I noticed her preoccupation with her phone, and it seemed one had stumped her.

“Oh whatever,” she dismissed with a wave of her hand. “Lando, be my sweet husband and get me a pot of tea? I think Hannah made it and forgot to bring it in.”

Lando, the strapping ex–Mafia capo, scowled at his wife for a moment before dutifully getting up to trudge out of the room. I’d always admired that about Carla, even though she was the gracious, compliant wife in public, in private, she had Lando wrapped around her little finger.

I sat down at the grand piano and lifted the cover from the keys, trailing my fingers over the ivories for a moment as my mind strayed to the twins. I hoped Dario was resting without too much pain and that Luca wasn’t driving himself to distraction trying to figure out who the hell had killed Felipe.

I’d texted him as soon as I was settled at the Ferrettis to suggest it was Niccolo, in case he hadn’t thought of it. To me, it seemed the only solution. He obviously realized I wasn’t stupid enough to believe his scheme for Lando to kill Felipe, and so he’d hired someone to do it himself.

I had a call in to Petyr to check with the Russians to see if any of theirs or their associates had been hired for the hit, but I was still waiting for a return text. Hank had checked in, and I knew he and the boys would keep an eye on me at this house and the empty seat at Edgemont for any suspicious activity. You could retire men from a motorcycle club, but not from the need for danger, I’d learned, and even though Booker and Walter had hung up their cuts in most ways, they still loved to get their hands dirty when I asked them for help.

It made me feel better to know they were out there somewhere looking out for me.