Page 8 of Forsaking All Others

A part of me stared at the three long gashes in his cheek and down his neck in horror, wondering how I could have hurt anyone like that, let alone my new husband.

But another part of me, one sired by Vincenzo Cavallaro, felt vindicated. He had left my family bleeding out, so it was only right he should bleed too.

“I will allow that because you are distraught,” Dario whispered in a cold, slithering tone that threatened like a snake’s hiss before a strike. “But do not think to raise a hand to me again, wife. You are mine now. You will remember your place.”

“My place is beside my family!” I shouted in his face.

Beside Niccolo, I thought on an internal sob.

“I am your family now,” he amended sinisterly.

“Please,” I begged, my heart beating so hard I almost couldn’t breathe through the pressure. “Take me to the hospital so I can be with them.”

“We are going straight to the tarmac where my plane awaits. I will not be a sitting duck in the middle of a turf war. We leave for America now.”

I blinked a moment before I screamed, “No!”

My struggles started again in earnest, my pulse thundering so loudly in my ears I couldn’t hear my own shouts or Dario’s grunts as he tried to contain me from lashing out. When I attempted to lunge through the seats to tackle the driver, he hauled me back and thrust me belly first into the back seat, pinning me there with his entire weight. I continued to sob and scream, thinking of Papà dead with one eye blown out, Beppe in his cooling pool of blood, and Ricco . . . poor Ricco dying slowly next to them.

“Please no, no, no,” I cried. “Please don’t take me away from them. They’re all I have.”

He’s all I want, I thought but somehow had the wherewithal not to say out loud.

Vaguely, I was aware of the car pulling to a slow stop and someone opening the door. When I tried to squirm out from under Dario, he pressed his hand firmly into the side of my face, so I was smashed to the leather, and ordered tersely for someone to bring me a sedative.

Moments later there was a sharp prick in my neck, and moments after that, darkness consumed me.

Chapter Three

Fiammetta

When I woke, my brain felt heavy and waterlogged, my thoughts clogged somewhere near my brain stem so I couldn’t make sense of them. I peeled my eyes open, wincing even at the low light, to reveal the luxurious interior of a plane done in creams and tortoiseshell woods. A man sat across from me in a wide comfortable leather chair, wearing thick-framed black reading glasses as he studied a tablet on his crossed knee.

For a blessed moment, I did not know who I was or where I had ended up.

My breath passed easily through my lungs, and my body felt pleasantly used up with lingering exhaustion.

And then the man across from me sensed my wakefulness, lifted his head, and pinned me with those wraithlike pale eyes. Three long, deep scratches scored one side of his face, cleaned of blood but still raw and red.

“Good,” Dario Ferretti said. “You’re awake.”

I blinked owlishly at him before memories crashed into me with the force of a tsunami. My head banged against the back of the chair with the impact, and I had to squeeze my eyes shut against the tumult of images that assaulted me: Ricco’s bloody chest under my hands, Beppe face down and unmoving, the gory cavern of my father’s one remaining eye, the broken body of my beloved Niccolo on the street.

“Please let this be a very bad dream,” I whispered in Italian.

“This is very real,” Dario replied firmly in English. “You need to accept your new life. The first step should be speaking in English. Your father assured me you were fluent.”

I peeked through one eye at him, my fingers curling into the armrests as rage suffused every inch of me. I had never been an angry person, but I could not bear the idea that this stranger had whisked me away from my family and Niccolo when they needed me the most.

“You tore me away from my home without letting me see to my family’s well-being. Without letting me say goodbye,” I choked out, wrath and not sorrow clogging my words.

Dario studied me as if I were a butterfly pinned under glass. “You said your goodbyes—rudely, I might add—seconds before the shooting when you ran away from me to hug your father and brothers. If you had not, perhaps they might not have been distracted and would have seen the shooter before they were taken down.”

I flinched as the words raked sharp nails across my heart.

“There was security everywhere,” I protested, but my voice was weaker than I would have liked. “No one should have been able to get anywhere close to us. Was it a sniper? Father said we had the rooftops secure as well as the surrounding buildings.”

“Information is coming in slowly,” he said vaguely. “The important thing is that I got both of us off that godforsaken rock. You will be much safer in Chicago. I control the city.”