Page 96 of Mafia Queen
Someone is on the road. He shot at me. That’s all I know. Could be one of my guys trying to stop a Tabona, or a straggling enemy who knows I’m behind the wheel.
With my right hand, I reach for my holster while the left pulls the door handle. It’s wrenched from me, and I tumble onto the pavement with enough presence of mind to hold the gun at the man standing over me.
In a millisecond, I make a decision not to shoot him until I know who he is.
He pushes my hands aside. The gun goes off, releasing a bullet into the bushes. He falls on me, putting his weight on my throat and wrists.
“We gonna do this easy?” he asks with a voice I’ll never forget. “Or we gonna do this hard?”
“Easy,” I say, knowing that’s the only answer that’ll shift Damiano Orolio’s weight.
“Where is it?”
The stupid crown. It gets men to kneel before you. He can have it.
“Car.”
He wrenches my gun away and stands, looking at me with his barrel leveled at my chest.
“Better be.” He tilts his head slightly, as if he’s seeing something new about me as I lie in the street. “Has anyone ever told you that you look just like my father?”
“Where’s Santino?”
“Starving. Dead.” He throws my gun to the side of the road, where the SUV that must have brought him sits in the shadows. “No one’s gonna find him.” He looks in the Suburban, but the crown isn’t in the seat where he must expect. “It better be in here.”
With his next movement, I’m sure he’s going to shoot me. Instead, a slight jerk of his shoulders turns into a full spin, and it’s only then that I hear the humidity-muffledpopof a gunshot. My eyes have frozen mid-blink, squeezed shut against the news of my own death. My singular failure. My complicity in the murder of the only man I’ve ever loved, and who loved me in a way no one had before or will again.
At least I had that, even as I die now.
A thud and gruntyumphhappen instead. I still feel the drizzle on my face and the hard earth against the curve of my head, but there’s no pain from a bullet.
A voice I know and love reaches through the rush in my ears. Something I’ve lost twice and not had a moment to grieve for either time is found again.
“Forzetta!”
My heart is struck by lightning.
Had it even been beating since he left? No. It had turned to frozen meat in my chest.
I twist into a crouch. He’s leaning over me, and the relief on his face mirrors my reprieve from despair. I was dead without him, but now I live again.
“Santi,” I whisper. “You’re…”
You’re here. You’re alive. You’re mine. All of them swirl up my throat and get caught on the sob squeezing its way out of my lungs.
“So are you,” he says.
So am I. We are here. Together. Only now do I realize that I’d assumed he was dead and I’d never see him again.
He grips my arm and pulls me upright until I’m standing face to face with my husband—my heart pumping and my eyes finally open. He looks like shit with dark circles and sunken cheeks, and he is the most beautiful sight in the world.
Forgetting where I am and the danger we’re in, I kiss him. Rain drips off his cheeks and hair into the seam between our lips. It rests on our tongues and I taste the sky, the earth, the salt of the sea. Barbed wire stubble scratches my mouth, but we press each other closer because we’re never separating again. We promise it with that kiss. Never.
The scrape of metal on the pavement breaks the lock we have on each other. We are standing on a street in front of a man trying to kill us.
Santino wraps one arm tightly around me and looks past me at the man on the ground. I turn inside my husband’s protection. Damiano’s trying to raise an arm attached to a shattered shoulder, but the gun only scrapes the asphalt.
“Say a prayer, Dami,” Santino says.
