Vendetta(98)

I felt myself jump and the pain in my rib cage soared, as if an invisible hand had decided to braid my insides. I fell back onto my haunches and followed the noise. Four figures were sneaking through the hidden back door. They started navigating their way through the crates, crouching low to the ground. A shock of crimson hair alerted me to Eric Cain’s position. Of course Jack’s best friend was involved in this, just like everybody else seemed to be. Beside him, I recognized the gait of my uncle as he pulled himself across the ground, stalking toward the Falcones.

I started to panic, caught between shouting out to draw attention to Jack so Nic and Luca could be forewarned and keeping quiet so Jack could save my mother from Felice’s increasingly steady aim. Maybe he did deserve this, but she didn’t. I patted my hand against Luca’s knife in my pocket and the angriest part of me imagined using it on Jack. What good was showing up to rescue me if he was prepared to use my own mother, knowing she could get hurt, too?

“Enough of this!” It was Gino; Gino the Unstable. He lunged forward, barreling past Felice and Nic, his gun held high.

My mother yelped, stumbling backward and almost tripping over herself.

“Gino!” Nic’s scream drowned out my own, and no one seemed to notice the threads of our voices intertwining. Luca lunged at the same time and in a heartbeat he was standing in front of my mother, his palms raised toward his brother.

“Gino, no,” he echoed, but calmer.

“She’s a distraction,” Gino lisped, madly waving his gun in the air. “And she’s Michael Gracewell’s wife! At least this way we can get the blood debt that you and Calvino screwed up.”

“Watch what you say, Gino,” Luca said without budging.

The shadows at the back were lurking ever closer. I caught a glint of Jack’s buzz cut several crates across from me. I decided to go for him. If he knew I was OK, maybe he could sneak away and then Luca could convince them to let my mother go, too.

I dragged myself across the cement, glancing over my shoulder as I crept as quickly as possible. My mother had buried her face in her hands and her sobs were echoing around the warehouse. I watched Luca turn and whisper something to her. She straightened up and began to wipe her face with shaking hands. She said something in return. He nodded and she released a watery smile, her face twitching with relief. She knew I was alive.

When I turned back, my uncle was no longer in my sights, and the lurking shadows were no longer shadows. They were men. And they were standing up, arms outstretched and guns in hand. I screamed at the top of my lungs, but it was too late.

In the movies it’s always so dramatic when someone gets shot. Time slows, the music ebbs and flows around the moment. When the bullet hits, the body buckles — each limb reacting in perfect unison — as it sails backward through the air, and even though it’s supposed to be horrifying, there’s always something quietly artistic about it, too.

It wasn’t like that with Luca. He just crumpled. One minute he was on his feet, standing in front of my mother, and the next he was lying on the ground in a pool of his own blood.

The pop was still echoing in my eardrums when she started screaming, and then the shouting followed, and all hell broke loose.

Eric Cain, the man who had shot Luca, dropped to the ground and rolled behind a line of broken crates. Dom started shooting at him, putting holes in the crates as he sprang up and leapt between them like a gazelle, weaving toward the back of the warehouse. Another man — who was little more than a curtain of white-blond hair — was trying to dart in wide circles around Gino, while Felice cornered the fourth, all of them firing at one another between crates.

Nic went straight for Jack, his gun readied, but Jack shot first. The bullet lodged in the crate beside Nic’s head. He shot back, but Jack dodged it, leaping behind a tower of crates and disappearing from my view. And then I couldn’t see them anymore, but their shouts rose up with the others’.

I slithered across the cold cement, following Luca’s blood like it was a trail and ignoring the pulsing pain in my rib cage. My mother was already crouched down, trying to drag him away from the chaos with one hand and protecting her head from stray bullets with the other. Someone screamed my name, and I braced myself for the impact of a bullet that never came.

Behind us, a door slammed and most of the shouting moved outside. I reached Luca and threw my hands onto his waist to stop the bleeding that was coming thick and fast from an entry wound in his side. It bubbled angrily beneath my hands as blood oozed over my fingers, coating them in sticky warmth.

“Sophie!” my mother cried, grabbing onto my shoulders. “Sophie, you have to leave!”