Total pages in book: 79
Estimated words: 75683 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 378(@200wpm)___ 303(@250wpm)___ 252(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 75683 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 378(@200wpm)___ 303(@250wpm)___ 252(@300wpm)
It wasn’t until I was in the ambulance and slipping a bit in and out of consciousness that something occurred to me.
They hadn’t been aiming for me.
They’d been aiming for Nino.
Then, well, the hospitals gave me enough of the good drugs to tranquilize an elephant, and there wasn’t a whole lot of thinking going on for the rest of the night.
CHAPTER THREE
Nino
“Nino, I wasn’t expecting…” Luca, the boss of our Family greeted me as I stormed into his restaurant, Famiglia, about twenty minutes after they’d taken Savannah and her frantic mother away in an ambulance. “Whose blood is that?” he asked, his whole body tensing.
“Not mine,” I said, dropping down into a chair, surprised to see my hands shaking.
“Okay,” Luca, ever the calm boss, said, pulling a chair over in front of me after gesturing something to one of his men standing around. “What happened?”
“I went to this fucking brunch place for breakfast. I was ordering food. And two guys came in. I didn’t even really see them until it was too late. My back was to the door,” I added.
“Nino, what happened?”
“They had guns. Figure they were aiming for me…”
“But?” he prompted when I didn’t go on.
“But the server shoved me out of the way. They shot her. That fucking innocent girl…”
“Is she… did she make it?” he asked, his own voice filling with worry and regret.
We didn’t have a fuckton of fast and true rules in the Family.
But we never fucked with children… or women.
They were innocents in our world.
Someone had fucked with that rule.
“She shoved you out of the way?” Luca asked, brows arched.
Yeah.
That was the part that my mind just kept going over and over.
She hadn’t tripped.
Or knocked into me after she’d been hit.
She’d seen the gun, then shoved me over before the bullets started to fly.
She’d saved my fucking life.
And been repaid with two plugs in her perfect body.
“Yeah. She took the bullets.”
“Fuck,” he said, exhaling hard. “Where?”
“Shoulder and stomach.”
“How bad?”
“I mean, not good. But she was stable when the paramedics took her.”
“Did you see them?” he asked.
“No. Just their backs running away. No faces.”
“Was anyone else there?”
“Two people at a table by the window. They hit the floor. Doubt they saw shit.”
“What’s going on?” Massimo asked, walking in, all head-to-toe black suit.
Massimo, the Family’s hitman, and my brother who had been saved by Matteo’s girl, Josie.
“Assassination attempt,” Luca said as Massimo’s head whipped over to me, seeing the blood, going stiff.
“It’s not mine. Waitress saved my life.”
“Fuck,” he hissed, raking a hand down his face. “She okay?”
“Shoulder and stomach. She was stable,” I recapped.
“Who is coming for us now?” Massimo asked, looking at Luca.
“That’s the thing,” Luca said. “No one that I know of. We need to have a meeting,” he declared. “Tomorrow,” he added, seeming to understand I wasn’t in the place to go over it right then. “Get the word out,” he told Massimo, who nodded as he reached for his phone. “You alright?” he asked as Massimo walked away, already talking to someone.
“No,” I said, jaw tight. “Those bullets were meant for me.”
“Why don’t you get yourself cleaned up, and go check on her?” he suggested. “Sounds like you need to thank her.”
I needed to do more than thank her.
I fucking owed my life to her.
She was the reason my Ma wasn’t crying right now, that my brothers weren’t on the street looking for blood.
“Yeah,” I agreed, getting up, and making my way outside, feeling oddly numb as I climbed in my car, seeing Savannah’s dried blood on my steering wheel as I sat in the driver’s seat.
I backed out of the lot and turned the car in the direction of my house.
It wasn’t a giant place, being just for me. But it was a nice old Queen Anne that I’d been working on restoring for the past few years. I liked the character it had. The wraparound porch, the gabled roof, the rounded angles, dormers, corbels, sawn spandrels, the one-of-a-kind decorative woodwork.
I still hadn’t decided on a color scheme for the paint, so it was still the boring white with black accents it had been when I’d bought it. But I eventually wanted to give it some sort of classic vibrant paint job.
It was settled on a corner quarter-acre lot with lots of old trees, including a massive weeping willow in the front yard.
There had been a tire swing hanging from it when I moved in, and I’d left it there, figuring that, some day, I’d have my own kids to swing around on it, lost in daydreams. Like I’d done as a kid.
The stockade fence was rickety on the best day, and in desperate need of replacement. One strong storm would probably knock it over.
I’d been too busy focusing on the inside to get to that. Stripping the black stain off of the gorgeous real wood wall accents, removing the carpeting that had been laid over original wood floors, restoring the bathrooms to something less modern-looking.