chiara
“Chiara, I—”
Someone screamed outside the room, and the sound of bullets ricocheting off the walls cut through the air. Alessandro growled and ripped himself away from me, pulling on all his clothes. I stood up a bit too fast and grasped my head, pain splitting through it and my leg.
Goddamn. Why’d someone always have to ruin the moment between us? It was as if the world was against us fucking or some shit. But, damn, I wouldn’t let that stop me. I hated that stronzo—really hated him—after that.
Alessandro peeked through the crack in the door and swore. “How the fuck do they keep sending more people? They should fucking know that I killed everyone else they’d sent.”
Suddenly, his entire body tensed, and he shut the door. He grabbed my hand quite tightly and hurried to the window, opening it up. It was a two-story drop right onto hard concrete. “You have to jump, Chiara.”
“Why can’t we just kill them?” I asked, brows furrowed.
My guard was out there, and so were so many men from the family. They all had guns, all had been in gunfights before. What was the difference between then and now?
“The man out in the living room is the fucker who put me in fucking prison.” He looked nervous. “If you think I’m bad, you haven’t seen anyone like him before. He’ll torture the living fucking shit out of you.”
“Are you afraid of him?” I asked, eyes wide.
He scoffed. “No, I’m not afraid of him. I’m afraid of what he’ll do to you if he kills me,” he said. “And I’m not letting you go out there to get yourself killed, Chiara, because I care about you.”
My eyes widened even more, my heart racing with butterflies. Had Alessandro … had he just said what I thought he said? That he cared about me?
He pushed me toward the open window. “Don’t look at me like that, reginetta. Jump. Land. Roll. And protect that pretty little head of yours because I don’t want to clean up your cracked skull and splattered blood.”
I swallowed hard, eyeing the jump, and glanced back at him. “Alessandro, I can’t do it with my leg. What about Alice?” My heart dropped, and I hurried toward the door. “I need to find Alice.”
He grabbed my arm, tossed me over his shoulder, and hurled me straight out of the fucking window. I screamed and grabbed on to the windowsill, trying so desperately to hold all my body weight up.
He growled, jumped out of the window next to me, hitting the ground hard, got back up, and stood under me. “Let go, Chiara. I’ll catch you.”
The spare bedroom door opened, and I let go before one of those men could kill me. I landed in Alessandro’s arms, as he’d promised, and we tumbled to the ground together. Someone stared out the window, and bullets started flying down at us again. Alessandro grabbed my hand and sprinted as quickly and as stealthily as he could while aiming for the man’s head and shooting him dead.
Everything happened so quickly. I barely knew what happened next. All I knew was that I was running through the rain of bullets to get into another car, which I assumed was Alessandro’s. He started the damn car, revved the engine, and sped off into the night.
There wasn’t a second thought in my mind that they’d follow us. We were bound to be followed—had been followed almost every time we were together now. As he drove onto the highway, he continued to look in the rearview mirror.
We got off on the second exit and sped toward a junkyard—the same junkyard we had sped into last time. He grabbed my hand and pulled me toward another car, pushing me into it and driving back off into the night—this time more stealthily.
I fumbled with my phone, about to text Alice to see if she was okay, when Alessandro grabbed my phone and hurled it right out the window and onto the highway.
“Don’t call. Don’t text. Don’t contact anyone.”
“But Alice … what if she—what if they take her?”
“Does she know anything about me? Anything about the family business?” he asked, jaw twitching.
I gulped. “Nothing about you. Some about the family business.”
After a few moments, he blew out a deep breath. “She should be fine.”
“Should be?!” I nearly screamed at him.
This man had the damn nerve. She was either endangered or she wasn’t. And either way, I needed to make sure she was okay. She hadn’t been in any shoot-outs as far as I knew. She was one of those let the guys do all the dirty work kind of girls.
“Sit back and shut your mouth,” Alessandro said. “Be thankful you got out alive.”