Page 65 of Masked Don

“Stairwell is clear,” Carmine reports. “Police inbound, two minutes. We’ve got people coming up to lock it down.” He looks at Enzo. “You need to be gone before the badges get here. You and her both.”

“No.” It’s out of me before I’ve decided to say it. I’ve still got one hand over Marcus’s on his leg, and he’s in no shape to be left. “I’m not leaving this kid on the floor so I don’t have to answer questions. Get him help first, then we go.”

Carmine looks at me for a long second. Then he almost smiles and says to Enzo, without taking his eyes off me, “I like her. More, I mean.”

“I know,” Enzo says quietly. “Believe me. I know.”

“And Matthew?” I ask. “Marta?”

“I checked in with the house,” Carmine says. “Nothing’s happening there. It was only this building.”

Relief washes over me like nothing else, the feeling so intense, I have to lean against Enzo for support.

The next minutes are a blur of arriving medics and police, of handing Marcus off to someone with a real medical kit. My hands are red. There’s blood on the green silk dress, and I don’t care about it at all.

And when it’s finally done, when there’s nothing left for my hands to do, that’s when they start to shake.

Enzo takes them into his. He doesn’t say anything about it. He just holds them steady until they stop, his eyes never leaving my face.

“You didn’t freeze,” he says. His voice is low, like he wants to make sure I heard and understood him. “Bullets were flying, people were getting shot, and you didn’t freeze. And you might’ve saved that boy’s life.”

“You said he was going to be fine.”

“It was hardly certain. But it is now, thanks to you. Who taught you to do all that, be so calm under pressure?”

“Nobody. Somebody has to keep things moving. It’s usually me.”

“Not anymore,” he says. “Not by yourself. Not ever again.”

Part of me wants to argue with him, to tell him he doesn’t need to look after me, that I’m fine by myself and always will be if I have to.

But I don’t. I’m too wrung out for that. I let him hold my hands in the wreckage of the party, sirens screaming on the streets below. And I let myself, for just one exhausted second, believe him.

Then I think of Matthew, asleep at home, miles from here, behind a wall and a gate and Marta’s watchful love. Safe. He’s safe.

But they came for us tonight. In a room full of Enzo’s people, in one of Enzo’s own buildings, with guns. They came right into the middle of all this protection like it was nothing.

And the chill that goes through me has nothing to do with the night air.

Because if they can do this here…

“Enzo.” My hands go tight around his. “We need to get home. We need to get home right now.”

CHAPTER 23

ENZO

The first thing I do, before the police, before anything, is put a phone in her hand and let her hear Marta’s voice.

Matthew’s asleep. The house is locked down, and I had Anthony, my security second-in-command, double the men at the gate, just to be on the safe side.

Matthew never even woke up, and Stevie hears that from Marta herself, some of the wildness going out of her eyes when she does.

I’m standing in the wreckage of my own party, waiting for the law. An hour ago, this ballroom was gold light and champagne. Now it’s filling with officers, red and blue strobe lights flashing on the street dozens of stories below. It’s not long before the paramedics are carrying out the men Carmine and I downed.

I’ll have to explain, but not now. At this moment, Stevie’s all I care about. She sits in a chair someone found her, a blanket over her shoulders, staring off into the middle distance. I don’t leave her side. A hundred things at that moment demand my time and attention: Carmine, the police, the question of who just tried to kill me in my own building. But all of them are secondary to the woman in front of me, the mother of my child.

“You’re doing it again,” she says. It’s the first thing she’s said in a while.