Page 158 of Forsaking All Others

And all I could think was Not again.

This bitch had already taken my ghost from me and Dario.

She wasn’t going to take the only family member I hadn’t even known I had left.

I threw myself at her back, shouting through the pain as my arm jostled when I collided with her. The shot she fired went wide, and she fell to the floor on her knees with a jarring thud that vibrated through her entire body.

Carla might have been an evil fucking cunt, but she hadn’t been trained in martial arts like I had for the last nearly six years. Once I had her on the floor, it was almost easy to wrest the gun from her and incapacitate her with a sleeper hold. My vision ebbed in and out due to the excruciating pain in my arm, but I held tight, gritting my teeth and ignoring the way my blood made her neck almost too slippery to hold.

Eventually, Carla grew still in my arms, not dead, but knocked out cold.

I lay panting underneath her for a long moment.

“Fiammetta?” Ricco groaned, dragging himself to my side. “Are you alive?”

“Yes,” I croaked.

Upstairs, there was a bloodcurdling scream.

Ricco and I both swore in Italian, and when he tried to get up, he fell right back to his ass on the marble.

“You need to get out of here,” I ordered, adrenaline prickling under my skin like fire ants as I calculated how long we might have before the kitchen stove I’d left on caused an explosion. “Call the fucking police and drag yourself outside!”

“My family,” Ricco called after me, but I was already moving down the hall on my way to them.

I could hear the clamoring of people upstairs and dragged myself up the treads with my good hand pulling me up the railing. Distantly, I was aware that the smell of gas was growing stronger, even with my increased distance from the kitchen.

Fuck, I had to get Ricco’s family—my family—out of the house.

Niccolo’s gun was in my left hand, wet with blood. It would be hard to fire it with my nondominant hand, but I knew I could do it because Booker had insisted on training me even in that. Suddenly, I was grateful for his paranoia. It could very well save the lives of my sister-in-law, nephew, and niece.

I found Niccolo banging on a locked door down the hallway across from a bank of windows.

“Get the fuck out here,” he was shouting. “I’ll break down this door.”

He was in the process of doing so, slamming his shoulder against the side with hinges, dust flaring up after each hit.

I crept closer, only the dull plop of my blood hitting the carpeted floor heralding my arrival.

Ten steps away, the downstairs entrance to the house blew open with a crash, and stomping feet poured in. Niccolo turned to face me, another gun raised in his hand.

He fired before I could blink.

Chapter Thirty-Eight

Luca

Booker even had a fucking bazooka. He racked it up, placed it over his shoulder, and hustled up the stairs with it before Dario and I could even finish arming ourselves.

We heard the massive boom as he launched a rocket into his front yard, and the cars there exploded with a metallic roar.

“Got ’em!” he’d hollered.

Booker had men on his property at all times, so even though Carla’s men had found a way through the gates, they were pinned in by his security in the front courtyard. His bazooka strike took out a swath of them, and the ones left, Dario, Booker, and I picked off with ease from the house.

Only two made it inside.

I killed those ones with my bare hands, mostly because I goddamn knew them as foot soldiers who were supposed to be loyal to me.