Chapter 10 #3
“Yes. Shoot me. In the leg or arm. Nowhere fatal. Take your shot, and if I’m happy I’m not going to die from it, I’ll give you the name.
This way, you’ll have evidence that you beat me up and shot me.
It will work as a warning to your enemies.
I’ll give you the name of the betrayer. Everyone’s happy.
” Except for the betrayer. But Niccolo had already got Dante to get word to them to run.
If they had any sense, they would have already left Naples.
He felt a degree of guilt for betraying them, but so be it. So long as he got Georgia out of this unharmed, the rest of the world could burn.
The Esposito brothers conferred, not with speech but with their eyes.
How much time had passed? He’d lost track. Georgia hadn’t called…
No. He wouldn’t think of whether she was still safe in the car. He needed to keep focused.
Tommaso fixed his hateful eyes on him. “I will take the shot.”
“So we have a deal?”
“We have a deal,” Mattia agreed tightly.
The handshakes that followed to seal it were the most surreal handshakes of Niccolo’s life.
The deal sealed, he made the call to Zurich for the money transfer to go ahead.
“It will be in your account within the minutes,” he said once it was done. He was nearly half a billion euros poorer, but the same amount in weight had loosened from his chest, so win-win.
“Good.” Tommaso stood back and aimed the gun. “Hands in the air.”
Niccolo obeyed. “Remember, if you shoot to kill, the name dies with me,” he warned.
Tommaso’s lips twisted. He pulled the trigger.
Holding her bump tightly to protect it, Georgia ran faster than she’d ever run in her life, along the path through the high trees and emerging into a vast space filled with row upon row of headstones… and two men huddled over a third who was sprawled on the ground.
Her blood froze on the spot. Screaming his name, she ran to him.
Okay, so being shot hurt. That was Niccolo’s thought as the force from the bullet sent him flying backwards onto the ground.
Winded, it took a long time for his senses to spring back to life. Mattia and Tommaso were standing over him, both staring intently at his shoulder.
He followed their gaze. Blood was pouring out of the wound.
Oh well, another shirt ruined by his own blood.
He pressed his fingers to the hole in his shoulder and determined he would live. “Nice shot.”
“Stop taking the piss and give us the name,” Tommaso raged.
“Something to stem the bleeding first?” He was no doctor, but he’d lost a lot of blood only five days ago and wasn’t sure how his body would react to losing a whole load more in such a short time frame.
Tommaso crouched down and smiled his gleaming shark smile. “That wasn’t part of the deal, arsehole.”
Fair enough.
“I suggest you brace yourself.” Now Niccolo was the one to smile. He uttered the name and had the enormous satisfaction of watching Tommaso’s face lose so much colour that Niccolo must look a picture of health in comparison.
What other reaction there might have been was lost by the scream of his name that echoed through the air.
All three of them turned their heads to the curvy woman tearing over to them.
Barging the shellshocked Esposito brothers out of her way, she dropped to her knees beside him and began stroking Niccolo’s cheeks. “Oh, God, oh, God, you’re hurt.”
He lifted his head, which was feeling very light, and clasped her cheeks. “Georgia, I’m okay.”
“How can you be okay?” she wailed. “You’ve been shot.” She pulled his hands off her. “You need to keep still. You’re bleeding.”
“Yes, but it’s over.”
“Over? They’ve shot you.” As she spoke, she pulled her top over her head and deftly wrapped it over his shoulder to staunch the blood flow. “Don’t move. I’m going to call for an ambulance.”
“No ambulance.” That was Mattia, who’d pulled himself out of the funk Niccolo’s revelation had put him in. “He can be seen by our doctor. He was at the funeral, so he won’t be far.”
Tommaso, who was in an even great stupor and who didn’t speak English, muttered something. Mattia translated for him, neither of them noticing Georgia getting to her knees and aiming her gun at them.
“You will call your doctor right now, and when you’re done, you’d better give me a damned good reason not to shoot you both,” she snarled, so fully in protective Tasmanian Devil mode that she was oblivious to the fact she was threatening two of Italy’s biggest gangsters with only her bra covering her pendulous breasts and her small baby bump clearly visible.
Her hands were red from Niccolo’s blood.
To his mind, she’d never looked more beautiful. Or magnificent.
“You’re not going to shoot them because it’s over, carina. I told them to shoot me.”
“You told them to…” Her gaze whipped to him. “Are you mad? You told them to shoot you?” She quickly turned her attention back to the Espositos. “Make the damned call.”
Mattia held his phone up and made the call. “He will be here in five minutes,” he said when he ended it.
“He’d better be.”
“Georgia?”
She looked back at Niccolo.
Lifting himself up, he gently covered the delicate, bloodied hand holding the gun. “Put it down. It’s over.”
She stared searchingly into his eyes.
“It’s over,” he repeated. “Look – they’re walking away.”
She followed his gaze.
The loud buzzing in Georgia’s ears, there since she’d heard the gunshot, a drill in her head since she’d spotted Niccolo prostrate on the ground, finally quieted as what he was telling her finally sank in.
“It’s really over?” she whispered, sinking down and letting him take the gun from her.
“I swear it.” His eyes shone with love and amusement. “Has anyone told you how fierce you are when someone you love is threatened?”
She choked a laugh and wiped away the tears that had sprung from nowhere. “I only figured that out myself a few minutes ago. I suppose if I didn’t already know I love you, threatening those two terrifying men would have forced me to recognise it… Are you in a lot of pain?”
“Not now that you’re here.”
She choked another laugh. “Am I going to spend the rest of my life checking your wounds for infection and force-feeding painkillers into you?”
“This is the last wound. Once this is healed, this will be it for me. I’m going to live a quiet life with the love of my life and our child, and however many more children she wants to have.”
Now it felt like her heart was choking. “I’m so sorry for what I said to you earlier.”
“You were frightened.” He squeezed her hands. “We both know you’re not at your most rational when you’re frightened or threatened.”
“I love you,” she whispered, stroking his beard. “So very much.”
“And I love you.”
She kissed him gently, frightened to put any of her weight on him. “Will you ask me again?”
She loved that he didn’t pretend not to understand. “To marry me?”
She nodded.
He didn’t hesitate. “Now that this is all over, will you make me the happiest man in the world and marry me?”
She kissed him again. “Only if you make me the happiest woman in the world and marry me.”
His smile creased from ear to ear. “In a heartbeat.”
Happiness of a kind Georgia had never known existed crawled through her veins and danced onto her skin, and then she was laughing for no other reason than the pure joy of being alive and in love, and kissing Niccolo over and over and again and again and again.
When the doctor arrived at the cemetery six minutes after receiving the call from Mattia, he found his patient with his head in the lap of a pregnant woman wearing only a bra on the top half of her body.
Both of them were smeared in blood. Both of them radiated a happiness so infectious that by the time he’d removed the bullet and stitched the patient’s wound, he could feel it in his own veins.