Chapter 36
36
Max
No one could decide what to do with Vittoria’s body. Luca wanted to carry her with them, but Grey wouldn’t let him. Frankie simply wanted to lie there next to Vittoria, but Max managed to uncrumple her into a standing position. Forrest and Ariana stood off to the side, seemingly unsure whether to offer comfort or stay as silent, non-intruders. Why hadn’t they left?
All Max knew was that they all had to get out of here. Downstairs. ‘Where are the others?’ she asked as Grey tried and failed again to contact another guard.
‘With Jett. We need to get Luca and Frankie to them. I’m trying to contact him – I don’t know which passage he’s taken them to.’
‘How do we know they’re still alive?’ Luca’s eyes were red.
‘We don’t,’ Grey said, ‘but we are going to act like they are.’
‘Switch with me,’ Max said to Frankie, pulling at her dress. ‘Quickly.’
Grey caught onto what Max was doing and wrestled the hoodie from the limbs of the unconscious guy on the floor, chucking it at Luca.
‘No way,’ the Barbarani boy croaked.
‘I’m keeping you alive,’ Grey said. ‘Put the hoodie on. We need to find your brother and sister, and to do that we need to hide in plain sight. We have no idea who’s behind this. For all we know, every single guest who was here tonight is in on this plan.’
With shaking hands, Luca and Frankie obliged. Max was so numb that she didn’t care she was standing in front of the group in Nella’s G-string and black strapless bra again as Frankie tossed her the baggy hemp dress she’d been wearing. Frankie was clearly too distraught to comment on the unethical material of Nella’s red dress that did not fit her but would prove enough of a distraction for anyone targeting her.
Grey was glaring at the hemp dress, which fell to Max’s upper thighs. Clearly he was thinking what a liability she’d be in such a ridiculous get-up. But how this was different from the red dress, which was arguably more restricting, she wasn’t sure.
‘The whole family’s the target,’ Max whispered as they made their way down the staircase, hands linked like children on an excursion.
‘Yes,’ Grey said. His hand was warm and clutched hers with such intensity it was almost painful.
‘Why the different weapons?’ she hissed. ‘The gun for Giovanni but the darts for Vittoria and us?’
‘And the security.’
Their group stopped as Luca, behind Max, pulled back. One of the security guards – a young redheaded guy who’d argued playfully with Max about the superiority of union over league before the gala started – was lying facedown below the wine cabinet Max had leant against as she’d realised Kaine Skinner was not the threat.
What use was there in saying it now?
Grey bent down and extracted a dart from his back – the same type that had hit Vittoria.
‘Blow dart,’ Max said. ‘They probably shot him before Giovanni. The blow darts are silent.’
‘So why kill Giovanni with a gun?’ Ariana asked.
‘They wanted the chaos,’ Max guessed. ‘They needed everyone to freak out and run. A gun is more dramatic.’
‘Who are they ?’ Luca’s voice was strained.
‘We’ll figure that out,’ Grey said, ‘once I get you to safety.’
‘I’m staying with you,’ Luca said. ‘I’m helping you kill every last fucker who shot my ... who killed my ...’ His voice broke.
‘Me too,’ Frankie whispered.
Max’s heart stretched painfully.
‘You’re not ...’ Grey started but a movement stopped him. ‘Where the fuck are you going?’
Forrest had broken his link with Ariana and Frankie and was pelting towards the glass doors leading out to the blackened vineyards.
‘Forrest, no!’ Max screamed. Grey yanked her hand back but she was too quick. She charged after the idiotic kid, past the dark shapes lumped beneath the walls. Grey’s security guards. Maybe others.
‘I think I know an exit!’ a guest called in the dark, maybe one of Tomaso’s friends, Max thought, based on the overenunciated vowels and the generalised arrogance.
‘Don’t!’ Max begged. ‘There could be trip wires on the exits.’
But the crowd was following the male voice, not hers, limbs and voices pushing past in a storm of stilettos and Oxfords.
‘ FORREST! ’
As a cop, Max had only ever attended one scene like this before, a suspected terror attack at a community centre. Lone gunman – five casualties, fifteen wounded. She could still remember the sounds and smells and the horrible shape the white blankets made over the bodies. But that had been forty minutes after the initial shot. This was different. This was raw and immediate – she knew she’d feel the effects of it later, like the pain that comes from surgery after the medication wears off. But right now the adrenaline was her buffer against all feeling – right now she could move through the horror of what was before her and meet her objective. Find Forrest . Not because he was more important than any of the other guests, but even through her adrenaline-soaked mind, she knew Forrest would be the key to getting the Barbaranis to safety.
Ariana wouldn’t go anywhere without her boyfriend.
Luca wouldn’t go anywhere without Ariana. Not after he’d just seen both his parents die.
‘Forrest!’ she called again.
He was gone.
Had he barged past the thicket of people? Had he been taken out by another dart like the one that killed Vittoria?
How many killers were they searching for?
Was this a macabre ‘Eat the Rich’ game? Some sort of Hunger Games ? The La Marca family hunting the Barbaranis?
Where the fuck had Forrest gone?
She hated that she expected Grey to have followed her. She hated that his alpha-male protectiveness or whatever it was that had made him attack the guy with the gun was something she’d come to expect. But Grey hadn’t followed. None of them had.
In fact, they’d completely disappeared.
Had she been knocked unconscious by the attacker and not realised? Had hours passed? Surely not. She felt the back of her head – no blood. She wasn’t hurt. She reached for the knife she’d sewn into the dress but remembered with a hot wave of horror she’d left it there when she’d switched with Frankie. Fuck. At least Frankie had protection. Not that the knife would do much against a bullet or a dart gun.
How had they escaped the ballroom so quickly?
Max would not focus on the swelling sting that they’d left her. After all, she was the one who’d broken free of their human chain. Snap out of it. You’re a cop. You can handle this. You don’t need someone to protect you. It was true. She’d protected herself since that night her parents died, she’d had her own back. She’d crawled out of the car wreckage alone, over broken glass and oil, and everything ever since. She’d crawled out of jail, and she’d crawl out of this horror show too. She didn’t need anyone. She’d never needed anyone.
But she couldn’t go it alone without a weapon. She jogged back upstairs to the dining room to the slumped figure she’d knocked unconscious. His dart gun was lying three feet from him.
It’s not the same thing , she tried to reason. No bullets.
But it felt like a gun. It wasn’t as heavy but it had the same shape. The same whirring potential in her hands.
The owner of the dart gun was stirring. As he turned his head towards her, Max’s heart stopped. Everything started to melt as she realised where she’d seen him before.
It might not mean anything. It could be a coincidence. But she had to get to the others right now .
The question that had been rolling in her mind like a dazed marble slotted to the front. Why two different weapons? Why not shoot the guards with bullets too, if the plan had been to create chaos?
Max ran from the dining room and slid quickly along the walls, gun first. She kept to the shadows and, when she came to the enormous staircase, ducked down level with the balustrade and crept down as quickly as she dared without stumbling in the dark.
Giovanni’s body still lay where it had fallen. She couldn’t see his eyes or anything else in the dark, but it felt like his ghost watching her. The sight of his crumpled form made her want to toss the gun over the stairs and run through the glass doors leading out to the skeleton vines, shattering the glass like pellets of rain. Run until she was in the woods. Until the Barbarani mansion was just a speck in the distance and the memory of Greyson Hawke and all the Barbaranis were just bruises on her skin that would fade in time.
On the final stair, Max heard voices. Long shadows bled into the ballroom from the hallway. She was out in the open – nowhere to hide. As two hooded figures appeared, Max threw herself beside the body of a guard by the doors. Gun cold in her hand, she held her breath as their footsteps trudged past, ripping and sticking to the floor.
‘All going to plan,’ one of them said. American accent. Southern.
‘Looks like,’ the other replied. Australian.
‘They all in the passage?’
‘Yeah, just got the text through now. They’re all there.’
‘Even ...’
‘Yeah, even Hawke.’
‘I gotta admit, I didn’t think we’d pull it off.’
‘Mmm. Kinda wish it didn’t have to happen like that. Makes me a bit sick.’
‘You know what we’re gaining.’
‘Yeah, but still, we were told there’d be minimal casualties. The guards weren’t meant to—’
‘Hey.’ The footsteps stopped. Max’s lungs screamed as she held her breath. ‘Remember – this is a long game. This is nothing, nothing , compared to the lives we’re saving.’
The Australian voice was silent. Max desperately wanted them to leave, but at the same time she wanted them to keep talking – to reveal everything that was going on. Who they were. What lives they thought they were saving by murdering the Barbaranis. How this was connected to the poisoned wine and Poppy Raven.
Why she’d been tricked into distracting the Barbaranis with the threat of Skinner.
Eventually, the footsteps ripped away, heading up the stairs. She waited until it was completely silent before she dared to lift her head. She raked through every word she’d stolen from them, searching for anything that would tell her what their plan was.
They’re in the passage ... even Hawke .
Grey and the others were where these murderers wanted them. One of the secret passages. So Grey hadn’t left her. He’d been taken . Something still didn’t fit – how had she not heard the struggle? But the face of the man whose gun she’d stolen morphed back into her vision, and what she’d thought she’d seen under the other attacker’s hood. A little bubble of a thought popped up – where she’d seen him before.
No. That was ridiculous.
The cold eyes of Emilio Barbarani scowled down at her from his portrait. The men would be back soon.
She had to find this passage. Grey and the others couldn’t have gone far; they’d disappeared so quickly. That meant the entrance to the passageway had to be somewhere here in the ballroom. ‘Where is it?’ she hissed up at the portrait of the old wine maker. He glared back – those dark, olive-like eyes so much like Giovanni’s had been.
Giovanni.
He’d known where all the passages were – it was probably one of the reasons why he’d always been so blasé about the threat of an attack. If trouble came to his party, he would know exactly how to escape – how to get his family out safely. It meant that whoever was behind this attack had somehow learnt the Barbarani secrets.
The secret.
Max looked back up at the portrait again. Emilio’s eyes seemed, impossibly, less angry.
What was it Giovanni had said up on the stairs, when he repeated the words of his father? The secret is in the wine.
That had been Emilio Barbarani’s catchphrase – isn’t that what Grey had said in the cellar before the bomb? Like The Burgers are Better at Hungry Jack’s or Lowest Prices are Just the Beginning.
What if it had a literal meaning?
Her fingers traced the glass wine cabinet Sophie had leant against while Max imagined Grey’s lips on her collarbone. Where Max had watched Vittoria watch Claudia La Marca.
The secret is in the wine.
Their group hadn’t been far from here when Forrest bolted towards the door. Had Grey led them in here, not knowing it was a trap? And if, by some miracle, the entrance to one of Emilio’s secret passageways was here – what if there was a keycode or fingerprint access needed?
There hadn’t been one to open the fake barrel back in the cellar ...
What had Grey said about Giovanni being old-school? Hating change? Keeping his father’s recipe like it was the fucking Eleventh Commandment? Would that have carried through to the secret passageways?
She clawed at the glass, searching for a bump, a partition, a crack, anything.
The voices above the staircase grew louder.
Fuck.
It was the same two men from before – the American one spoke first. ‘Why does she want us out here? If the cops show up, we’re the ones who are gonna get shot at.’
‘Cops don’t come to the Barbarani property unless they’re invited.’
‘Shit, they really run this place don’t they?’
‘Not for—’
CRACK!
Max had been so busy searching for an entry that she hadn’t been watching where she stepped. The crunching sound of her shoe against glass echoed through the silent chamber, cutting off the voices instantly.
Shit.
Shit.
‘Who the fuck’s that?’
Her heart was hammering so loud she didn’t even know if it was the American or the Australian who’d spoken. Shards of an expensive watch face stuck to her heel. She’d stepped on the Rolex she’d last seen on Grey’s kitchen bench.
How had it fallen off his wrist?
Unless ...
Was it a breadcrumb?
Had he left it for her?
‘There’s someone down there.’
Now would be a fabulous time, Emilio, for your portrait to go full Dorian Gray and point me in the right direction.
Her fingers clasped something – ten centimetres above the fractured face of the watch. A lever.
POW!
She ducked as the glass cabinet above her shattered. Another bullet streaked past as glass and wine gushed down. Max raised the dart gun towards the two silhouettes stomping down the stairs. Her hand shook as she searched again for the lever she knew she’d felt. She’d lost it as soon as they’d fired.
‘It’s the security guard. Fuck it, I thought we got her in the first round. Fuck!’
Pow.
Pow.
She felt the last shot right by her ear as more glass rained over her.
She had a clear shot. All she had to do was pull the trigger.
But all she could see was Evan’s face. The shattered glass raining down on her was still framing Jackie as she bled out over the coffee table. Evan was yelling. Evan was smiling. Evan slammed Max’s head against the countertop.
Evan was in a suit, answering the lawyer’s questions. Calmly, jovially. The jury were smiling, nodding, understanding.
Evan holding a knife. Evan not holding a knife.
Max had shot him in cold blood. She’d meant to kill him. That last shot had ended her career, her life as she knew it.
She couldn’t do it. She couldn’t pull the trigger.
She dropped down to her knees, letting the dart gun fall to the ground as the two men reached the bottom of the stairs. It was over ...
No! Her stinging, bleeding fingers found the leather of the watch. She traced up, one last time, and grabbed the lever.
She couldn’t remember how it happened, only that she leant her entire weight onto the wooden handle below Emilio’s cabinet and the next moment she’d tumbled into an open crevasse.
‘ Don’t kill her, you idiot! ’
Everything was dark. The cabinet had clicked shut. The air smelled wet and like cork.
‘ Where the fuck did she go? ’
‘ She was right there. She was right there! Turn the lights back on! ’
The voices of the gunmen were so distant it was like there were five brick walls between them.
Don’t kill her?
‘You foolish girl. Why didn’t you shoot them?’
That voice, however, was right by her ear.
‘ Vittoria? ’