Chapter Eight Guinevere #3
The cross was the size of my palm, large but thin and made of delicately twisted filaments of metal, with a diamond the size of my pinky finger pressed into the apex.
“That was my sister’s,” I breathed, stepping forward as if by magnetic force.
“It was,” he agreed.
Before he could say more, the sound of footsteps echoed through the stairwell. We shared a look, just for a split second, but it conveyed his distress that we had been found and my own that this stranger couldn’t finish telling me why the hell he had Gemma’s necklace.
The next second, he was dropping the necklace back into his pocket and gripping his gun, training it at the mouth of the stairs. A shape appeared, rounding the curve, and he shot at it.
The sound of Ludo cursing in Italian reached my ears, and I knew if I did nothing, this stranger was going to hurt him.
There was no way Ludo wouldn’t find a way to get me.
I might not have trusted Raffa’s goodness, but I knew he wouldn’t let me be taken and that those orders meant something to the men in his inner sanctum.
Not just because they were orders from their capo, but because I truly believed I meant something to them too.
Just as they meant something to me.
Raffa wasn’t the only person I’d missed in Italy.
There was no way for Ludo to get to me except by storming up the stairs onto the small landing, exposing himself to the gunman’s bullets.
But he seemed to have forgotten about me for the moment.
My mind worked so fast it ran into the idea headlong, making me wince.
Ludo fired a round of shots that didn’t connect and then was forced to duck around the curve as the man returned fire.
I sucked in a deep breath as I tried to gather every ounce of courage I possessed and transform it into kinetic energy.
When the man ceased firing to move slowly toward the staircase with his gun raised, I took my opportunity.
The landing was small enough that it only took me a single leaping bound to ram myself into the unknown gunman with the full weight of my charging 110 pounds.
The force made him stagger sideways, his head hitting the bulbous iron bell with a dull knell that vibrated faintly through the tower.
I almost winced in sympathy at the contact, but he was already reaching for me, probably trying to use me as a human shield against Ludo, who was charging up the stairs.
I evaded his reaching arm, but he raised his gun with the other and fired off a shot.
It was poorly aimed, but that didn’t matter with Ludo racing up to the stairs toward us, caught between the narrow walls.
The sound of Ludo’s pained grunt drew my attention momentarily away from our assailant, and I watched my friend fall to one knee at the top of the stairs, hand pressed to his side.
Before I’d come to Italy for the first time, I had never known violence. It had been as abstract as a staged fight scene on the television screen or a chapter in a spy thriller, something intangible enough that I had never had to think about how it would apply to me.
Did I have the capacity to be violent?
I would have laughed and said, unequivocally, even righteously, absolutely not.
I’d never even killed a spider.
Yet there I was, standing at the top of an ancient bell tower with shots ringing out around me, a wounded friend at my back and a strange shooter before me, and the only thing I could think about was protecting Ludo, protecting myself, at all costs.
So as the gunman righted himself against the wall and took a step forward with his weapon trained on Ludo, the small American girl completely forgotten, I rushed him again.
Throwing all my weight low into the side of his exposed torso, I pushed the stranger up against the half wall in the open archway, and then, when he tried to swing the gun my way, I planted both hands on his chest and shoved with all my might.
Our eyes locked for one unnaturally elongated moment, the previously pleasant mask he’d worn to convince me to go with him quietly eradicated by fury and disbelief.
I felt his weight give way under my hands, the rush of air as his body tipped over the ledge, legs kicking up to try to regain some semblance of balance. A foot kicked me hard in the shoulder, a parting blow before he was suddenly gone.
I lunged over the stone wall to watch, morbidly fixated and horrified by my own actions, as he went tumbling through the air to land with a sickening thud in the piazza.
The wine revelers nearby screamed and scrambled away while one or two noble people ran to the fallen man’s side to see if they could help.
There was no help for him.
He was dead, and I had been the one to kill him.
When a hand clamped over my shoulder, I screamed before I remembered that Ludo was up here with me. I turned to find his face pale and sheened with sweat, one hand pressed to his side, blood bubbling between his fingers.
“Grazie,” he murmured, reeling me in for a hug against his uninjured side. “Grazie, amica mia. I am sorry I could not stop him before you had to.”
I curled into Ludo’s body, oxen-strong and steady even with a serious wound. He smelled like cypress trees and gun oil. It shouldn’t have been comforting, but it was because it reminded me of Raffa.
“I killed him,” I whispered into his chest. “I killed someone, Ludo.”
“Si, Guinevere,” he agreed in as soothing a voice as I had ever heard from him.
He led me toward the stairs with one arm around my shoulders, as if I was the injured one.
Even though my shoulder ached and I felt close to vomiting, I wrapped my arm around Ludo’s waist in an effort to support him too as we started down the spiral stairs.
“I’m a killer,” I breathed as the dead man’s face flashed in my mind like a strobe light at a disco, something epilepsy inducing that jerked through my entire system.
“No, sei colei che mi ha difeso,” Ludo grunted over the chaos of the door at the base of the tower slamming open against the opposite wall and multiple footsteps thundering up the steps toward us.
“It doesn’t matter why I killed him,” I murmured, knowing that taking a life had shifted something fundamental, tectonic, inside me, revealing dangerous cracks in the foundation of my soul for something hot and hazardous to seep through. “Only that I did.”