Chapter Nineteen Guinevere #3
“You have the eyes of your father,” my aunt said. “Of your grandmother.”
“What’s your name?” I asked the elderly woman, who was still cupping my face, her thumb rubbing back and forth along my cheekbone.
“Giulia,” she said with a tremulous smile.
“Hi, Giulia,” I replied, pressing a kiss to each of her silken cheeks.
She beamed at me.
“And these are my sons, Circo and Ottavio,” Ginevra introduced the two preteen boys, one of whom I’d also seen at the church with Giulia.
“I’m glad you broke the G naming tradition,” I said, which prompted my aunt to laugh. “It was a bit much.”
Behind me the door opened, Gaetano ushered in by a soldato I didn’t recognize. He stopped in his tracks when he saw me there, face screwing up with distaste.
“What is she doing in here?”
“She is family,” Ginevra pointed out. “Just because you do not trust her yet does not mean she shouldn’t be kept safe.”
“I am safer out there than you are,” I countered. “They’re here for me.”
“To take you away again and use you against us,” Gaetano said, his brows so knit together they were one thick black squiggle from a marker drawn across his face. “We will not give you up to be manipulated again.”
I looked at the man who had raised my father and wondered how Dad could have become the kind of man I knew today. There were shades of the iron will and stubbornness that must have come as a product of this life, but John Stone was otherwise kind, caring, and thoughtful.
This paranoid creature who would waterboard his own granddaughter while claiming to want to welcome her into the family was the kind of monster Raffa had claimed to be. Two faced, violent as a baseline, convinced always that his way was the best.
It was ironic that this kind of man was exactly whom Dad and Raffa had warned me against, thinking themselves inherently monstrous too.
I could say with a clear heart that they were not.
And neither was I.
But that did not mean I wouldn’t do something monstrous when my loved ones were threatened. Or when I was.
So I fixed a trembling pout to my mouth, ran to Gaetano, and threw my arms around his neck to sniff into his shoulder.
“I’m so sorry,” I gasped. “I was afraid and confused, but I just want it all to go away. Please, make it all go away.”
Gaetano was stiff in my embrace for a moment before the hand holding his cane came up to thump me gently on the back.
“Hush now. Do not worry. Your nonno will take care of it.”
I lifted my head from his suit jacket just enough to peer around his arm at the soldato who had come inside with him. He stood close, a personal bodyguard.
Close enough that if I shoved Gaetano just a little bit as I nuzzled closer for comfort, I could snag the gun dangling from his right hand . . .
Gaetano stumbled back a step as I pushed forward, the guard reaching to steady him with his left hand. He was distracted by the movement, lulled into a false sense of security behind the locked door of the panic room with only the Pietra family inside.
So it was almost too easy to grab the gun and wrench it to the side, twisting his wrist to such an extreme angle he barked out a curse. Gaetano was between us, so it was impossible for him to get a good grip on me as I took the gun for myself.
Shuffling so that my back was to the side wall, I leveled the gun at Gaetano, then swept it across the room.
Ginevra sat with Giulia and her sons on the love seat, staring at me with more curiosity than fear.
Gaetano’s gaze was one of indignant fury.
“You will not shoot us,” he proclaimed. “This is your first time holding a gun, if I had to bet.”
It wasn’t.
I’d held one at the Beaumont Building what felt like years ago but was only weeks prior in Michigan, when those thugs had tried to take me away.
But he was right in that I had never fired one before.
I raised a brow at my grandfather and smiled, all teeth and peeled-back lips. “I know enough to hit a target four feet from me.”
Gaetano shifted quickly for a man of his age, snapping his cane up with one hand to knock it against my wrist. The impact smarted, the weapon swerving to the right.
To the soldato, who used Gaetano’s distraction to lunge for me.
Without a second’s hesitation, I pulled the trigger.
The bullet caught him in the upper shoulder and hardly slowed him down.
So I fired again, his torso only a foot from mine. The kickback from the gun bit into my hand, but I hardly felt it through the adrenaline.
This time, the bullet blasted through his chest cavity, the force so much greater because it was at point-blank range.
When he hit me, it was in a stumble, his breath a thin thread of air whistling through his throat. I shoved him off me, and his body fell to the side against the wall, alive but not for long.
Gaetano stared at me as if he had never seen me before.
Which was funny, in a way, because I had never felt more myself.
There was a loud bang at the door, not as if someone knocked but as if a body was crushed against it. Gaetano pulled his own silver handgun out of its shoulder holster and shuffled back away from the door.
“It will hold,” Ginevra reassured him. “It’s reinforced. No one will get in using force.”
All of us waited with eyes on the door, only the dying man’s gurgling breaths to punctuate the silence.
“Guinevere, get back here,” Ginevra hissed as a mechanical whirr sounded.
“I’m fine here,” I insisted, but one glance behind me showed my aunt standing before Giulia and her sons, fierce and proud like a female warrior staring down the barrel of her gun.
“They must be friendly if they know the code,” Circo whispered. “Right, Mamma?”
The whirr continued until there was a loud beep and the heavy door began to swing open.
Gaetano fired into the narrow gap, once, twice, three times.
“Non sparate,” someone called out from the other side.
Hold fire!
My grandfather froze, his mouth puckering in tart surprise, while behind me Ginevra gasped.
Then again, I did too.
Because I would have known that voice anywhere. It had read to me before bed, soothed me through multiple hospital visits, and bantered with me my entire life.
The door pushed open farther, and John Stone, born Mariano Giovanni Pietra, stepped into the room wearing a bulletproof vest over his dress shirt, a semiautomatic rifle strapped across his chest as casually as a fanny pack.
“Ciao, papà,” he said. “Are you happy to see me?”
Behind him, Raffa emerged in his own bulletproof vest, blood from a shallow cut weeping down his neck. His eyes immediately found mine, darkening as they took in my damp clothes and hair, the blood spatter from the fallen soldato at my feet.
Without hesitation, he stepped around Dad and pistol-whipped Gaetano, who fell to his knees with a sharp cry.
“Did you do this to her?” Raffa asked, his words as clear and cold as ice carved from an Arctic glacier.
Gaetano spat a wad of blood at his feet. “She was defending the man who killed my sons.”
Raffa arrested completely before a snarl retook his features. He looked utterly feral in that moment, filled with animal fury and a base sense of right and wrong that was entirely founded on his own skewed code.
It was magnificent to behold.
Especially knowing that a crime against me had inspired it.
“What did he do to you?” Dad asked, staring at me in anguish. He looked simultaneously older than his years and younger. I could see the old version of himself transposed against the man he was now like a palimpsest.
“They filmed it to send to you,” I said, surprised that my voice did not waver even though it was rough from choking on water and crying out with distress. “They waterboarded me for information about Raffa. About you.”
Raffa cursed viciously in Italian, but it was my dad who shocked me.
John Stone, the same man who was a leading financial adviser and owner of the largest investment firm in the Midwest, the man who followed his routines like gospel, without deviation, who volunteered at the local homeless shelter and held me every single time I cried, stepped up to his father’s kneeling form and put a bullet straight through his head.