Chapter 14 Giovanni
GIOVANNI
The city gives you a half-second warning before it tries to kill you.
It’s never the noise. Noise comes later.
It’s the silence that tips me off…the way traffic stalls too cleanly at the far end of a Red Hook side street, the way pedestrians thin without explanation, the way the air tightens like a held breath.
I don’t have time to tell Lucia. Only to roar the order that surges up my throat.
“Down!”
I’m already moving, pulling her hard against me as the first shot cracks through the air and peppers the bulletproof glass behind where her head was a heartbeat earlier.
She gasps, but she doesn’t scream as the first barrage pounds us with unrelenting force.
Good girl.
I don’t need to tell my men to move.
But we only make it half a block before the second wave comes. More firepower than before.
Fuck.
First, I hear bullets ricocheting off metal, then I feel the unmistakable buckling as it begins to give way.
“Get us out of here. Now!”
I twist us, my body taking the brunt of the impact as we’re slammed into the side of another vehicle.
Pain blooms hot and immediate across my shoulder, sharp enough to make my vision white at the edges.
Worth it. Always worth it, because I’m still alive.
“Giovanni—”
“I’ve got you,” I snap, pushing her down into the footwell, one hand fisted in the back of her coat, the other already drawing my weapon in preparation for when the severely cracked glass shatters. “Whatever happens, do not move.”
They’ve chosen their ground well: gritty, semi-private, a service alley feeding into a half-abandoned industrial strip just inside the city limits.
Close enough for chaos but isolated enough for blood.
Bellandi’s shadowy signature.
Another impact hits the SUV like a hammer blow. A brutal, metallic thud that makes even bulletproof glass shudder in its frame.
My eyes narrow, recognising the sound with a twist in my gut.
Armour-piercing.
Of course.
The second round spiders the window in a sharp white bloom, the laminated layers holding for now, but I can hear the stress in it, the thin scream of something engineered being forced beyond its limit.
We’re pinned.
Front and rear, both sides boxed in by the narrow Red Hook street, the warehouses looming like indifferent witnesses. Traffic has stalled too neatly at the far end, cars abandoned at odd angles as if the city itself has been instructed to look away.
“Stay down,” I bark, already twisting back.
Lucia’s tucked into the footwell exactly where I’ve shoved her, her hands clenched tight, her breathing fast but controlled. She promised me. She’s keeping it.
Good.
I press my palm against the centre console, feel the hidden latch give under my thumb as a panel slides back with a soft hydraulic hiss.
Lucia’s eyes widen when she sees what’s been beneath our feet all this time. Beneath the leather and luxury is what Dragoni territory always is beneath the surface—
An armoury.
Compact. Efficient. Purpose-built.
I tuck my pistol into my waistband and grab the nearest heavier weapon without thinking. An HK MP5K, short-barrelled and vicious, made for close quarters and urban slaughter.
My jaw tightens as another round slams into the glass.
Fuck, they’re now hitting from all sides.
More vehicles. Bellandi’s crew has us bracketed, a kill box designed to make even my security hesitate. I taste the trap in the air.
I grit my teeth, shifting forward, preparing to kick out what remains of the window and take the street the old way—
Then salvation arrives in steel.
A Dragoni SUV rockets into view and T-bones the car on our left with catastrophic force.
Metal screams.
The vehicle lifts, flips, tumbles end over end down the street like a toy kicked by a god, glass and smoke exploding outward as it rolls.
One threat neutralised. But one remains.
The SUV on the right revs, engine snarling, men already moving to reposition.
Lucia’s pressed against my legs now, small and furious and breathing fast, her hands clutching my thighs like she’s anchoring herself to me. More shots spiderweb the glass and she flinches, going paler.
A thought hits me like a blade, cutting deep. Maybe I should have left her on the island.
It’s there and gone in an instant, swallowed by rage, by fear, by the knowledge that there is no world where I would ever choose distance over her again.
My hand finds her head instinctively, fingers threading briefly through her hair, a touch too intimate for a moment like this and yet unavoidable.
She looks up at me from the footwell.
A long, fierce look, punctured with alarm, then resignation.
She knows what I’m about to do. Knows she cannot stop me.
A fierce sparkle lights her eyes, sharpened by a hint of tears. But she blinks it away fast.
“We’re not done tussling. So don’t fucking die,” she whispers, the words scraped raw from somewhere deep.
I bare my teeth. “Don’t plan to, dragunidda,” I rasp back.
Then I’m gone.
The door flies open and the street hits me like a slap: salt air, oil, gunpowder, the sharp metallic tang of violence.
I assess in one heartbeat.
Then I fire without hesitation, taking out the nearest shadow before he finishes raising his gun. Another one goes down screaming as my driver returns fire from behind the car.
The rest of Bellandi’s men take cover behind their vehicles, two on the far side, one crouched low with another armour-piercing rifle.
They expected me to stay trapped. They forgot what I am.
Feral focus locks in and I raise the MP5K and fire.
Controlled bursts.
Accurate.
The first man jerks back, red blooming across his chest. The second tries to move and doesn’t get the chance.
My men are with me now, returning fire from behind our SUV, the street erupting into chaos as bullets chew through metal and concrete alike.
Engines hiss as steam pours from ruptured radiators and blood slicks the asphalt in dark, obscene ribbons.
A round grazes my shoulder: hot, sharp, but not deep enough to slow me. Not today. Not when she’s in that car.
Bellandi thought he could touch what’s mine. He’s just signed his death warrant.
I snarl as another shooter appears at the mouth of the alley.
I step into his line of fire deliberately, drawing it to me, and feel the punch of impact tear across my ribs. It burns. Blood is already soaking my shirt but I barely register it.
All I see is Lucia.
Alive. Unhurt. A promise I intend to keep.
I return fire and he drops.
Yard after yard, I push them back with my men until they’re the only stragglers left.
Walking backwards to the car, I double-check my surroundings once more, then yank the door open.
“Time to move, amuri,” I growl, hauling her with me towards the service door I clocked the second we entered the street.
My men close in around us, efficient, lethal, but I don’t let go of her. I don’t trust anyone else with her body. With what’s mine.
The door slams shut behind us, plunging us into darkness that smells like oil and rust and old concrete.
The gunfire outside fades into echoes.
Silence crashes down.
Lucia turns to me, eyes wild, hands already on my chest, then my shoulder, then the blood.
“You’re hurt.”
“I don’t care,” I snap, already pulling her closer, already running my hands over her back, her legs, her throat, my touch uncharacteristically frantic. “Answer me. Are you hit?”
She shakes her head quickly, hands fisting in my jacket, anchoring herself the same way she did in the street. “No. I’m not. I swear.”
Only then does the tension break, just a fraction.
My forehead drops to hers, our breaths colliding in the dark, my hands still braced hard at her waist like if I let go she’ll vanish.
For a heartbeat, I’m not Don Dragoni. I’m not a tactician or a killer or a man built for war.
I am a man who very nearly lost his wife.
A wife who feels the next tremor that seizes my body. Tosses it about like a leaf in the wind.
“You’re not, though. Are you?” she mutters.
“I’m fine. We’ll be safe here until the culos are taken care of.”
Even as she nods, her gaze is tracking all over me. She stops when she sees the wet patch on my shoulder.
“Gio, you’re bleeding really badly.”
She rarely uses my abbreviated name. And when she does, I pay attention. “I said I’m fine.”
She doesn’t listen.
Surprise.
“Let me see.” Her hands shake as she presses them against me, breath coming fast, her pupils blown wide with adrenaline and fear and something else I don’t let myself name yet.
I cup her face hard enough that she stills. “Look at me,” I command.
She does.
“It’s nothing more than a scratch. I’m still standing. Capisci?”
Her gaze darts frantically between mine.
Then it slows. Holds steady.
And I’m not sure why my insides flip and twist with dizziness. Almost elated by the fierce thing that looks like trust in her eyes.
But I throttle it before it consumes me whole.
Even as I suspect it will bloom until it overtakes every corner of my existence.
Lucia
The world doesn’t come back in tiny fragments of relief.
It slams into me. Hard.
Sound, heat, the echo of gunfire still ringing in my bones, the smell of blood sharp in my nose, and Giovanni, right in front of me, too solid, too close, his hands on my face like he’s afraid I’ll disappear if he loosens his grip.
He faced bullets that could’ve torn him to absolute pieces.
That memory of those tense seconds alone in the car, when I didn’t know if he was alive or dead, shatters my calm and my relief.
I shove at his chest, fury breaking through the shock. “You absolute asshole! W-what if something had happened to you? What if—”
“What?” he cuts in, voice rough. “What if I’d done nothing? Just let them have you? Only over my fucking dead body,” he seethes.
My breath stutters.
A sob rips through me. Then he’s yanking me into his body suddenly, hard and uncompromising, one arm braced around my back, the other at my hip, grounding me, claiming me, anchoring me to the fact that we are both still alive.
I feel everything then.
The fear. The rage. The heat still roaring through my veins.
And something darker. Something feral.
“You…this scared me, Gio,” I whisper, my forehead pressed to his chest, to the blood-warm fabric of his shirt.
His voice drops. “Good. Means you’re beginning to understand what you are to me.”
I pull back, my hands sliding up his arms, over muscle, over the place where he’s hurt, my body buzzing with too much sensation to contain.
“You could have died,” I say as I stare down at the smear of his blood on my fingers.
“Don’t let the Brioni fool you, ragazza. It’s been a while, sure, but nothing has changed. This life, with all its dangers and thrills, still flows through me. And whatever comes, I triumph. Every fucking time. Don’t forget that.”
The words hang between us, heavy and unavoidable.
And then something in me breaks open.
I grab his face and I leap up into him, kissing him with all the raw desperation fuelled by the fact that we are here, breathing, touching, and while he arrogantly believes he’s invincible, tomorrow is not guaranteed.
He kisses me back like he’s been starving.
The gun he was still holding clatters to the ground, forgotten, and his hands are everywhere.
My back hits the cold concrete wall and his body shields me from the world, from everything, mouth hot and unrelenting and his breath harsh against my skin.
Tongue and teeth and sucking lips drag groans of need and desire from our souls.
His fingers cup my core through my dress and mine finds the stone-hard shape of him.
The soundtrack of our lust is interspersed with gunfire and, God, I couldn’t care less.
We stop only because we have to, because the line we’re standing on is trembling under the weight of everything we’ve been holding back.
He rests his forehead against mine, breathing hard. “I hate to stop this…but, amuri, this is not how I planned it,” he says.
I laugh shakily. “You sure? I could’ve sworn you plan everything.”
“Not this,” he admits. “Not here.”
The admission guts me. Or maybe it’s the residue of danger, the intoxicating effect of Giovanni’s torrid kiss.
Whatever it is makes me lace my fingers into his jacket, holding him there.
“What if I said I don’t care? That I don’t want to be brave or managed or seduced right now?”
His thumb brushes my cheek, surprisingly gentle. “Then I’ll say you don’t have to be any of those things.”
I swallow. The next step feels as inevitable as breathing, as vital as clinging to this life we’ve tested and maybe triumphed over tonight.
“And what if I said I want more?”
The look he gives me then, dark, hungry, reverent, tells me everything I need to know.
That this time, neither of us will pull away.