Chapter 18
Aurora
When Curse’s anchoring hold is ripped from my neck, I feel like a kite whose string has been cut. Like I’m floating, directionless, trapped until the wind takes hold of me and either lifts me higher or sends me crashing to the ground.
Impact slams us, and it’s like gravity has been turned inside out. Sloshing inside my skull, my brain can’t make sense of all the input. I can do nothing but go limp in disaster’s hold. As if in slow motion, I watch Curse’s gun go spinning through the air between us, as serene as a snowflake.
A second impact, even worse than the first, wrenches my body, flinging my bones against seatbelt and airbags. Motion slams to a stop so fast I’m dizzied by inertia.
I blink dazedly, my ears ringing, my head still spinning from that floating, lost-kite feeling. Does it take seconds or hours for me to orient myself in the carnage? We’re at the bottom of a steep slope, the front driver’s side of the SUV smashed up against the gnarled trunk of an old tree.
Curse is slumped at the steering wheel, unconscious.
Or worse.
“No!” My fingers are entirely numb as I fight with my seatbelt. Finally freeing myself with an agonized sob, I kneel on my seat, barely feeling the scrape of broken glass at my knees.
“Curse,” I stammer, my hands shaking as they pass over his face, his neck. “Curse, love, please!”
He’s breathing, the rhythm of it shallow and unsteady, but there.
Letting out another sob, this time one of shattering relief, I begin a panicky catalogue of his injuries.
Blood streams from his nose, and from the side of his face where he was already cut by the breaking mirror.
From this angle, I can’t see any other wounds, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t there.
“Curse,” I begin again, as if by merely saying his name I can call him back to consciousness. “Curse, I-”
I hear the passenger side door open too late to react.
When a fist forms around the loose strands of my hair and yanks mercilessly, my body goes sailing backwards from the force.
Screaming, throat feeling like it’s ripping apart, my hands shoot to my scalp.
Adrenaline lights me up, and I start bucking, kicking, even fucking growling as I am dragged out of the vehicle.
I’m released as soon as I’m out of my seat, and I fall the rest of the way to the ground, pressure punching into my tailbone and spine.
I’ve landed in a shallow, freezing stream, the water seeping into my clothing, the rocks cutting my palms and thighs as I wrench my head back to take in the man who stands above me.
His hair is plastered to his skull from the rain. He’s not looking at me, but at the vehicle instead. I know who he is, I know this is Alessandro, but some memory has been pried loose in the crash, and for a jarring second I see only Carlo Messina now, standing beneath Sicily’s sky.
He raises his gun, aiming it at Curse’s head.
“No!”
I didn’t even know my body could move as fast as it does in that instant. Rocketing from the ground, I fling myself at Alessandro’s arm, almost like I’m hugging it, putting my full weight on it. The gun goes off, but it doesn’t find its mark. The bullet goes flinging off into the forest.
The sound that rips from Alessandro’s throat then is one of pure, animal rage. He tries to shake me off, but I won’t go. Won’t release his arm.
Snarling, he spins, slamming me against the side of the SUV. The wind’s knocked out of me, and I gasp uselessly, limbs gone limp as he aims his gun into the car again.
He’s going to shoot Curse. Right in fucking front of me. He’ll actually end things this time.
And there isn’t a single fucking thing I can do to stop it. My body is no longer responding to my screaming brain. Time slows, and everything tilts, the planet knocked off its axis.
Maybe that’s because my entire fucking world is in that car.
“I’ll kill myself.”
It’s only when Alessandro hesitates, then turns his burning hazel eyes on me, that I realize I’ve spoken at all. I don’t know where the words came from, but they’ve clearly had an effect, so I say them again.
“I’ll kill myself. If you shoot him. You won’t get Buffalo. You won’t get a bride. You won’t get anything.”
A maddened laugh bubbles out of him then.
“You think I’m gonna leave this prick alive?” He points at Curse with the gun, and my heart wails inside my chest. “The Titone fucking assassin? He will never stop hunting me if I do.”
“Yes, he will!” I stammer. “He doesn’t give a shit about me!”
“Bet he gives a shit about Buffalo, though. Enough to slit my fucking father’s throat.” He sneers. “If him killing my dear papà hadn’t put such a golden opportunity before me, I’d have to shoot him just for that alone.”
“You’re…You’re happy he killed your father?” I recoil from that, the sheer, cruel unnaturalness of it. But his sneer only widens, deepens, turns his entire face into something gruesome.
“Of course,” he replies without hesitation. “Killing bosses – even if they’re fathers – is often the only way to make things happen in this world. Why the fuck do you think that I killed yours?”
My breath lurches.
“What?” I try to swallow. But I can’t. “Papà died of an aneurysm! He-”
“He died of a fatal case of bullet-in-the-brain-itis,” Alessandro interrupts.
“I should know. Since I’m the one who fucking put it there.
” He shakes his head. “You are so damn clueless it’s fucking pathetic.
Why do you think your step-mamma Mia ran off to Texas and remarried so damn fast?
She fucking walked in on me, came cruising right in through the front fucking door, right after I did it.
” He raises his gun in the air like it’s a trophy.
“I told her she could either have a nice, shiny bullet of her own, or she could disappear and never fucking come back.”
I’d always wondered how she could leave me the way she did. We’d always been close, more like best friends or sisters than stepdaughter and stepmother. She didn’t even stick around for the funeral. That had hurt me so much.
But now I understand why.
“You killed my father. Why?”
“Why the fuck do you think?” The gun slashes through the air ash he waves his arm. “To start the clock on your inheritance transferring over to us. Your papà kept dragging his feet, wobbling back and forth, not committing to wedding dates. Eventually, he ran out of time.”
So that’s why the wedding came together in a frantic flurry after papà’s death. I’d questioned what the rush was. Why it all had to happen so fast.
“Out of time,” Alessandro repeats, more quietly his time. “Just like Curse Titone.”
“No.” The word comes out steady. Sure. “I meant what I said. If you kill him, then you’ve killed me.”
Alessandro looks like he wants to strangle me. And I’m sure he would, if he didn’t need me alive. It’s the only thing that gives my threat any power over him.
“But…But if you let him live,” I say, the words pouring from my mouth in a rush, like water, like blood. “I’ll annul my marriage to him. I’ll go with you to any lawyer, any judge. I’ll do whatever it takes to get you my inheritance.”
It’s the easiest promise in the world to make. Because Buffalo has been nothing but a weight around my neck, dragging me down. Drowning me. I’d trade it – and more, I’d trade fucking everything – for Curse’s life.
“I’ll marry you, Alessandro.”