Wolfe #2
Francesca had already reloaded her shotgun and took out one then another.
But it was chaos, guys coming from the front and the rear, bullets everywhere.
I fired my rifle, but this time, they were expecting it.
In close quarters, the guns were actually more detrimental than helpful, so I used my gun to bash in a face before I punched another so hard he dropped.
I pulled out my knife and stabbed another in the throat while Francesca continued to pick off whoever with her shotgun.
I felt a bullet hit me in the back of the shoulder, and I screamed before I turned around and stabbed my knife clean through the spine of the asshole behind me.
Lifted him from the floor then used his body and his vest to protect myself from the spray of bullets that came at me like a tropical storm.
“Fuck off!”
The momentum of the bullets pushed me back, the force of everything the same as a charging Clydesdale. When the spray of bullets started to wane, I looked over to see Francesca standing behind them because their attention had been entirely focused on me.
She fired the automatic rifle, went through the entire magazine in just a couple seconds. “Fuck the fuck off!”
They all dropped to the floor.
I shoved the body off me and realized I’d been shot in the shoulder and the forearm, but I didn’t actually feel it. Just felt the warm blood drip down my body. “Baby, are you okay?”
She screamed a war cry, her eyes glistening with angry tears. She was deranged, like the adrenaline gave her that high that I spent my life chasing. She breathed hard and then abruptly started to cry.
“Baby, are you okay?” I asked as I rushed to her.
She nodded as the tears dripped down her cheeks, but then her eyes focused on my arm when she realized I’d been hurt. “No…no…you’ve been shot.” She snapped out of her catharsis and grabbed my arm, getting blood all over her fingers.
“I’m fine. I’ve got to kill off any more who are outside before they get away.”
She looked at my shoulder. “You’ve been shot twice—”
“You can clean me up after.”
“You could bleed to death.”
I grabbed the rifle from her hand then ripped the vest off a dead guy before I strapped it on, knowing I should have stored one here in case of something like this.
I ran outside and saw the headlights of the vehicles as they tried to speed off.
“Like I’m letting you assholes get away.
” I sprinted along the house to the road and then fired my rifle into the sides of their vehicles, hoping they weren’t bulletproof like mine.
When glass shattered, I knew they weren’t. One car veered off the road and crashed into the vineyard. The other kept going with a spray of bullets in the door, flooring it over the dirt road in the dark. Then a car appeared out of nowhere and chased him down, a car that I recognized as Andre’s.
I watched Andre pursue him while the adrenaline still pumped hard in my veins and nearly made them burst. I continued to bleed out from my wounds, but I didn’t notice the pain from the bullets embedded in my flesh.
Other cars pulled up, the headlights hitting me right in the face while I felt the rage dump on me like a bucket of cold water.
Warren.
I turned when I heard the sound of a door shut.
Leo stumbled out of the car as he moved toward the house, and with a look of abject horror, he stared at the destroyed house, all the windows shattered, with broken pieces reflecting from where they lay on the ground. His eyes wide, he trembled slightly as he started to pant. “Francesca…”
“She’s alright,” I said as I walked toward him. “She’s not hurt.”
But he continued to look at the house as if he didn’t hear a word I said. Overcome with shock and grief, he dropped to his knees.
“Leo, I said she’s okay.”
Tears formed in his eyes and streaked down his cheeks. He hadn’t reacted this way when Lombardi had hit the main house while Francesca was there alone, but perhaps because this was the second time, it was more than he could bear.
Francesca appeared in the open doorway, the door ajar from the way the guys had busted through it. She looked at her brother and saw him overwhelmed by emotion, and she ran to him.
He got to his feet and stumbled forward as he moved for her, grabbing her in his arms and squeezing her tight against him in an embrace I’d never seen them share before.
They had a decent relationship, but I never considered them particularly close.
But perhaps a near-death experience could change that in a heartbeat.
Another pair of headlights flooded my body as another vehicle came to a stop.
Doors shut, and then the lights turned off.
Don Mancini got out of the passenger door and walked toward me with his eyes on the house.
He didn’t react the way Leo had, his exterior calm as he saw the violence the house had endured.
“Francesca isn’t hurt.”
His eyes flicked past me to his daughter, who continued to embrace Leo thirty feet away. Then he looked at me again, seeing the blood running down my arm and soaking into my t-shirt.
“There were about twenty of them. Most of them are dead. I think a few got away.”
He took a few more steps before he stopped and stared at me.
“I’ll hunt them down.”
His eyes were absolutely rigid as he looked at me. He possessed such a deep focus it was unclear if he heard what I said. He regarded me exactly the way he had when we’d first met—like he didn’t trust me one fucking bit.
His eyes darted to Francesca behind me and then back to me.
Shit.
His eyes moved away again, flicking to where my Range Rover was parked around the side of the house, an impossible spot to access if the house had been surrounded by the enemy. When his stare shifted back to me, it possessed the flames of the underworld. “How did you get here so quickly, Wolfe?”
If I hadn’t been here, Francesca would be kidnapped or dead. But that didn’t seem to register.
“How did you get here so quickly?” he repeated, a vein popping in his forehead that I’d never noticed before.
I held his stare without remorse or fear because I felt neither of those things.
This was not how I wanted the don to find out I was sleeping with his daughter.
Caught in the act, my pants around my ankles, with my dick wet.
I wanted to tell him to his face like the honorable man that I was.
But circumstance and Francesca’s protests had led us here—to our doom. “You already know.”
I heard footsteps behind me, heard people enter the house.
Francesca’s inaudible words trailed into the distance as she took Leo inside to show him the damage the shootout had caused.
In the morning light, the full extent of the violence would be revealed, with the bullet holes in all the surfaces and the blood on the walls and the floor.
Don Mancini didn’t take his eyes off me.
Salvatore had driven him here, and he silently excused himself from this conversation by walking to the house to join Francesca and Leo inside.
The don didn’t scowl or clench his jaw or show any particular outward reaction, but his eyes were more venomous than the strike of a king cobra.
It looked like he wanted me in a grave he dug with his own shovel.
“You were a stray dog that needed a home, and the second I invited you inside, you shit all over my floor.”
“This is not how I wanted you to find out—”
“The manner of discovery doesn’t change the extent of the crime. I trusted you, initiated you into this family, and all the while, you’ve been sneaking around and screwing my daughter—”
“I’m not screwing her—”
“Interrupt me again, and I’ll shoot you between the fucking eyes, boy.
” He took quick steps toward me and pointed his finger right between his eyes.
He tapped the spot then pointed at me, his nostrils flared like a wild cat’s.
“You shake my hand, and then the second I turn around, you stab me in the back.”
I continued to stand there, blood dripping down my arm to my hand before the drops hit the dirt. “That’s not my interpretation.”
“That tree bears the mark of my forefathers and my brothers…and now it bears the crest of a traitor. A disrespectful son-of-a-whore who tracks mud all over my house from his filthy boots. You’re a snake in my garden, Judas at my supper, a hyena in my pride—”
“I love her.”
The rage remained in his eyes, but he was clearly stunned into silence.
“I love her. I would die for her. I’d ask her to be my wife if I thought she would say yes.”
His eyes remained volcanic as he looked at me.
“And with all due respect, I don’t give a damn if you’ve got a problem with that.”
His angry eyes narrowed as his shoulders stiffened.
“I don’t want to kill you, Don. But try to come between us, and I fucking will.”
He inhaled a slow breath, pissed off and obviously in disbelief.
“She’s a grown-ass woman who can make her own decisions—and I earned her.
” I slammed my fist into my chest. “I kept you alive when Lombardi played you. I killed all those assholes who attacked Francesca and hung the survivors from that historic oak. When that shithead disrespected her at the wedding, I defended her because she’s my woman and like hell will I let anyone talk to her that way.
And if I hadn’t been here tonight, she would have been kidnapped or shot.
Every single one of you would be dead if it weren’t for me—and don’t you fucking forget it. ”
He silently seethed as he listened to me, his eyes like two angry bullets.