Chapter 27
POV: Amanda
The door opens slowly, as if the man on the other side knows exactly how loud a quiet room can be. He fills the frame the way a storm fills the sky: low, broad-shouldered, suit ironed tight. Don Delacqua. Not the polite, smiling man from dinner — the Don who smells of old tobacco and older grudges.
“Don, it’s not a good time,” Adrian warned, voice tight. But Delacqua pushed inside anyway, carrying the weight of inevitability with him.
His gaze swept the office and stopped at the edge of Adrian’s desk. The papers lay scattered like a crime already confessed. His eyes narrowed, face flattening the instant he saw the photos, the maps, the wire transfers. For a beat, he didn’t move.
Then the world tilted.
“Mancini… traditori,” he hissed, traitors in Italian.
Control slipped away in a heartbeat. Voices erupted from the hall, men barking orders, boots striking marble, the rustle of jackets pulled back. Somewhere too close, the metallic click of a safety being switched split the silence.
Adrian stiffened, coiled tight as a spring. He didn’t reach for a weapon. He reached for me — like if he could hold me, maybe the world wouldn’t collapse, maybe we wouldn’t fall with it.
“Stay—” he starts.
There is no time.
A shot cracks. The first sound is small and obscene in the service room, and then everything explodes: glass shatters in the hall like crystal rain, heels hit marble like thunder.
Men shout in Italian and English. The air fills with smoke, the metallic sting of gunpowder, the scream of laughter and rage braided together.
My training eats the shock and makes room for motion. I don’t think — I move. Adrenaline unspools into my limbs, precise and cold. I snap for my purse without taking my eyes off the door. Two handguns, light and familiar, fall into my hands like second skin.
“Cover him!” I bark to Adrian’s men, though my shout is swallowed by chaos. I grab the edge of his heavy wooden desk and shove it, drag chairs, flip the small credenza with a grunt. The office buckles into a barricade — not elegant, but honest. It buys us inches.
A Mancini man ducks behind a pillar and fires; a Delacqua thug answers from the doorway.
The bullets start to tear the wood and plaster around us.
I slide into the world I know: breath, aim, fire.
One shot, two — I pick my targets, stop them from climbing the stairs.
That part of me that used to count kills in training ports into the present: sight, breath, trigger.
Adrian moves like a force—fast, animal. He takes a man down with a single, brutal sweep, his shoulder catching a bullet’s kiss that sprays my cheek with sparks.
We fall back to back without planning it, two blunt instruments of survival.
There is an uncanny rhythm to it: he covers the doorway, I cover the flank; a perfect, dangerous duet.
The room is chaos, but my hands are steady. I hit a chest, a shoulder, a knee that folds and doesn’t get up. I hear shouts, curses, someone collapsing like a sack of grain. I smell cordite and sweat and something coppery that makes my stomach turn.
Then a flash to my left. A muzzle blooms in the doorway — my head snaps and I see the angle, the man raising the rifle. He’s half-hidden behind an ornate screen. I squeeze off a round from the shoulder holster and the rifle twitches, but not enough. The man fires.
Time slows in a way that makes no sense: the world thins to the arc of a splintering sound and the little bright hot bloom searing across skin. I see the bullet’s path not as a physics problem but as a line headed straight for him — for Adrian. Instinct bulldozes training and calculation.
I step forward.
My body is a decision that overrides everything. I shove myself between the muzzle and his chest and the world detonates.
Pain arrives as a white, electric bloom in my thigh that steals my breath.
I don’t even feel blood at first; I feel only the wrongness of being struck and the sick, searing knowledge that I cannot stop this.
The rifle barked again as the shooter took a second shot—this one grazed my ribs and something hot and wet slid down my side.
Adrian’s voice is a raw animal sound — half scream, half plea. His hands close on me like steel. I feel him lift, unthinkingly, like the world makes room for him to carry me away. I taste copper and fear and the stink of gunpowder on his breath as he shouts at everyone.
“What the hell are you doing?” he roars into the chaos, rage tearing his insides out. “You are not my shield. You are not—”
“Because I love you,” I gasp, and the words break out of me ragged and certain. “I would rather die than watch you walk into it.”
His eyes find mine—panicked, wild, a raw thing pleading in the space where a king would normally stand. He sets me down behind the desk with a furious gentleness, pulling a cuff, searching for the wound like hands have done for him before, but this time clumsy with fear.
“Get her — get a doctor!” he barks in English, the command snapping men into motion. Someone’s fingers are on my leg, and suddenly everything is loud: running footsteps, the hiss of someone slamming a door, a phone clattering with a number dialed badly.
My world narrows to his face — the hard planes, the way his mouth trembles, the glitter of something like tears. He pulls me close and I hold onto whatever I can: the edge of the desk, his sleeve, the thudding of my own heart.
I try to stay with him. Pain steals the edges, make them soft and far. My vision blurs; the office lights smear into halos. A man curses close by and Adrian’s voice cuts through, impossible and full: “Stay with me, Amanda. Stay—”
I try to answer. My mouth tastes faint and metallic. My last clear thought is the certainty of the thing I said out loud — that I would die for him — and the sound of his name like a prayer. Then the room folds into dark.