39
LEVI
W e sprint outside as soon as we hear it. The frantic gunshots fill the skies, pop after pop until there’s just silence.
“Where did it come from?” Luca huffs.
I look left and right, my chest heaving as I scan the parking lot, but I can’t see anything. “Fuck knows.”
“No!” a scream tears through the parking lot to the left.
Luca takes off before me, but I’m close behind, drawing my gun out as we follow the cries.
“Help! Somebody!”
“Sera!?” I call out.
“I’m here!”
I search and search through the darkness, my eyes squinting in the hopes it will help me see better. We keep running forward through the dark until I can just make out the edge of Sera’s dress poking out from behind a car. I pick up speed, my feet moving faster than ever until I reach her.
We skid to a halt as our eyes land on the blood coating her and her beautiful dress, her arms holding Giovanni against her chest. Then my eyes move to a man with a bullet in the center of his head lying behind them.
“Gio, stay with me!” she orders.
Cazzo. There’s so much blood.
I drop to my knees, checking Giovanni’s pulse. It’s weak, but still there. His eyes are glassy and he’s clutching his jacket to his stomach, spitting out blood. At least he still has some strength in him to stay awake, but he’s still not in a good place.
Luca is behind me, already on the phone to Raf, ordering the doctor in. But I’m not so sure a doctor can help him. He needs to go to a hospital, which I know is out of the question. They’re out of our jurisdiction when it comes to payroll, so they’ll ask too many questions. We can’t risk it right now.
“Help me move him,” I say to Sera.
She nods obediently, sniffing as she pushes Giovanni upright.
He groans out. It’s going to be damn difficult getting him into the car— the man is built like a brickshit house and there’s no way Sera can lift him.
“Get the keys,” I tell her. She frantically searches his pockets, locating them after a few guesses. Once she’s got them, she stands up, darting towards where the car is parked.
Luca appears beside me, wiping his brow. “Raf’s getting the doc, but we need to go now.”
He’s right. I can hear the faint sirens in the distance, meaning we don’t have a lot of time. We need to disappear before anyone sees us. The last thing we want is more questions on top of the current accusations of dead bodies at the docks.
Together, Luca and I lift Giovanni. He slumps against us, still trying to stand. I admire his determination, but now isn’t the time for stubbornness. “Come on big fella,” I say, earning a scoff from Luca.
I hear the screeching of tires as Sera pulls up beside us in the SUV.
“You can drive?” Luca quizzes.
“Just because you insist on driving me around doesn’t mean I can’t do it myself. Now get the fuck in! ”
“You’re trusting her to drive?” Luca questions me, but I’m already opening the door and slipping inside.
Luca slides Giovanni over the seat to me, and with a pained groan, I drag him inside. Once we’re inside, Giovanni drops into my lap. Luca runs around the side of the car, and before the passenger door is even closed, Sera is peeling out of the parking lot and into the dark streets of Iris Bay.
I lock eyes with Sera in the mirror, her eyes watery yet focused. I know she’s doing everything she can to keep it together right now. It can’t be easy reliving the same thing over and over. First Enzo, now Giovanni.
She snaps her attention back to the road, accelerating and swerving between slower cars as blue and red lights speed past us in the opposite direction. She’s silent and focused, skilled at driving in the same way as only one other person I know. Sera takes a sharp corner and I grab the overhead handle, keeping Giovanni and I as steady as possible.
Luca curses, but Sera just smiles.
“Where the hell did you learn to drive like this?” Luca asks.
“Enzo,” we both answer with a smile.
Her concentration shines through in that moment, and I’m immediately taken back to when we were kids and the three of us would sneak out, hitting the streets to get up to mischief.
Sera was always painted as the perfect Bianchi Princess, but Enzo and I knew her better. She was stubborn and rebellious, searching for liberation as much as possible. Her father forbade her from driving, telling her she would never need it in this life because people like Giovanni would always be under her foot, willing to take her anywhere she needed to go. But independence was something Sera always chased, and Enzo helped by always, always , providing opportunities for her.
That’s how I’ve come to realize that there is more to Sera than I ever thought. She’s a queen, that’s for sure, but she doesn’t need anyone. She’s more than capable of getting the job done when she sets her mind to it, but with her upbringing, she’s still become someone who should be revered.
Effortlessly, Sera maneuvers us out of the city and onto the back roads. She never lets her gaze wander from the road, keeping two hands on the steering wheel. I sense it’s for Luca’s benefit more than anyone else because he hasn’t let go of the door handle since we left the city.
“Someone came after us,” she states, decelerating once she realizes nobody is chasing us.
“Who?” Luca quizzes. “The Vultures? I fucking knew we shouldn’t have trusted them!”
“At this point, do you really need to ask?” She raises her brow at Luca before turning her attention back to the road. She whips the SUV around another corner, the vehicle moving so smoothly that if I closed my eyes, it would feel like we were floating.
“The Verdis.”
I look down at Giovanni, but his eyes are closed.
“What were you doing out there anyway?” I ask.
Sera huffs, picking up speed as we hit a hill. “My father pissed me off,” she admits.
“Why the fuck did you leave, though?” Luca interrogates. “We were right there with you, all you had to do was say you wanted to leave.”
“It’s not that simple.”
“Like fuck it isn’t!” Luca snaps. “That could have been you back there!” He tosses a thumb over his shoulder toward me and Giovanni. “Or worse!”
“You think I haven’t thought about that already?! I was there, Fontana!”
Ouch. She only uses his surname when she’s pissed or playful, and the latter isn’t likely right now.
“The asshole had a gun to my head!”
“So why didn’t he pull the trigger on you?”
“I don’t fucking know!” she screams.
We all lapse into silence for a beat, the gravity of the situation thickening the tension with every second that passes. I notice her eyes in the mirror, and though she won’t look at me, I can tell this is hitting her hard.
I lean forward, resting a hand on her shoulder. “Sera?—“
“Don’t!” she snaps, shaking me off.
“Let me drive,” Luca urges, but she shakes her head.
“No,” she sniffles. “I need to focus.”
I’m pretty sure I know the answer to what she needs to focus on. Neither of us want to say it, but it definitely has something to do with Enzo and all the buried emotions she’s been fighting since his death.
After another ten minutes of excruciating silence, we pull up to the gates of Sera’s home. The guards wave her through, the look of confusion depicted on all of their faces at the sight of their leader driving. When we get to the courtyard, the doctor is already there waiting for us.
Sera gets out first, a march in her step as she rushes to speak to the doctor. While she’s busy, the twins rush out, immediately by our side and helping Giovanni out of the car.
He grumbles and groans, but he’s too out of it to say anything coherent. The blood pouring from his stomach has now spread across his crisp white shirt, his hands stained red, too. I look back in the car, and that too is covered in his blood.
So much blood.
“Get him to the kitchen,” Sera orders.
Luca gives her a pointed look.
“Unless you have a better idea?”
The only response she gets from Luca is silence. He shakes his head and all four of us take Giovanni into the house.
Raf is already waiting in the kitchen, a sheet of plastic covering the wooden surface of the table. We place Giovanni on it. There’s a level of disgust on all of our faces because this just looks fucked up, like we’re expecting the worst.
“Looks morbid, I know,” Raf comments. “Bianchi doesn’t exactly have an operating room here.”
“And I don’t think it’s time I invested in one either,” she remarks, joining us with the doctor by her side. Under the lights, I can see her clearer. Her skin is painted with smatters of dried blood—thankfully not her own. This dress is yet another she’ll have to trash, it’s not even salvageable at this point. The skirt is torn, blood caking every layer of the material. Despite the trauma, she still looks beautiful, and I have to admire the way she’s keeping herself together right now. If it were any lesser woman, they’d be falling apart.
The doctor slices through Giovanni’s shirt with medical shears, the material ripping through the silence. We all wait with bated breath as he orders the twins to turn Giovanni over so he can get a better look at the bullet wound.
“The bullet is still inside,” he murmurs, pressing gauze to Giovanni’s stomach.
“What does that mean?” Sera asks.
I press a hand to her shoulder. “It means he’s going to have to take it out.”
“Is he…” her voice quivers, but she quickly covers it with a cough, her fists tightening. “Will he be okay?”
The doctor huffs, already getting to work with his utensils. He’s probably done this a thousand times before because it doesn’t phase him in the slightest. He doesn’t ask questions, he just gets on with it. He sterilizes the wound with some clear liquid from a bottle kept in his case. Then his gloved hands start pressing at the surface of Giovanni’s skin, a finger sinking into the wound.
More blood pours, and Giovanni groans out.
“Can you sedate him?” Sera’s concern for her bodyguard grows dire by the minute.
“I can, Donna Bianchi. But I have no equipment to ensure he stays with us. He’ll have to endure it, I’m afraid.”
Sera takes a step back, her chest heaving as she watches the doctor prod at the wound again. He grabs forceps, asking the twins to hold Giovanni down. “This will hurt,” he reminds us all.
And fuck me, does it look like it hurts.
Giovanni writhes on the table. He stifles every cry and groan, but I can see Sera growing more agitated by the second. She chews on her thumbnail, like it’s the only thing keeping her anchored and strong .
The doctor keeps driving the metal instrument into Giovanni’s stomach in search of the bullet.
Giovanni groans out once more, then passes out.
And there’s just silence.
Clang.
“It’s out.”
Sera marches towards her bodyguard, kneeling down to the table and taking his hand. “Gio,” she whispers.
He’s out cold, though, and I don’t think he’ll be waking up anytime soon. The doctor is already filling a syringe full of some milky liquid, placing it on the table beside his other stained instruments.
It feels like time moves at a slower pace after that.
The doctor stitches Giovanni back up, cleaning the wound once more before placing a clean dressing over his work. More seconds tick by slower as he tells Sera to keep an eye on him. “The next twenty-four hours are crucial.”
She looks up at him with red eyes. It’s only now that I realize she’s been crying. “And then what?” she whimpers.
The doctor rests his now clean hands on her shoulder. “Rest. Lots of rest.”
Sera nods back, whispering her gratitude to the doctor before Raf walks him out.
But the silence doesn’t last long. It seems Luca hasn’t quite forgotten about how her and Giovanni got into this mess and he’s not about to let up.
“Sera,” he starts.
“Not now!”
“Then when?” he challenges. “When we’re all fucking dead?”
Sera spins around so fast that none of us see it coming. One minute she’s kneeling at Giovanni’s side, and the next her fist is connecting with Luca’s face.
“ Vaffanculo !” she screams, shaking her hand out.
“Are you fucking done?” he screams back at her, his jaw flaring red from the contact. “That could have been you.” He points a finger at the bodyguard still lying motionless on the kitchen table. I don’t think I’ll ever look at that table the same, but I don’t voice that thought.
“So you’ve said,” Sera barks.
“So tell me why the fuck you thought it was a good idea to leave without us?”
Sera glares back at Luca. They’re both so enraged that it’s probably going to take tranquilizers to calm them down. Whatever Sera’s father said to her tonight not only pissed her off, but tore a part of her open. She never lets mediocre shit get to her, and her father is definitely the least of her problems. So what the hell did he say? It must have been some messed up shit for Sera to be reacting like this.
“I don’t have to tell you shit,” she sneers.
Luca’s eyes widen and there’s no mistaking the shock and hurt swimming in them. “Ok,” he replies calmly—the calmest I’ve ever seen him. “Is that how it’s going to be?”
Sera doesn’t answer him. She’s too pissed off to give anyone a rational answer now and I don’t blame her. We all need a time out to calm down, get our shit together, and figure out our next steps.
Obviously, whoever came for her tonight isn’t the Vultures, unless we’ve been seriously betrayed. Though, I didn’t peg the gang for bartering loyalty only to throw it back in our faces. They wanted something dear to them, something that could have caused us serious harm in obtaining, and we delivered. At this point, they’d be stupid to fall back in with the Verdis.
The door slams behind us, signaling Luca’s departure. Sera flinches, but she doesn’t say another word. So I guess it’s up to me to fix it this time.