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“Shit.” Alessandro slammed his hand over a button on the panel. “She’s getting away. Crawled into the hall,” he rasped, letting his family know Alice was on the move amid the chaos.
With the fog of the explosion settling down, Enzo—thank God—appeared on camera. He was on his feet, weapon drawn. “Which way did she go?”
Alessandro flipped through the different camera views, searching for her. “She’s heading upstairs. But you have incoming. The house has been breached. Three tangos by my count heading your way.”
“Roger that,” Enzo said while his brother and father rose.
I could see Nico and Giovanni now on the floor, surrounded by debris.
“You alive?” Constantine asked them.
“Yeah,” I heard someone respond between coughs.
“Stay here. Barricade yourselves,” Constantine ordered.
“You’re clear to move out,” Alessandro let them know as Angela turned away from the screens and Isabella walked her back to the daybed and sat with her.
“I’m switching to comms. I’ll be your eyes.” Alessandro positioned something into his ear; then he tapped it. “You copy?”
I couldn’t hear Enzo anymore, but he was in the hall now with Constantine and his father, and seconds after Alessandro warned them, I stifled a gasp with my hand when a man appeared and Enzo shot him without hesitation.
“You have a tango at the top of the stairs,” Alessandro alerted them next, and Constantine moved to the other side of the stairwell and ducked off to the side. The second a boot appeared, he reached between the banister and grabbed his ankle. The man stumbled, and Enzo, already waiting on one knee, threw a knife at him. It was like something from a movie. “You’re clear to move up.”
“Okay, maybe I can’t watch,” I admitted.
“What?” Alessandro quickly looked at me and shrugged while saying, “Chefs do that.”
His joke, if that was what it was, did nothing to ease my nerves. “I’m just, um ...” My attention landed on the outside view of the home, spotting even more bad guys there, all working hard to get inside, and their roadblock was the Costas’ security team.
“Enzo told me to tell you not to worry and please don’t watch.” Alessandro gently grabbed my arm. “He can hear you,” he mouthed.
I nodded in understanding; the last thing I wanted was to distract him. I went over to the daybed, and Angela and Isabella made room for me. Angela wrapped an arm around me like I was her daughter, too, which made me want to cry for whatever reason. Maybe it was because I was a mother, and I never wanted to suffer the kind of loss Angela had endured. God, I missed Chiara. But I was thankful she was far away from here.
Alessandro continued to guide and give directions to his family, but I couldn’t peel my eyes away from the screen, even from a distance.
The exterior camera had a view of the front of the house, and black Tahoes appeared, rolling over the gate that’d already been blown up by the Brambillas while Enzo had faced off with Alice in the study.
“Oh God. More of them?” I lurched to my feet, losing the battle to my anxiety, unable to keep calm.
Alessandro tapped his ear but didn’t look our way. “They’re FBI. We needed help. Hudson called in a favor earlier and then told them to wait for his call before they arrived.”
I nearly collapsed, shuddering from relief at their contingency plan.
Alessandro tapped his ear again. “I think Nico and Giovanni’s location has been compromised. I lost visual of the room. Camera is out. I don’t know what happened.”
“Are they dead?” Angela asked, and he looked back at her with apologetic eyes.
“I don’t know, Mom,” was all he said.
I forced myself to stand at his side again, watching as the Federal agents swarmed the house, dealing with the bad guys alongside the Costas’ security team.
“The Feds are converging on the house. If you want to kill her, you better do it before they stop you,” Alessandro quickly told Enzo and the others, continuing to flip through screens to try and find the woman responsible for murdering his sister.
“There!” I cried out at the sight of a flash of red from her suit on-screen. “Bianca’s room.”
Alessandro toggled the controls, shifting the camera angle around, and there she was. But she wasn’t alone.
“She’s in Bianca’s bedroom. And she has a gun to Nico’s temple,” Alessandro said. “She must’ve been the reason the cameras went out. She circled back downstairs to get a hostage.”
