“I’m fine,” I brushed it off.
I glanced up at my uncle as he tucked his gun away, then reached to pull both me and Alara into a bear hug, nearly suffocating me in the process and making my ribs scream. But I didn’t pull away.
“Charlotte?” Alara asked, sounding all stuffy from crying.
“On her way back to the apartment with Ezzy and Brio. She’s okay. Are you okay?” He pulled back, framing my face. “Fuck, kid.”
“I’m fine.”
“His face was slammed into the floor,” Alara said. “He needs to get checked out.” She sniffed hard. “And his ribs. I think he was kicked in the ribs.”
“I’m fine,” I insisted. “She was strangled. Twice.”
Uncle Chris reached for both of us, pulling us each under one arm, taking turns kissing our heads like little kids.
“They dead?” he asked Zeno.
“Oh, yeah.” Then, voice lower, “On me. Not him.” Then, a second later, “Though, he does have good aim.”
I wasn’t about to admit it was thanks to endless hours with friends playing paintball or Airsoft.
Alara’s hand was on my face, pressing into my cheek. “He saved me,” she told my uncle. “Twice. Or maybe three times. It’s all blurring together.”
Uncle Chris’s arm tightened around me. “Happy to hear it. But also, don’t ever fucking do that to me again.”
“Chris,” a stern voice called, making all of us turn to find the capo dei capi himself standing there. In his pajamas. Which was kind of funny. Everyone was in their pajamas, actually. “Salvatore is on his way to the clinic. I want them both checked out.”
“I was already planning on it.”
“But I need to know what happened.”
Alara and I both launched into it then, filling in the gaps for each other as more and more Costa men filed into the apartment.
“Where’s the drive?” Lorenzo asked when we were done.
“I still have it. Stupid fucks didn’t see it sticking out of my damn laptop,” Zeno said, shrugging, as a man who had to be his brother grabbed his chin and turned his head to check out his steadily darkening black eye.
“Okay. I’m gonna need to get Silvano in here. And we all know how that’s gonna go. So let’s start clearing out. Not you,” he said to Zeno. “Nero is parked outside with my car. Take it to go see Salvatore.”
With that, we were dismissed.
Stuffed in the back of the town car, the whole night came back to me in flashes.
And I knew two things.
I would absolutely do it again if I needed to, no matter what my uncle thought.
And I wanted to go into the family business.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Christopher
It would forever go down in history as the night that all hell broke loose.
Charlotte getting sick was bad enough.
Then the hospital visit, where she cried about having to get stuck for the IV and looked sweaty and red in the hospital bed until, finally, the fluids, meds, and cooling blankets did their job.
