Page 159

By the time we cleared the lot, an hour had passed.

I tried to call Fia, but it rang through.

Hank answered immediately and told me he was en route as soon as I hung up with him.

Still, it had been an hour.

Sixty minutes that Fia was alone in the fucking fox den.

“Did you know our mother was a raging cunt?” I asked Dario as he jogged with me, breathing heavily and limping badly, into the underground garage, where Booker was leading us to his cars.

“Yes,” he said through gritted teeth. “I didn’t know she was a damn sociopath who would kill her own fucking children, though.”

Well, that made two of us.

Dario spent the entire ride into Wicker Park on the phone with Cesare or Ciro, counting our troops from the ones who had obviously defected to Carla’s side. No one at Edgemont House was absent, and it seemed like only low-ranking foot soldiers had been under her control at Booker’s house.

A good sign that her power didn’t reach as far as she thought.

When I pulled up to our parents’ Wicker Park house, the gates were blown open, and a group of motorcycles were pulled into the front yard, the men just climbing off.

I’d barely parked the car in the gravel turn before I was out of the car and running for the doors where Hank and a buddy were shooting off the handles.

I waited for them to finish and then burst through them myself.

The smell of gas assaulted my senses first and then the clear punch of a gunshot from somewhere upstairs.

A woman screamed.

Without thinking, I sprinted up the spiral staircase, my gun in one hand and the keris blade in another.

A window had broken in the hall, and a body lay half draped outside the iron supports, golden-brown hair shifting in the wind tunneling through the gap. Slumped on top of her, pressing her into the points of glass, was Niccolo Malatesta.

My vision tunneled, everything gone black outside of the face of my enemy.

I was at his back in a blink, prying him off Fia and throwing him into the wall. He landed with a hard thud, his head flying back to hit the wall.

It took me a moment, as I hauled him up from the floor with my hand around his throat, to realize his pulse was thready beneath my fingers and vomit coated his mouth and down the front of his shirt.

He was half dead already, showing every sign of having been poisoned.

I dropped him unceremoniously and turned to face Fia.

She was bowed over the window ledge, body halfway to falling out the gap to the two-story drop below. I hauled her in carefully, cradling her head and mindful of the bleeding, misshapen arm on her right.

Something broke downstairs, and someone shouted about a fire.

I ignored that, focusing on settling Fia in my arms.

Her eyes were closed, her back bloody from the broken glass of the window, her arm absolutely mangled by a bullet wound that had fractured her bone.

“Fia,” I murmured brokenly, pressing a kiss to her hair.

Even under the growing aroma of gas and smoke, I could smell her honeysuckle scent.

She stirred slightly, lids parting so she stared at me blurrily. A wobbly smile claimed her mouth, and when she tried to talk, it was almost soundless, but still I heard, “I knew when I died I’d see my ghost again.”

Tears burned the backs of my eyes for the first time since I was a small child. I pressed my face to her hair and tried to breathe.