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Because the next thing I was conscious of was my mother crouching down beside me, her beautiful eyes swimming with tears.
“Hey there my angel girl,” she said, voice quivering, but she was trying to keep her tone light. For me. “The ambulance is on its way, okay? You just have to be strong for a couple more minutes,” she said, taking one of my hands into both of hers and squeezing hard. “How about we try to do some of those deep breathing exercises we’ve always done when something hurts, okay?” she asked.
Granted, those deep breathing exercises were typically only used for headaches and menstrual cramps. But since it felt like I’d been stabbed with burning hot pokers, I thought I would try anything.
So I breathed with my mom as my hand clung to Nino’s arm, fingers digging in, likely leaving bruises in their wake, but I couldn’t think of that. I could only think of the pain. And, underneath that, why someone would bring guns into my work and shoot me.
It wasn’t until I was in the ambulance and slipping a bit in and out of consciousness that something occurred to me.
They hadn’t been aiming for me.
They’d been aiming for Nino.
Then, well, the hospitals gave me enough of the good drugs to tranquilize an elephant, and there wasn’t a whole lot of thinking going on for the rest of the night.
CHAPTER THREE
Nino
“Nino, I wasn’t expecting…” Luca, the boss of our Family greeted me as I stormed into his restaurant, Famiglia, about twenty minutes after they’d taken Savannah and her frantic mother away in an ambulance. “Whose blood is that?” he asked, his whole body tensing.
“Not mine,” I said, dropping down into a chair, surprised to see my hands shaking.
“Okay,” Luca, ever the calm boss, said, pulling a chair over in front of me after gesturing something to one of his men standing around. “What happened?”
“I went to this fucking brunch place for breakfast. I was ordering food. And two guys came in. I didn’t even really see them until it was too late. My back was to the door,” I added.
“Nino, what happened?”
“They had guns. Figure they were aiming for me…”
“But?” he prompted when I didn’t go on.
“But the server shoved me out of the way. They shot her. That fucking innocent girl…”
“Is she… did she make it?” he asked, his own voice filling with worry and regret.
We didn’t have a fuckton of fast and true rules in the Family.
But we never fucked with children… or women.
They were innocents in our world.
Someone had fucked with that rule.
“She shoved you out of the way?” Luca asked, brows arched.
Yeah.
That was the part that my mind just kept going over and over.
She hadn’t tripped.
Or knocked into me after she’d been hit.
She’d seen the gun, then shoved me over before the bullets started to fly.
She’d saved my fucking life.
