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She ran.
But this was one-hundred percentnotthe kind of chase that excited me.
Chapter Thirty
Heidi
A gunshot sounded as I ran down the concrete-lined hallway.
The same muffled sound I’d heard from Amadeo’s cabin.
The same muffled sound I’d heard in Elio’s dining room.
The sound I’d heard loud and clear the night my parents were murdered.
After seventeen years, so much of that night had faded. I couldn’t recall what my mother’s face had looked like when she’d been torn from my bed. I couldn’t remember if my father had been looking at me when the gunshot sounded. But that sound, so loud it felt like it had gone off inside my brain, had been etched permanently into every neuron. And then the ringing. Dear God, the incessant, shrill ringing.
I could hear the ghost of it now as I flew up the stairs and across the marble floor to the front door. There was no one around to stop me, but the moment I stepped outside, an enormous man with a thick, dark beard stepped into my path. The same man who’d stepped into my path the last time I’d been here.
“Is there a problem,Signorina?” he asked. He hadn’t reached for his gun, but I could see the muscles tighten along his forearms. Adrenal glands release epinephrine to trigger the fight-or-flight response—
I drew myself up and forced slow, even breaths from my lungs. “I’m not leaving,” I said with all the calm and precision I could muster, “and I’mnota prisoner here.” God help me, I’d come here of my own volition.
He nodded like he had no particular objection to what I’d said, but he didn’t move from my path.
“I’m simply in need of some fresh air. Some space,” I added, gazing pointedly at the small distance between us.
He eyed me warily for a moment, then nodded and took a step to the side, letting me pass. I noticed, though, as I descended the front steps and veered right through the ornate gardens that sprawled across the front of the house and around the side, that the big man followed at a distance.
Each time I looked back, he was there, perhaps fifteen feet back, keeping an eye on me.
“If I’d intended to escape, I would not have taken the scenic route through the gardens,” I told him when I’d reached the back edge of the house, and still he followed.
I turned away before he could reply. There was an open expanse of grass, like a no man’s land between the well-kept gardens and the dense wooded area surrounding the house.
I stepped out onto the grass, and it was strange that at that moment, what I wanted, perhaps more than anything, was to feel the cool, soft living carpet beneath my feet and between my toes.
Living.
Alive.
Cells multiplying and dividing.
Growing.
Thriving.
Out here, there was life.
In that basement, there was death. Or perhaps worse, the process of dying. A man, bound and broken. Blood had spilled from his mouth and his mangled hands. But how much blood? I tried to envision it, to remember how much blood had pooled on the floor beneath him, but I couldn’t be certain.
I kicked off my shoes, pulled off my socks, and dug my toes into the cool grass. The blades tickled the edges of my feet. To my follower, I must have looked mad. I smiled, perhaps a little manically. To this man, the sight I’d stumbled upon in the basement was probably the norm; I was the bizarre sight here.
But when I turned around, my follower was gone. Amadeo had taken his place, but he’d come much closer, just a few feet from me. The lights that surrounded the house cast little more than a faint glow around him here, but the moon was full and the sky was clear, casting lights and shadows across his features.
“Nice night for a walk,perla?” he asked. His facial muscles moved with relaxed ease, but his shoulders were taut and his stance was uncertain, like he wasn’t sure whether to make a grab for me or give me my space.
“How could he do that?” The question spilled out before I’d even fully realized what had truly bothered me in that gruesome scene. Not Amadeo; I’d known from the first moment I saw him that he was a violent man. I think I’d even come to accept Raven’s explanation that it was part of what made him a “protector”, as she called it. But Aurelio?
