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“Hello?” Feng snaps, his voice echoing just behind me. “Yes, uncle, I’ll be right there. The meeting with the Gemini guy didn’t go as well as planned.”
The smack of approaching footsteps whirls my head toward a tattooed, raging Italian barreling through the jungle of trees. His eyes latch onto mine, and relief floods his features. Then they lift to the Red Dragon presumably standing right behind me.
“Feng!” he shouts. “Get away from her!”
I shrink further into the stand as the nephew of the leader of the Chinese Triad leans over the short stand and pins me with dark, narrowed eyes. He mutters a curse and spins around, before racing between the trees.
“Feng, you coward!” Dante yells after him. “Come back here and face me like a man.”
Dante slides to the ground beside me, his strong, calloused hands cradling my face. “Are you all right, Rosa?”
My head bounces up and down. “He never saw me. I was hiding, and he had no idea I was here, not until you showed up anyway.”
“GrazieaDio,” he mutters and pulls me into his chest. “Thank God, you’re okay.”
I sink into his arms, burying my nose in his shirt. His scent invades my being, bringing with it an odd sense of calm. I feel invincible with Dante’s massive body enveloping me.
“Cazzo, Rosa, I leave you alone for a second….”
“It’s not my fault.”
He releases me and holds me out to arm’s length. “Tell me everything.”
“There’s not much to tell. I was minding my own business picking out ornaments—”
Dante rolls his eyes so hard, only the whites show.
“—when I overheard him talking to some guy with an Italian accent.”
“What guy?” Now they’re so wide the darkness nearly eclipses the white.
“I don’t know, but I think he’s dead.” I must be in shock because the words just spill from my mouth like it’s any other Tuesday.
Dante rises and tugs me up with him. I point over the ornament display, through the trees.
“Over there.”
He jerks me behind his back and creeps around the Christmas display. Just a few yards away, a pool of deep crimson blankets the snow. Another string of curses erupts from that foul mouth. For some reason, it’s so much hotter in Italian.
I try to get around Dante to see the body, but he shoves me further behind him.
“You don’t have to see this.”
The crazy thing is that I want to. Some sick, dark part of me wants to see the unseeing eyes, expressionless mask of death. I’d imagined it a hundred times, that same look, on my uncle’s face as I stand over him with a knife in my hand.
Only I’d never had the balls to go through with it.
The crunch of approaching footfalls sends my head spinning over my shoulder. Aldo races toward us, gun drawn.
“What the hell took you so long?” Dante growls.
“Sorry, boss, I was grabbing a hot dog when you texted.”
“You’re fucking lucky Rose wasn’t in real trouble.” He grabs Aldo by his jacket collar and lifts him off the ground. Terror streaks through the man’s eyes as his feet kick and find nothing but air. “If she had been hurt and you showed up late, it would’ve been your body left for clean up.”
A strange chill of excitement at the venom lacing his words skates up my spine.
Aldo swallows hard, his gaze dipping to the snowy ground. “I’m sorry, boss. It’ll never happen again, I swear.”
