DanteMy bullet pings off a metal shelf as Luca Lombardi ducks at the last moment, dragging El down with him. She yelps and tries to disentangle his fingers from her hair. My vision narrows to her, half-dressed on this filthy warehouse floor. She looks so vulnerable, nothing like the iron woman who tried to stand up to him moments ago. How dare he expose her like that, how dare he grope her with his fucking gun like a piece of meat, how dare he threaten—Tony drags me down behind a table I didn’t realize he flipped over for cover. “Head in the game, asshole.”“Fuck off.” I reload my gun. I don’t want to miss my shot on Luca because I emptied a chamber into a fucking shelf.Tony slams me against the table. “Head in the game, or I’m dragging your ass outside and chaining you to the car until it’s over.”I grit my teeth and try to swallow down enough of the white-hot anger that filled me and made me fire that first shot. I can’t save El if I’m dead. There’s no life to share with her if I
EleniThe world slows around me. Gravel crunches under my bare feet. Oh, god, how has this happened? Everything hurts as I sprint across the warehouse parking lot to where Dante fell.Gouts of crimson blood stains the rocks in front of him. My heart hammers, drowning out voices and gunfire and anything else. I drop to my knees and skid the rest of the distance, barely noticing the pain as my skin shreds. His eyelids flutter. Not dead. Yet.“Eleni.” He reaches for me with a weak smile.My heart is in my throat. I run my hands over his chest, not bothering to be careful, until I find a patch of his suit soaked through with blood. Right in the middle of his chest. Tears fill my eyes, magnifying the shine on something a bit behind him.His gun.Luca begins laughing. “Looks like we’ve got more than one night to enjoy, Ellie.”My feet move before I know what’s going on. All I know is that Luca has taken too much from me. I’m tired of hiding, of waiting, of preparing. I snatch Dante’s gun ou
EleniI stare out of the wide window in the bedroom I used to share with Mama over the Narrows. The setting sun glints off the water, and my heartbeat pounds slowly in my ears. I don’t remember coming back to Staten Island. I don’t know if someone drove me, or I drove myself, or if I walked. I changed at some point into a soft dress. Dante’s blood remains on my hands. Other than that, all I know is this view, my heartbeat in my ears, and the uncertain sense that everything has changed.Dante is in a hospital somewhere. I think. Or he’s dead in the back of an ambulance or the doctor’s car. That knowledge washes over me numbly. An hour ago—a day ago, it would have rocked me to my core. Torn me apart. There’s a real chance I’ll never look into Dante’s dark eyes and see love looking back at me again. I am alone in America. But in the wake of what he said, I can’t shake the feeling I was alone in America already.Christos is dead. That does ache. As much as I thought Luca killed him, part
DanteI open my eyes to see a popcorn ceiling overhead. Before I can finish thinking how much I fucking hate popcorn ceilings, a pain like I’ve never felt before rips through my chest. I grunt and try to twist away from it. My cheek meets a plastic couch cover, and I recoil. Where the fuck am I? Glancing around as much as I can without agitating whatever’s going on in my chest yields little. Puke-brown walls. The back of the couch I seem to be laying on, a grandmotherly floral print.Popcorn fucking ceilings. I inhale and smell…soup? Chicken soup, I think, and medicinal alcohol. None of this makes any goddamn sense, and I feel like shit. My mouth is dry like I got blackout drunk and collapsed in someone’s shithole apartment, but I haven’t done that since college. Getting that drunk is just offering my enemies an opportunity at this point. But I can’t piece enough memories together to come up with another idea.Finally, I grit my teeth against the pain and lever myself up a little.
EleniI pull into the complex of warehouses on the docks in the bright-blue sedan Dante bought me. It arrived a couple days after our run-in with Luca. At first, I was going to ignore it, like the tracking necklace I took off after that first meeting and haven’t moved from my nightstand since, but it turns out running a syndicate requires a lot of driving.Gianna turns up the radio. “Well, I think you’re crazy.”I expected her to be furious with me after I shot John. Still, I refused to let Tony give her the news, after all she’s done for me. When she hugged me and said it was a long time coming, I asked her to be my right hand. No matter what he said, Tony was still Dante’s. And I didn’t want anything of Dante’s around to make me think of him, even after I found out he was recuperating in hiding.“No one takes me seriously when I pull up in this thing,” I complain. “It’s like a neon sign, begging them to treat me like a little girl.”“It’s your favorite color!” She leans back against
EleniI linger in the moment of Dante’s capos defaulting to me instead of him, making sure he feels it. Then, I wave my hand.“Go watch the foreman,” I say. “Nothing ranks above making sure the business keeps running.”The capos escape into the building. Behind Dante, the engine shuts off. Gianna raises an eyebrow at me.“You’re good.” I smile wryly. “At least if he kills me, we got to shut Piacere down a few times.”Gianna chuckles. “I’m just lucky I know the people who can keep my name off the no-fly list.”“You’re just lucky I’m one of them,” I say.It’s the most emotion I’ve let slip into my voice since the shootout. She sidles around me, and I turn with her to face Dante once again. Tony leans against the outside of the now-quiet sedan he pulled up in, and Gianna joins him. I knew Tony was still Dante’s, but if he’s sticking around, having my second nearby can’t hurt. Finally, I look at Dante again. Our gazes connecting rings through my limbs like the starting bell of a boxing m
DanteI slump against the passenger’s seat, fighting for breath as Tony drives us back through the city streets. Standing up for a few minutes felt like running a goddamn marathon, and I can’t forget the burning in my chest anymore. Tony glances at me in the rearview mirror but doesn’t say anything. He said enough on the ride over.As soon as he told me Eleni shot Uncle John, I was on my feet. When he told me it was the same day everything went down with Luca, I put together a picture in my head. I expected her to be grieving, just trying to hold the pieces together. Instead, she doubled her kill count in a single day. The Eleni I met in The Greek Corner, the one who glowed while telling me about the after-hours gyros, would’ve broken down. That’s the Eleni I was racing for when I hurried out of Domino’s apartment while his wife yelled for me to lay back down.But as we drove to the house for a change of clothes and then where Eleni was “working,” a new story took shape. A hardened,
EleniThe next morning, I wake up on a wide, soft mattress and immediately reach for where I’ve been plugging my phone in, on my right. My hand swipes through empty air. Right. Fuck. Dante came home last night and took his room back. Since I moved the bed frame out of my old bedroom to make my office, I couldn’t even sleep there. I’m just somewhere in his massive house.I scrub my eyes and sit up. My laptop shifts on the end of the bed, and I sigh. I stayed up late last night as usual, and now the red eye flight I have planned is going to suck. I climb out of bed, drop my laptop in my office, and head downstairs to make coffee. No point in changing out of the thin, oversized T-shirt I’ve been wearing to bed. I have nothing to hide from Dante, and he’s the only one here.The coffeemaker dings as I set foot on the first level. He must’ve woken up before me. I’ll just grab a cup and go. There’s nothing left to talk about. Just a few hours of packing, and then I’m on my way back to Mama.