Page 131 of My Dark Ever After
I pushed it open so powerfully, it banged against the opposite wall.
“Let me go first,” Renzo insisted, but I was already going down the wood treads, the smell of piss and damp cellar rising in my nostrils.
Nothing shot at my feet as I descended, and I had no idea what I might find waiting for me in the basement.
But nothing could have prepared me for the sight of an emaciated girl tied to a chair and gagged with a stained rag. There was a Colombina Venetian mask over the upper half of her face.
“Che cazzo?” I muttered as I moved to her, Renzo and Carmine checking the rest of the basement as I approached, the other soldiers at my back.
She was young, her matted, unwashed blond hair hanging in her face where it was slumped against her shoulder. Even though she was clearly captive and bound, there was no other sign of injury.
I had tipped her face up to further examine her when her eyes popped open.
They were not the same rich brown of freshly tilled earth like my Vera’s, but the shape was the same, doe eyes topped with delicately arched brows in a heart-shaped face.
“Gemma?” I whispered, recognizing her from the photo I had seen in Guinevere’s apartment.
She jerked against the ties, shouting something behind her gag.
“Boss!” Carmine yelled.
I deftly untied the back of the gag so Gemma could speak to me, the fabric falling away at the same time Carmine called, “There’s a fucking bomb down here.”
“Get out!” Gemma screamed in English, voice hoarse, eyes rolling wildly in her head like those of a feral horse. “H-he called ahead and knew you were coming. It’s a trap.”
A moment later, the first explosive detonated.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Guinevere
The entire family had moved to Stacci’s house down the road from the main villa to sleep what was left of the night. It was an enormous house built for their ever-expanding family, with enough rooms for the adult couples to each have one and for the kids, frightened out of their minds, to share one, where we’d laid mattresses down so they could all cuddle together.
Only Zacheo had refused to leave my side, clinging to me so tightly his little nails had left crescent-moon shapes in my thighs. I’d told Carlotta and Emiliano that it was fine if he slept with me and took him up the stairs to the small bedroom at the back of the house, where he had immediately curled into me, tucked up like a bug in a rug, and fallen asleep.
He was twitching beside me, nightmares plaguing his slumber, but he eased when I smoothed a hand down his freshly washed hair. It soothed me too.
When I had first seen Leo at the edge of the fiery tree line, my only thought had been of revenge. I was going to tackle him to the ground and beat his head in for what he had possibly done to my sister andhad attempted to do to Raffa. But when I overheard his conversation with asoldatoabout Zacheo lost somewhere in the grove, I felt my soul cleave in two.
Did I go after Leo and appease the fury wrapped around my heart like an iron vise, or did I go after sweet Zacheo, who had taken such a shine to me the last month he had been my constant shadow at the villa?
In the end, of course, it was not even a question.
I followed Aio’s barking entreaty farther along the trees before I dived into the curling black smoke.
Until the day I died, I would remember the feel of the scorched soot in my lungs, the heat pressing into every side of my body like ghostly hands threatening to drag me into the depths of hell. I called for Zacheo until my voice ripped up my throat; I’d headed to the copse of trees that we had played in many times before, where there was a trunk that looked like a throne. We liked to play make-believe there and had even erected a little fairy house in one of the trees. It was disorienting with the smoke, and I was completely lost until one of my croaky cries was met with the sweetest voice I thought I had ever heard.
“Vera?”
He had hidden against the lip of a well just beyond where we played, wet from the bucket of water he’d thrown over his head to cool himself.
“Che ragazzo sveglio che sei,” I’d praised him as I collected his steaming body in my arms, tucking his face into the gathered fabric of my dress so he might breathe through it.
Clever boy.
The weight and warmth of him curled under my arm kept the residual panic at bay even though I was too agitated to find sleep myself.
I could not believe Leo had done something like this.
