Page 76 of My Dark Ever After
I woke up because someone was jostling me none too gently. Even though my head felt stuffed with cotton and pounded like a pillow beneath the fists of a restless sleeper, memories came back to me instantly.
I lashed out even before I forced my sticky lids open, my fist landing in the throat of the man who carried me.
Philippe let out a crackling grunt, his grip loosening so I slid from his arms onto my own two feet. I landed in a crouch and immediately sprinted away from the people in front of me waiting around the front door of an actual castle.
I didn’t get far before someone tackled me hard into the dirt road. My chin hit the packed ground, and the sharp edge of a canine tore through my lip.
Still, I did not stop fighting.
Raffa’s voice in my head urged me on.
La cerbiatta diventa la cacciatrice.
The fawn becomes the huntress.
I managed to kick out, happy I’d worn boots that day, landing the heel in the chin of the man who’d caught me by the legs. It gave me space to roll onto my back, even though he kept hold of one ankle.When he reared over me, I went for his eyes with my thumbs, digging into the inner corners with my nails until I felt the thin membranes pop and warm, wet blood sluiced down my forearms.
The man howled above me, tossing his head back with the yowl of pain. It gave me time to squirm out from under his weight, but by then, like wolves called to the hunt, more men surrounded me.
“Basta!” someone ordered in an old, creaky voice that still managed to hold serious authority.
For just a second, I found myself frozen as well.
When I tried to get up again, one of the suited men stepped forward to press the mouth of a gun to my forehead, a cold kiss.
I stilled.
The bodies around me parted to reveal an old man stalking toward us with the use of a gold-tipped cane. Where he had once been tall, he was now stooped over, the joints and bones beneath his silken, loose skin like the gnarled roots of trees. Even in old age, there was something beautiful about him, almost majestic, like one of those paintings you saw in old British manor homes and museums of white men who had ruled the colonial world. He was swarthier than that, with deep-olive-toned skin and eyes like black olives between knitted, scowling brows.
It was obvious that this man was John Stone’s father.
Gaetano Pietra.
He did not stop until the tips of his black leather boots were pressed into the side of my belly. With him looming over me, the shadows of night thick on his face with the blazing lights of the house at his back, I thought he might actually kill me then and there.
A man so ready to kill his daughter’s lover would not draw the line at his estranged granddaughter.
But then he was offering his hand down to me, each finger glinting dully with the metallic shine of heavy rings.
“This is my granddaughter you tackle into the dirt,” he said in that scratchy Italian. “Touch her again like that, and I will let her gouge out your eyes to the root.”
I blinked up at him, shocked by his vehemence.
Irritated with my hesitancy, he bent down to grab my hand himself and leveraged me to my feet. Given the cane and his knotted bones, I was not expecting his strength.
He turned me with one hand so that the light from the house spilled over me before taking my chin in his hand to lift it to his.
“You look like him,” he said after a long minute of scrutiny. “Pretty, but like him very much.”
“A compliment,” I said, tipping my chin higher in his grip.
A fleeting smile struck his face, there and gone so fast I almost thought I’d imagined it.
“Inside,” he called to everyone in the courtyard, at least tensoldatiand my aunt lingering on the periphery.
As one, the group moved toward the house.
Even though curiosity ate at me, I knew I would use the first chance I got to escape. These people were strangers even if we shared the same blood, and they had a deep, dark history with the only man who did matter to me.
