Page 126 of Beauty and the Mafia Boss

All these certainties gained during sleep gave me the peace of mind I needed to sleep through the night. However, I saw that same serenity collapse when I woke up tangled up in arms and legs that protected me and deprived me of the world at the same time. They guaranteed, leaving no room for doubt, that every breath taken, touch felt, and certainty gained the night before was true. They force down my throat the indigestible truth that I need to tell Vittorio how I feel.

“And I can't believe you've never tried pistachio gelato.” I hear Rafaella, sitting next to me in the backseat of the car, continuing to chatter, but I don't really listen.

I don't even know what the words that entered my ears mean, because I'm not processing them.

“Mhhm!” I force my lips to move.

“And the pineapple bought a bicycle.” She continues.

“Uhum!”

“In a purple dress with gold polka dots.”

“Mhhm!”

“And you're a terrible friend.”

“Uhum!”

“Well, at least we can agree on that,” she says, and I'm about to say another “Uhum” when the cold touch of her hands squeezes my arm. “Gabriella!” she calls my name and I startle, exactly as I would if I were alone in a room and, suddenly, the door opened. I gasp and bring my hand to my chest, blinking several times. “Where is your head?”

“What?” This time I know exactly what each of the words that left Rafaella's lips means, but still under the influence of a racing heart, I ask about them.

My friend furrows her eyebrows, evidently worried. Today is her day off, and she's been begging me to go out for weeks. Her birthday is coming up, and Rafaella wanted to buy a special dress for the day, according to her, everything can be missing on a birthday, even cake, but not a new dress.

I thought that leaving the property for a bit and getting away from Vittorio's traces that are spread across every corner of it would help me find some clarity and think straight. But the truthis that it is not around me that man is permeated, it is within me, in every possible way.

I'd been terrible company for most of the day, but since we got into the car to head home, the prospect of facing Vittorio had only worsened my affectation. I need to tell him because I can't keep my feelings to myself anymore. Not after last night. Still, the mere prospect of doing this terrifies me.

I open my mouth to apologize, but the feeling of being thrown backwards forces me to close it. The large car we are in accelerates down the road in a completely unexpected way and, if before the view from the windows were blurred images, now they are nothing more than multicolored blurs.

In an automatic reaction, I look in the rearview mirror, searching for the driver's eyes, but what I find is his frown and a very different expression than the bored one he had on his face when we left the property earlier.

I turn my face towards Rafaella again and, if the driver's expression worried me, my friend's makes my skin run cold. The security guard, in front of me and with his back to me, sitting next to the driver, moves and suddenly there is a gun in his hands.

My chest quickens and my skin immediately sweats. It's then that I realize that the car we're in isn't the only one moving forward. The one behind us, with the other three security guards with whom Vittorio forces me to walk, suddenly stops next to us, walking in the opposite direction at high speed and I turn my neck, looking back.

I regret it immediately and scream as a powerful impact hits the glass, and Rafaella pulls me down. A shot. Someone just shot the car window. The tremors running through my body are reflections of my nervousness and confusion.

“W-what's going on?” I murmur to Rafaella, desperate, and her only response is a negative shake of her head.

Despite her pale face, she is infinitely more balanced than me and keeps her body over mine, forcing me to remain lying on the floor of the car.

The vehicle is hit hard and abruptly dragged to the side of the road. I scream again, unable to contain myself, because although I can't see what's happening, the noises fill my mind with images of action movie scenes that are exciting on a television screen, but in real life are nothing but hopeless.

The tires scrape audibly across the asphalt, and the all-too-familiar gunshot noises become louder inside the car when the front windows are opened. My body slams against the seats between which it is sandwiched, turning the already difficult task of breathing under Rafaella's weight and the pressure pumping dread through my veins into something almost impossible.

I pray. Not to God, but to La Santa.

I squeeze my eyes tight enough to fuse my eyelids and corneas together, and in the infinite time when the confusion around me only seems to increase, I beg her that, wherever I am, Vittorio will come to my rescue. I don’t want to die. I don’t want to die.

Sobs wrack my dry throat, and a deafening noise fills my ears, announcing that something has exploded or collided hard enough with something hard to make it seem like the world has ended. I'm grateful that I'm blind to anything other than the inside of my eyelids.

The fear compressing my organs keeps my body completely glued to Rafaella's and, when the driver slams his foot on the brake, this sensation becomes infinitely worse. The car skids on the track, sliding at high speed, and I say a new prayer.

I ask La Santa that, if I have to die, it should be now, because even though I have no idea what is happening, there is a premonition poisoning the uncontrolled beats of my heart telling me that death during a rollover will be a much kinder fate than whatever the people shooting at us might be planning.

My chest hits the ground hard as the car rises into the air and the pain radiates through my entire body to the point of stealing the breath I no longer had, as soon as the wheels return to the ground.

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