Page 98 of Queen
For a heartbeat, silence reigns. Even the sea stills.
Then he lunges.
The gun lifts. My body moves before thought. I shove Guido down into the dirt, roll to the side, and the shot cracks, deafening, shattering stone where my head had been. The recoil stuns Santino for a blink—just long enough for me to close the distance.
I slash. Steel bites into his arm. He curses, staggers back, blood spraying across the gravel. His eyes flare wide, shock breaking into something darker—admiration.
“You’ve got fight,” he growls, clutching his wound. “Good. I want it to hurt when I kill you.”
Boots thunder at the far end of the courtyard—his men, closing in. Guido whimpers my name.
I stand, chest heaving, blade dripping red. My voice is low, lethal, meant only for him. “You’ll have to cut through a mother first.”
Santino licks blood from his lips, eyes blazing. “Gladly.”
The flare dies, plunging us back into shadows. The courtyard becomes a battlefield of ghosts.
And I realize—the real war isn’t just at the gates anymore. It’s inside the family. Inside the bloodline itself.
The Siege Ignites
The first bullet cracks through the courtyard lantern. Glass rains like jagged stars. Guido screams, and the sound splits my chest open. I shove him flat to the ground, my dagger useless against the storm that erupts from the walls.
Gunfire answers in volleys—rifles barking like thunder, echoing off marble and iron. The gates crash inward, metal shrieking like a wounded beast as they buckle under the ram. And pouring through—wolves. De Luca soldiers. Betrayers wearing the crest of Maritz. Faces I’ve seen across dinner tables, now twisted with greed and lit by muzzle flashes.
I drag Guido to the nearest column, pressing him into the marble as shards pepper the ground. His body trembles against mine, heartbeat fluttering like a trapped bird. His breath comes in short, ragged sobs. “Don’t look,” I whisper fiercely, cupping his head against my chest. “Don’t you fucking look.”
Across the chaos, Santino steps into view like he owns the stage. My husband’s son. Giovanni’s heir. His pistol gleams, black and holy in the firelight, lifted like a priest holding up the host. His mouth curves in a smile I want to carve off with my blade.
“Take them!” His voice cuts the night in half, sharp as a guillotine.
The courtyard erupts.
Men collide in a storm of screams and steel. Muzzle flash lights the air in bursts of orange, each one burning ghosts into my eyes. Emiliano’s loyalists surge from the villa doors—black suits, rifles, every one of them baptized in blood. Their boots pound the stone like war drums.
Romeo is there, carving a path with his blade. He plunges it into a traitor’s gut, the man folding around steel before dropping into the dirt. For a breath, Romeo’s eyes lock with mine across the carnage. He nods once—quick, sharp—before disappearing back into the blood tide.
I grip Guido tighter. My body is the only shield I can give him, but rage screams in my chest. I want fire. I want to cut my way to Santino’s smile and make him choke on it.
Bootsteps slam against stone behind me. A soldier—young, too young—charges with his gun raised. Instinct shoves fear aside. I slash upward, and my dagger buries itself in his throat. His scream gurgles into silence as hot spray coats my hand. He collapses at my feet, twitching. Guido whimpers but doesn’t scream this time. My boy is learning what it means to be born in blood.
“Stay down!” I hiss, shoving him flatter into the shadows. “No matter what. Do not move.”
I rise, dagger dripping, black silk of my dress whipping like a banner. The siege is swallowing everything—the villa, the gates, the loyal men screaming as they fall. But my voice slices through it, raw and savage.
“You want the Queen?” I scream into the night, fixing my eyes on Santino. “Come and bleed for her.”
His grin widens. He lifts his pistol again, pointing it directly at me.
The siege has begun.
The Treachery Revealed
The courtyard is fire and ruin. Gun smoke coils like storm clouds, screams ripping through the marble air. I clutch Guido’s hand, my dagger slick with blood that isn’t mine, and fix my eyes on the balcony above—where Santino waits like a king crowning himself in betrayal.
“Bring her!” he shouts, his voice thunder against the chaos.
And then the unthinkable—two of Emiliano’s men, men who wore his crest, break from the line and charge toward me. Traitors. My lungs seize. They shove through loyalists, one raising a rifle, the other dragging chains like they’d been waiting for this moment.
