“We’re under attack,” the one in front says, his voice quavering. “I don’t know how they got inside undetected.”
“Who got in where?” Pyotr demands, reaching for the gun he keeps tucked into his belt.
He still hasn’t released my wrist, though, and I cringe as his grip tightens, compressing the bones until it hurts.
The men pale visibly as screams erupt in the hallway behind them—followed by the bone-chilling sound of bullets striking flesh and bodies hitting the ground.
One guard turns back to face the quickly approaching violence, and before their leader can answer, the hushedpewof a silencer stops him.
Literally.
His jaw drops, his expression turning vacant as the side of his head opens up to make way for the bullet that just passed through it.
The two other guards are dropping seconds later, three bodies littering the breakfast room floor.
A scream catches in my throat.
I might have grown up in this world.
I might have been raised amid violence and heard the horror stories. But I’ve never watched a man die right before my eyes.
And as a looming figure steps through the doorway, it feels as though my blood has turned to ice.
“You,” Pyotr snarls, his contempt plain on his face as he glares openly at the man I spilled champagne on one night, a lifetime ago.
Michelangelo Chiaroscuro.
He towers menacingly in the doorway, seeming to fill it entirely with his broad shoulders and rippling muscles.
Gone is his sleek black velvet suit jacket I ruined at that gala.
In its place is a simple white henley, unbuttoned just enough to give me a glimpse of the tapestry of ink beneath.
It’s smeared with dirt and grease, splattered with crimson that can only be one thing, but that’s not what makes it impossible to tear my eyes away.
Without the confines of a suit to restrain them, his muscles bulge beneath the thin fabric, straining it until I can see the lines of his pecs and arms without even trying, and somehow, it makes him look even more massive than when I ran into the solid wall of his chest.
He’s alive.
Of course he is.
I don’t know how I believed, even for a second, that someone could kill a god of death.
“What is an abomination like you doing in my house?” Pyotr growls at him, shoving me aside roughly enough to send me sprawling back to the ground.
I hit the rug hard, catching myself with my palms and wincing as my wrists protest, but I can’t take my eyes off the showdown unfolding in front of me.
While Pyotr’s blustering anger is a thin veil to hide the doubt beneath, the oldest Chiaroscuro brother looks like an angel of vengeance coming to smite him down.
The smug grin that curves his full lips makes my pulse pound, and I scoot back, tucking myself beneath the dining room table as my survival instincts kick in.
If I want to get out of this alive, my best chance is to make myself as small as possible and hide.
But I can’t bring myself to run completely, not when I see the murder in his eyes.
His icy-blue gaze is laser focused on my husband, and I know that only one of them will be walking away from this fight.
“An abomination?” Michelangelo asks in that deep, rumbling Italian accent that raises goosebumps across my flesh. “At least I’m not the coward who put an unarmed old man on his knees before I took his life.”
