Before I can process, hands grab me, rough and brutal, dragging me out by my arm. I scream, twist, try to find purchase, but I’m hauled from the SUV and dropped onto the gravel like a sack of nothing.
My knees hit the ground. Pain shoots up my legs. My palms scrape against rock and dirt, tearing skin.
I’m shaking so hard I can barely see.
“Hello, Violet.”
The voice is familiar. Feminine. Cold.
I look up.
Gabriella stands over me in a black sheath dress and red-soled heels, a cigarette burning between manicured fingers. Not a hair out of place. Lipstick perfect. She looks like she’s waitingfor a table at a restaurant, not standing among corpses with gunpowder still hanging in the air.
“You,” I breathe.
She smiles. All teeth, nothing behind her eyes.
“Me.”
She crouches down, bringing herself to my level. This close, I can smell her perfume. The same expensive scent from the villa. The same one she was wearing when she called me a whore in the garden.
“I wanted to kill you myself,” she says, almost conversational. “I spent hours thinking about how I’d do it. Something slow, I decided. Something that would let me watch you suffer for taking what was mine.”
My voice shakes. “Elio was never yours.”
Her smile sharpens. “No. He wasn’t. And that’s why this is going to hurt him so much more than your death ever could.”
“What—”
“My friends have plans for you.” She tilts her head, studying me like I’m an interesting specimen. “Better plans. Moreprofitableplans. Plans that will destroy Elio Marchetti in ways a bullet never could.”
“He’ll come for me.” The words scrape out of my throat, desperate and pathetic. “He’ll find me, and he’ll?—”
Gabriella laughs. Soft. Genuine. Terrifying.
“Oh,tesoro. That’s exactly what I’m counting on.”
Two men step forward from behind her. Tall. Expensive suits that don’t hide the violence in their posture. They look at me the way buyers look at merchandise, assessing value, calculating worth.
One of them speaks to Gabriella in rapid Italian. Numbers. He gestures at me like I’m livestock.
She’s selling me.
Panic claws up my throat. I scramble backward, but there’s nowhere to go. My back hits the wrecked SUV, and then hands are on me again, hauling me up by the arm with bruising force.
I fight.
I kick, twist, and claw at the man’s hands. My nails rake across his skin, drawing blood, and he doesn’t even flinch. His grip is iron, immovable, as he drags me toward a black sedan idling twenty feet away, engine running, back door open like a mouth waiting to swallow me whole.
“ELIO!” The scream rips from my throat. “ELIO!”
No one reacts.
“Let me go! He’ll kill you, he’ll kill all of you, he’ll?—”
The man shoves me forward, and I stumble, nearly falling. He catches me by the hair this time, yanking my head back, and pain explodes across my scalp.
Gabriella steps close one last time. Her lips brush my ear, her voice a whisper meant only for me.
