“Run, Aerin!” he yells in my face. “Run!”
He shoves me away and pulls his gun from his hip, aiming at the maniac on the table and opening fire while our guards swarm the tables, tackling the gunman’s wife as she fights to get her own weapon up.
I can’t move.
Each violent pop of gunfire makes me flinch, the entire restaurant is screaming and yelling, a fire starts at one tablewhere candles are knocked over by bullets, and the air floods with the scent of gunpowder and blood.
People run and scramble in all directions, and I watch them scurry until someone’s shoulder slams hard into me, sending me spinning around and barely keeping my balance.
As I steady myself, I find I’m face-to-face with a black handgun, and my heart stops dead in my chest.
Behind the gun stands the fourteen-year-old girl who just blew out her candles, her face completely void of emotion and her eyes dark.
“Wait!” It’s all I can think to say, but she just raises the gun higher, aiming at my chest.
In the exact second that the gun goes off, someone grabs me and spins me around so quickly that my stomach lurches and my head whips to the side, sending agony spiraling down my neck.
The force dislodges the pin in my hair, sending my curls cascading down over my face, but through the strands I see him.
I’m face-to-face with him, barely an inch apart.
The sun-kissed, older man with eyes as gold as morning sunlight. Somehow, he’s between me and that girl.
His hardened face melts into nothing but pain.
He stumbles forward and his lips part, but nothing comes out except one word barked with complete urgency.
“Run.”
His hands fall from my arms, and he collapses face down on the ground in front of me.
Blood spreads across the lower back of his shirt, spreading out so fast that the red quickly swallows all the green.
I barely have time to breathe before my father’s guards sweep me up like a river catching a stick and drag me away from him.
They yell at one another, gunfire continuing like popcorn in the microwave, and my father’s voice booms furiously through the air.
But I don’t look away.
He saved my life.
And I don’t even know his name.
2
FALCO
“Let me see.” The Paramatti family doctor taps my bare arm and flicks the pen in his other hand upward. “Lift both of them.”
I obey.
Fighting through pain during a medical examination is easy. Familiar.
Countless doctors have spent countless hours tending to and cataloging the patchwork of scars decorating my body, each one a memory I’d much rather forget.
Life’s cruel trick is that I remember every single one.
“Any tightness?” His cool hand presses against my left flank.
