Anastasio slides next to me by the pews, and behind him, I see a flash of yellow. It takes me a heartbeat to recognize Dante’s little wife. Her eyes are open in surprise, and her mouth is twisted in a permanent silent scream.
But I’m having a hard time finding sympathy for her, not after the part she played in making Lydia feel unwanted. I suppose I’ll have to reckon that with God later.
That’s when I see Father Valdoni.
He's spilled across the altar steps with the front of his vestments gone wet with blood, one arm still reaching for the congregation that he spent forty years leading. He once pressed a cold cloth to my split lip when I was nine, and never once asked why it was split.
In a different world, he would’ve been the man to marry Lydia to me. Grief tries to climb up my throat and I force myself to swallow it back. There’s a time and place for that.
“We need to take one of these bastards alive,” I tell Anastasio. “Make him talk.”
A ragged and broken shriek from a woman rises up behind me, and I see Sal take three rounds in the chest before he can get a shot off. She falls to her knees and cradles his head in her lap, begging him not to leave her alone in the world while he bleeds in his good Sunday suit.
Anger unfurls in my chest, and I yank Anastasio close. “Fuck making him talk, we’re going to make him hurt.”
“With fucking pleasure.”
I turn towards Lydia to tell her to come with me outside, but find that she’s scrambling on her hands and knees towards Elena.
“Lydia! No!” I lunge just in time and pull her back as a burst of gunfire impacts the ground where she’d been a second ago.
Lydia pulls against my hand. "Nico, we have to get her!"
"Not yet!" The word comes out savage with the fear surging under the surface. "Not until I know you’re safe."
"Nico—" Her voice climbs as if to argue, but then she shrieks. "Look out!"
I turn and see a man raise his gun at her head.
There’s no time for me to get a shot off. Without thinking, I shove Lydia to the ground and leap forward to cover her body against mine just as another roar of thunder sounds behind me. A red-hot sledgehammer slams into my shoulder, and pain spiders out in a spray of blood and bone.
For half a second, the world is nothing but sound and shove. The impact throws me into her. Then the pain comes–white-hot and complete. It swallows the entire left side of my body and I rage at how close I had come to fucking up and letting someone hurt Lydia.
The rage fuels me enough that I turn and fire my gun at him until the trigger clicks empty with every pull.
I move forward, pick up his rifle, and point it at the final shooter. But he suddenly crumples under his own weight like a marionette with its strings cut. Anastasio is on him in an instant, stepping on his hand and prying the gun out of his fingers.
I stand up, wincing.
Blood drips down from my arm, pitter-pattering steadily on the floor. I push the pain to the back of my head until it’s nothing but a dull throb aching in the background. My feet move me like a man possessed towards the man held underneath Anastasio’s boot.
This bastard dared to walk into church and aim his gun atmywife.
"Nico, you’re hurt." Lydia’s voice sounds like it’s a thousand miles away.
“I’ll be alright,” I say without turning around.
I look down at the gunman, and there’s no mistaking the crown tattoo on his forearm, or the Greek letters underneath the crown.
He’s a Diamandis hitman.
"The furnace room." I say to Anastasio. "We’re going to teach him some fucking manners."
I turn to tell Lydia that she should stay here, but the words die out in my throat. There’s blood on her hands, and it takes me a second to realize that it’s my own. But she’s no longer concerned with me. Her arms are wrapped around Elena, gripping her daughter’s hand but staring off into the distance.
Sal’s blood still covers the front of her dress. She stammers something as tears fall from her eyes, and Lydia hugs her even tighter.
Once she’s walked Elena out of the front door, Lydia walks back in with anger flashing in her eyes.
