Page 48 of Claimed By the Silver Fox

The gunshot rings out, my ears dampen with the sound, and I wait for the pain and the darkness to take hold.

25

JULIA

….but they don’t.

I stand there, eyes still squeezed shut, the sound of the gunshot ricocheting off every wall in this tiny room. My hands still clenched, I wait for the shock of the pain to hit me—to feel the sudden bloom of blood breaking through my body and leaving me with no choice but to accept my fate.

And it doesn’t come. I hear a thud beside me, and in shock, whip my head around to see what it is.

And I realize that it’s Andreo.

Andreo’s dead.

Antonio is standing there, the gun still smoking in his hand, gaze fixed on his son as he hits the floor in a heap. My eyes widen, brain still rushing to catch up with what the hell has just happened. Because there is no way—there is no fucking way that it can really have gone down like this, can it? I must be misunderstanding. I can’t—no, I can’t be seeing this right. I…

But as I look between Andreo and Antonio, the situation starts to make sense to me, some of the smoke clearing from my mind. I can’t believe it. It feels almost surreal, looking at the body on the floor next to me, the spatter of blood across the side of my body where the bullet entered his stomach. I stoop down at Andreo’s side, staring at him, reaching out to hold my hand over his mouth, trying to figure out if there is any life left in him at all, but as far as I can tell, he’s gone.

“He’s dead,” I whisper, and I look up to Antonio, who has a grim expression on his face, his eyes fixed on the scene before him. I can’t tell if he’s regretful, wishing he had made another choice entirely.

I don’t understand. One moment, Andreo was telling him to kill me, to wipe me off the face of the earth, and he seemed like he was going to go along with it, and the next⁠—

The next, his son was dead.

“Come on,” Antonio tells me, holding out a hand for me. I stare at it for a moment, feeling as though I’ve been rooted to the ground.

“Julia. Please.”

Antonio’s voice has an edge to it now, and I can’t tell if he’s angry or pained or something else entirely. I figure that I shouldn’t try to parse it, at least for now, not when I’ve been offered the chance to get out of here once and for all, and before I can stop myself, I take his hand and he leads me from the room.

The apartment is quiet, almost eerily so, now that Andreo is dead. I look around, half expecting him to spring out from behind a corner, laughing at me for thinking for a second that he would ever have made things so easy for me. But he doesn’t. This is real.

This is real.

Antonio leads me through the apartment and out to the top of the stairwell, where his men have gathered. They straighten up as soon as he appears, paying respect to their leader, and one steps forward as though the nominated speaker of the group.

“Don,” he greets Antonio. “We heard a gunshot⁠—”

“I’m fine,” he replies bluntly. “So is Julia. We need to go. Is the rest of the building secured?”

The man nods, and I can see a flash of curiosity pass through his eyes, no doubt wondering if Antonio truly executed his own son in there. Even to me, it seems impossible, like a fiction I’ve invented to deal with my own demise. I keep expecting the moment to shatter and break around me and to be pulled sharply back into the reality of what’s going on, to find myself bleeding out on the floor while Antonio and his son leave together.

“Clean the place up,” Antonio tells the man. “I’ll see you at the apartment. We can talk there. Tomorrow.”

The man nods once more, perhaps thinking better of arguing with him when he has clearly already made up his mind. And Antonio guides me down the stairs which curl, almost labyrinthine, down to the street outside.

I gulp down a lungful of air as soon as I step out, grateful for the relief of the outside world once more. Being up there with Andreo, it’s almost like I forgot what it was like, to taste freedom like this.

I lean against Antonio heavily, my knees still shaky, ears still ringing with the sound of the gunshot. I’m not sure if it’s truly stuck in my head, or if I just can’t stop replaying it over and over again in my mind, trying my best to make sense of it in any way I can.

He pulls open the car door for me and I climb in, and I watch as he does the same, slipping the gun from his belt and into the small compartment under the dashboard of the car. I notice the way his gaze lingers on it for a moment, as if he’s still trying to contend with the enormity of what he has just done.

I don’t blame him. Killing your own child? No matter what the circumstances, it must feel utterly twisted, like something fit for a biblical epic rather than the real world.

He takes the wheel and begins the journey to take us back to the—no, not to the mansion, it seems like we’re going somewhere else entirely. I didn’t get much of a look at the place when Andreo broke in to steal me away, but I guess it shouldn’t come as much of a surprise that Antonio has started over somewhere new. His son left that place a wreck, from what I could see, and I can only imagine the human cost of that kind of damage too.

There’s so much I want to ask him, a million questions on the tip of my tongue, but I don’t think he’s in any place to answer them, at least right now.